Should a company invest in resources to assist them with the development of their employees and leaders?

Is it possible to measure the return on investment for developing “people skills?"

The answer is YES!! The data and testimonials that support the value of building teams and investing in your workforce are becoming increasingly more abundant.

Consider the following:

University of Chicago
79% of America’s wealth is in human rather than physical capital.

University of Southern California
Companies employing HR best practices showed 60% higher return on sales, 20% higher return on investment and assets, and 13% higher return on equity.

Watson Wyatt
An organization's imprudent use of human resources can have a 33.9% negative impact on its market value.

"Putting the Service-Profit Chain to Work", Harvard Business Review
Taco Bell (as an example) has discovered that the 20% of their stores with the lowest turnover rates enjoy double the sales and 55% higher profits than the 20% of stores with the highest turnover rates.

Spencer, McClelland & Kelner
At L'Oreal, sales agents selected on the basis of certain emotional competencies sold on an annual basis $91,370 more than other sales people did, for a net revenue increase of $2,558,360 and had 63% less turnover from their ranks than those selected in the typical way.

Randall Tobias, chairman of Eli Lilly
What my years of business experience have taught me is that the key to competitiveness is innovation, and the key to innovation is people. Taking care of people, therefore, is an essential way of taking care of business.

Richard Hadden, coauthor of "Contented Cows Give Better Milk"
If people feel like they're part of a workplace then they're going to have more resistance to leaving. They're not just leaving a job, they're leaving a community, and it takes a little bit more of a tug for that to happen.

Larry A. Bossidy, Chairman and CEO (retired) Honeywell and coauthor of "Execution"
No company can expect to beat the competition unless it has the best human capital and promotes these people to pivotal positions. At the end of the day, you bet on people, not on strategies.

Gary Peck, Author of "5 Simple Rules – Leadership Lessons for Today's Workforce" and MBL Consulting Advisor
When it comes to employees—for virtually every company, they are the single largest expense line item on the P&L ($.60 of every dollar, according to Watson Wyatt)—very few companies actually treat employees as assets, let alone their most valuable asset. I submit to you that employees are, in fact, a company’s most valuable asset. They are also the most underutilized and least understood asset in almost any organization.

Jim Collins, Author of "Good to Great"
Executives who ignited transformations from good to great did not first figure out where to drive the bus and then get people to take it there. No, they first got the right people on the bus … and then figured out where to drive it. They said, in essence… “If we get the right people on the bus, the right people in the right seats, and the wrong people off the bus, then we'll figure out how to take it someplace great."

Great vision without great people is irrelevant.