Not another bl**dy training session!

Not another bl**dy training session!

There is a strange phenomenon I see inside organisations all the time (cue the X Files theme music).

When things are not always happening the way people want or expect them to such as:

• Leaders not thinking strategically.

• Managers not giving clear feedback.

• Teams not aligned.

• Customer service is inconsistent.

• Cultures feel slow, reactive or stuck.

Then almost immediately, someone says “I know what we need, we need training.”

Sometimes they are spot on. Often not. Because not every performance gap is a bucket that can be filled by training. Not every behaviour problem is a capability problem. And not every workplace challenge can be solved by putting people in a room, giving them a workbook, showing a few slides, doing a role play and hoping they come out different.

Training is useful when people genuinely do not know what to do, how to do it, or how to practise it safely. But many times, in many of the businesses we work with at Beside Leaders, people already know how.

They know they should give feedback.
They know they should make decisions.
They know they should follow the process.
They know they should speak up early.
They know they should work together.

But knowing and doing don’t always go hand in hand. How often have you worked somewhere where there was training and awareness but no desire so stuff still didn’t get done the way it was meant to?

The issue is not always knowledge. Sometimes the issue is people are not sure they have permission to do things differently. Sometimes the system rewards the opposite behaviour. Sometimes leaders say one thing but tolerate another. Sometimes the process makes the right thing harder than the shortcut (eye roll for all the times you’ve seen this the case where a new system was meant to revolutionise the way people worked and ended up bogging them down even more).

Sometimes people do not have the time, space, confidence or support to do what is being asked of them. And sometimes, if we are honest, they simply do not care enough because no one has helped them understand why it matters.

This is why training without diagnosis can become a very expensive form of wishful thinking. Sure, it looks like action and feels productive. True it gives everyone something to point to and say look at us doing the thing, tick! But it often does not shift the real issue.

The question should not be “What training should we create?”

The better question is “What is preventing this behaviour from happening now?”

That is a very different conversation.

It moves us away from being training providers and towards being behavioural investigators. It asks us to look at the work, the system, the leadership, the culture, the incentives, the pressure points, and the lived experience of the people we are asking to change.

Before investing in training, I think organisations need to slow down and ask three simple questions:

1. What behaviour are we actually trying to shift? (Hint I don’t mean a broad vague statement like “we need better leadership” or “we need people to be more strategic.” Instead actually what would it look like in practice? What would someone be doing differently in a meeting, in a decision, in a conversation, in a customer interaction, that would tell you shift has happened?

2. Why is that behaviour not already happening? Rather than assume people are not doing the right thing because they do not know how, probe deeper. The gap may be in clarity, capacity, capability or care.
   Clarity - Do people actually understand what is expected, what good looks like, and where the boundaries are?
   Capacity - Do people have the time, energy, systems and resources to do what is being asked of them?
   Capability - Do they have the skill, confidence, practice and support to do it well?
   Care - Do they understand why it matters, believe it is worth doing, and feel any real commitment to the outcome?
   In my experience, organisations often jump to capability, (ding dong training calling) when the real issue is clarity or capacity. It could be that people are overwhelmed, unclear, pulled in competing directions, stuck inside clunky processes and then we derrr, send them to training. It is not that the training is bad (hit I love facilitating workshops) It is that the diagnosis is wrong.

3. What’s the best solution for closing the gap and shifting the behaviour? Eg: if managers are not giving feedback, training may help. But only if lack of skill is the real barrier. If managers are not giving feedback because senior leaders avoid hard conversations, training will not fix it. If managers are overloaded and have no time for quality one-on-ones, training will not fix it. If poor performance has been tolerated for years, training will not fix it. If there’s insufficient psychosocial safety and people fear the reaction they will get when they speak honestly, training will not fix it.

One hundred percent training can build skill, what it can’t compensate for unclear expectations, weak leadership reinforcement, broken systems, poor accountability or a culture of avoidance. This matters because organisations waste enormous amounts of money trying to train their way out of problems they have not properly understood.

They run leadership training when the issue is decision rights.

They run customer service training when the issue is process friction.

They run feedback training when the issue is a culture of fear.

And then, when nothing changes, people say: “The training didn’t work." Sometimes that is true and sometimes the training was asked to solve the wrong problem.

So next time, before you spend huge sums of money on another program, workshop or learning initiative, you need to become a bit of a Mulder and Scully and do some of your own X Files investigation by asking are we using training because it feels safer than addressing leadership, workload, expectations, accountability or culture? Are we designing a course when we should be redesigning the conditions around the behaviour?

Training is not the enemy. Poor diagnosis is.

And if you’re a People and Culture, Learning Services or HR person then start with curiosity. What are people doing now? What do we need them to do differently? What‘s getting in the way? Where is the gap really sitting - clarity, capacity, capability or care?

Because when we diagnose properly, training becomes an investment on the P and L rather than a cost.

As culture advisors sure we sometimes run workshops with teams but we do not rush to the workshop as the answer. They look at the whole system, we ask lots of questions. We remember that behaviour is shaped by more than knowledge because we’ve lived and breathed this work and we’ve all worked decades in corporates ourselves and we know that expectations, permissions, pressure, reinforcement, leadership, motivation, design and culture all shape knowledge.

So before we create another training program, let’s pause. Let’s get curious and name the behaviour. Let’s work out what’s not already happening and whether capability is genuinely the barrier. And then, if training is the right lever, let’s do it (call us we’d love to come and play). But if it is not the right lever, then let’s have the courage to have a conversation to address what is really going on (likewise call us we can help).

Because the goal was never to run more training. The goal was to change what happens at work so we can make sure work works. Comprende?