What Role Do CFOs Play in the Great Resignation?

In April 2020 the United States hit 14.7 percent unemployment, the highest since collection began in 1948. A year later the pattern inverted. Instead of organizations shedding people, people started leaving voluntarily, in numbers nobody forecast. Over 4.5 million in November 2021 alone.

This piece asks a question I hadn't seen anyone put directly. What role does the CFO play in that?

It draws on my doctoral research, where I interviewed chief financial officers about how they actually think about training. The headline finding is more uncomfortable than the usual story we tell ourselves in L&D. CFOs do perceive learning as an investment. They're not the obstacle we imagine. But they don't prioritize it, they struggle to see its real value against competing demands, and most tellingly, they have no working relationship with the learning function whatsoever.

Connect that to the Great Resignation and the logic is uncomfortable. People left in large part for development and growth. Development is chronically underfunded. It's underfunded partly because the person controlling the budget has never had a substantive conversation with the person running learning.

That's not a measurement problem. It's a relationship problem, and it's fixable, but not with a better dashboard.

For L&D leaders who've concluded that finance is the enemy. The research suggests they're mostly just absent, which is a different problem with a different solution.