4 Reasons Why Corporate Training Fails

The Scene:

Large neutrally colored room. Name tag lanyards on a registration table. Many round grey 10-top tables set with 8 chairs (you need some elbow room at a corporate training). Post-it notes in many different sizes. Carafes of water and small glasses in the center of each table. Carts with stacks of extra chairs against the room partition. IT guy doing a sound check with the keynote speaker.

The Training Agenda:

Keynote address. Workshop. Boxed Lunch (turkey sandwich on a croissant with tiny packets of mayo and mustard wrapped into the cellophane, chips, cookie). Team building. Workshop. Lecture. Close.

If you are lucky, the content was good, the messages inspiring, someone remembered to sprinkle your large round table with a handful of snack-sized chocolate bars, and there was beer, wine, and charcuterie to end the day.

The Day-After-Training-Agenda: Back to work. Catch up on the backlog of emails that you missed while you were in an all-day training. You bring your own turkey sandwich. End scene.

Fact: Corporate training doesn’t fail due to a lack of good content.

Fact: Corporate training doesn’t fail due to a dearth of inspired speakers and facilitators.

Corporate Training Fails in the Before & After.

1 - Lack of Pre-Strategy

To get the most out of any corporate training engagement, the engagement should begin well before the actual training event.

The training before the training.

At the very minimum, there needs to be a collaborative creation process between the trainers (usually an outside consultancy) and those in the organization tasked with pushing forward professional development and growth. It is also imperative that the internal team working with the trainer has an excellent and nuanced understanding of the overarching organizational culture and the specific needs of the relevant departments and people.

This pre-strategy work should accomplish several critical tasks:

Make sure that the internal training team has a good grasp of the training content being offered. They don’t have to experience every detail of the curriculum personally, but they have to understand the training concepts well enough to help guide how they can best be delivered.

Make sure that the trainer understands the main strategic and training objectives of the overarching organization and how the specific groups with which they are preparing to work fit into that strategy.

The Magic Bullet:

If you want your training event to be really successful, you need to start engaging with the leadership & management responsible for implementing the training before the training. This also means that you have to invest training budget in the pre-work. This can come in the form of surveys, interviews, coaching sessions, key leadership sessions - the more interaction with the organizational leadership pre-training event, the better.

These are the people who can best inform your event content and will be responsible for implementing concepts in the day-to-day. Their input, buy-in, and enthusiasm are everything.

2 - Lack of Implementation Strategy and/or Unrealistic Implementation Timelines

It is a little bit mind boggling how often companies will spend huge amounts of money, time, and energy on planning an amazing training and staff engagement events, but never spend any time thinking about a cohesive and deliberate strategy for implementation and followup.

Oftentimes there is nothing. No management followup meetings. No coordinated followup effort. Often not even a consistent check-in with the teams at the following Monday morning meeting.

Another version of this same miss happens when leadership and management assume that their teams will magically absorb the concepts from the training event and “just be better.”

Unrealistic expectations around implementation are more common than not. I believe that there are two main causes for this:

Deadlines and organizational goals that do not consider the basic capacities of the humans tasked with said deadlines and organizational goals. You wouldn’t expect a person (even a relatively fit person) to train for a full marathon in a week - especially if you wanted them to do it willingly, with high quality, and a great attitude.

Misunderstanding of how systems change happens. True behavioral and cultural change happens……slowly. Methodically. With Intention. With Support. With PRACTICE. This leads us to reason #3.

3 - Leadership That Has Not Been Taught to Teach

One of the biggest fallacies of the business world, a fallacy that reaches across all industries, is this: the best tradesman will be the best manager.

This. Is. False.

But you see it happen all the time. Drew is an amazing nurse. Drew gets promoted to be a manager. Jo is the most creative and productive architect. Jo gets promoted to team lead. Emerson is a natural at customer service. Let’s promote Emerson to a management position.

The skills that it take to be an excellent XXXX (fill in the blank) are not the same skills that it takes to manage a team of excellent XXXX (fill in the blank).

Management is a unique skill set: teaching, leading, pacing, inspiring, onboarding, coaching, corralling, flipping constantly between big picture & small picture, politicking, soothing, balancing, deescalating, relationship building, lighting fires under people, putting fires out…..the list goes on. These are the skills of management. And the simple truth is that most people that find themselves in management have never actually been taught these things. They haven’t been taught because their managers don’t know how to teach.

4 - Lack of Internal Leadership Accountability and Support

#4 is a continuation of #2: Implementation Strategy. The first problem is a lack of strategy. Once the strategy is in place, the next hurdle is a lack of accountability and support.

Leaders and managers need the permission, training, and time to implement training concepts and skills.

They need their organizations to prioritize continuous improvement and growth in the same way that they prioritize productivity and bottom lines - because the truth is this - the two are inextricably intertwined.

They need systems of accountability woven into their day-to-day lives. This can look like a consistent conversation thread about training ideas and implementation with a group of managers. It can look like follow-up training sessions for management. It can look like consistent executive coaching. It can look like accountability through regular check-ins with a supervisor. It could and should look like all of these things.

Okay, now that we have solved all of the world's problems: go forth, kick ass, be awesome, and make your next corporate training stick.

WANT MORE?

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XO,

Anna Baeten @ Failure Lab Training