Should people grow the organisation, or should the organisation grow its people?

Every development budget carries a sequencing question. Does an organisation invest in its people so that growth follows, or do people first deliver the growth that funds the investment? The answer tends to move with the balance sheet.

That tension anchored People Before Institutions: Why Human Development Comes Before Corporate Development, a discussion under AsiaHRM’s Governance Series on LinkedIn Live, run in partnership with HRM Asia and ESG-in-a-Box Academy. Moderated by AsiaHRM Founder Rita Tsui, it brought together Daniel Yuen, Head of Finance, Administration, IT and ESG at Swire Motors Hong Kong, and Bernard Tang, Development Manager at Big Front Line Company Limited, who approached the question from finance and training, respectively.

Where the organisation sits decides the sequence

Yuen argued that organisations should help people grow first, on the basis that people are assets rather than tools, and that people produce business results. Without capable talent, he said, an organisation will not grow, particularly in uncertain markets. He qualified that by circumstances: where an organisation is loss-making or mid-turnaround, the priority reverses and people help the organisation grow first, while a stable business with a longer horizon should be investing in its people, with returns following as the two grow together.

Tang started with a different premise. In his framing, human resources are resources rather than assets – capable of being grown, reinvested and redeployed. But he was sceptical that training changes people, noting that employees weigh what they receive against what happens after the reward. On that reading, training functions as a form of selection: those who do not pass the assessment do not retain their posts. Content is set from the top, he added, with a small senior group handing down a theme that trainers build courses around, and returns are measured for shareholders. The dynamic, in his view, is less chicken-and-egg than cause and effect.

Investing without a guarantee

Tsui put the familiar counter-argument: the fear that well-trained employees leave, against the line often attributed to Virgin founder Richard Branson that training people well is what makes them stay.

Yuen pointed to his group’s management trainee programmes, where graduates are assigned to a business unit, rotated to another after two to three years, and expected to reach general manager or business unit head within 10 to 15 years. No employer can guarantee those people stay, he acknowledged, but without the investment an organisation has no picture of who its successors will be. Tenures of 30 to 40 years remain common in the group, which he read as a signal that development is genuinely valued.

When the technology moves faster than the workforce

An audience question shifted the discussion to organisations investing heavily in systems while underinvesting in people.

Tang described a widening gap. Two or three years ago, the conversation was about chatbots; this year, it is about AI agents that can execute work directly on a machine. A decade ago, organisations invested in management trainees to transmit culture and build a future C-suite; the emphasis has shifted to hard skills, on the logic that a fast learner can pick up the latest tools and be plugged into a role immediately. Where organisations have invested in people who then lag the technology, he said, those people are the ones cut. He had seen the mismatch in public courses: attendees over 40 arriving for hard skills without the underlying logic of the technology, failing the assessment, while people in their 20s from non-technical backgrounds used AI to write code and build websites.

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Underinvestment in people is common in Hong Kong, he said, where access to global AI tools is also constrained. Even as a trainer, he suggested formal courses matter less now that self-study is so accessible.

Yuen agreed the answer is industry-dependent, but argued that people investment should not decline as systems spending rises – and that much of it need not be expensive. Alongside external courses, there is internal training, and leadership behaviour costs nothing. He contrasted a manager from three decades ago who asked who had done wrong with one who asks what the team learned and how it can do better. That shift builds trust and amounts to development that never appears as a line item.

Culture as a control, not just a value statement

Asked how internal culture shapes human capital governance, Tang described a textile organisation in Hong Kong whose orientation programme covered the founder’s background and family, told as a story rather than a corporate history. New management trainees were paired with directors who met them at least monthly, on the reasoning that mindset transfers through connection while hard skills can be learned online. Before the pairing, few trainees stayed beyond a year; afterwards, more than half remained. Tsui noted that in owner-led organisations, stated corporate values tend to be the owner’s values.

Yuen made the governance link more direct, advocating job rotation between functions where team size allows – moving a financial planning and analysis staff member onto month-end closing, for instance – both to encourage continuous learning and as an internal control. He drew the parallel with banking, where employees must take blocks of consecutive leave as a governance requirement. Where one person handles accounts payable alone for a decade, he said, familiarity with a supplier can quietly shift practice – payments released faster than agreed terms require, in volumes large enough that an authorising manager may not notice. Rotation gives someone else the chance to spot it.

Tang framed the same question as a test of whether policy ever gets revisited. In his description, a fixed mindset is a policy that has not changed in a century. A growth mindset may leave the wording untouched but reviews it, including through external eyes, on the understanding that no checklist survives a changing world. He cited a small textile organisation in Hong Kong that became a dumpling restaurant on the same premises – the business transformed, the underlying values retained.

Yuen closed on sequence: organisations can only grow as fast as their people are capable of growing, and both can grow together if human development comes first. Tang held his line that training is selection. Tsui’s reading was that concentrated investment in a defined group, such as management trainees, is where organisations are most willing to spend – though shifts as broad as AI have prompted some to fund training across far larger populations.