Sad fact: most training doesn’t lead to lasting behaviour change, and the stats prove it. Tim Samuels explores why too much theory and too little practice is to blame, and offers simple, memorable solutions that actually work. If L&D really wants to shift performance, it’s time to stop over-complicating things.
The most important point about any learning and development program is surely this: Does it result in any changes in behaviour? Looking at almost any stats related to this issue, the conclusion is a rather worrying one – most training doesn’t actually work.
Let’s delve into what Harvard Business Review shares those stats say and why that might be:
- Only 12% of employees apply new skills learned in L&D programs to their jobs
- Only 25% of respondents believed their training measurably improved performance
- We forget 75% of what we’ve learned in 6 days unless we apply it
About one in ten are applying any skills they’ve learnt at all – surely we can aim higher than that?
Easy as riding a bike
There’s a simple analogy which I believe sums up the heart of the problem: Imagine I advertised that I would teach you to ride a bike. You turn up to a classroom and we spend the day talking about how bikes work, the technique behind how to balance and power it along. We even watch videos of people riding bikes and discuss our thoughts on that and how we will go about it when we eventually sit on a bike. And that’s it. I let you go at 5pm and at no point have you sat on a bike and tried it out. Consequently, you either wouldn’t have the confidence to try riding a bike on your own or if you did, you’d fall over pretty quickly and hurt yourself, perhaps resolving never to ride one again.
Nobody learns to drive a car by simply talking about it
That’s how much of L&D works. There’s some great discussion. Some wonderful frameworks. But that’s all useless if it remains theoretical. Nobody learns to drive a car, ride a bike, in fact learn any practical skill by simply talking about it. Yet we’ve somehow found ourselves in a place where that’s exactly what we do with communication and leadership skills training.
That’s not to say that training programs don’t often make us feel inspired and motivated immediately afterwards. It’s just that, as Harvard Business Review found, a year or two later it had all gone back to how it was. That phenomenon had been noted as early as the 1950s and can we honestly say it’s not still prevalent now?
There seem therefore to be two main reasons for this inability to make skills stick long-term.
Over-complication
It’s tempting to pack any program full of the latest techniques and frameworks and of course these can be useful in strategising, but too often there’s just too much all at once or the theory is just too complex to recall in the moment under pressure in a real-life conversation. I also think there’s an element of wanting to showcase our ability to clients or line-managers when designing training – “look at how much detail and complexity I’ve packed into the program!” We tend to equate complexity with effectiveness.
McKinsey noted in their 2014 study Why Leadership Development Programs Fail: “What managers and employees often see is an ‘alphabet soup’ of recommendations”. That fog of information is simply not retained beyond the walls of the training room. It’s therefore not uncommon for delegates to get most animated by the simple techniques rather than more complex frameworks. For instance, I’ve often seen these two noted down enthusiastically:
- TED statements (Tell me… Explain to me… Describe to me…)
These simple follow-up statements can elicit more information and act like very open questions, without the user having to have the next question on the tip of their tongue. Easy to remember and apply. - AID feedback (Action, Impact, Do Differently)
A short, simple framework for having a feedback conversation that doesn’t antagonise and can lead to positive, future-focussed conversations that change behaviour.
These are the things that many decide to note down in their own notebooks. It’s these little gems that make the difference in conversations, not necessarily the 25 latest leadership approaches.
Give somebody two or three key behaviours to adjust that really make a difference and they’ll be much more likely to use them. Crucially, they will make a difference to outcomes at ground level in a way that over-arching theory can’t touch.
Lack of practice
In 2015, McKinsey found that experiential learning is the most effective form of adult learning precisely because it tackles the problem of forgetting information so quickly unless we apply it. Practising the skills you’ll hope to reproduce later is the only way to get them into your brain long-term. Not only does it cement the skills themselves, but it also gives you the confidence to know that you can do it and as a result, you’ll more likely try them out in your role.
In turn, that spaced repetition improves knowledge retention to 80% after 60 days, a huge improvement on the 75% lost in a week we noted above.
Using experiential techniques to practise a conversation gives you two key benefits:
- You get to try things out and see how they land. You can ask someone how your words are landing and get feedback on whether what you intend is in fact what’s being received. Working in small groups means there’s no sense of giving a ‘performance’ and the observers can chip in with tips or indeed steal the best techniques.
- Those you practise with can adjust their approach and personality to challenge you in the most useful way even within the same scenario. If you find it tough to speak to those strong silent types, give it a go. Or maybe the over-bearing direct types make you shrink. You can rewind, try things again, get feedback and iteratively work towards more effective behaviour.
With so much riding on employee engagement and budgets tight, we can’t afford to keep missing the mark and hoping theory will translate into practise. Because as we’ve seen here, it just doesn’t.
Tim Samuels is Founder and Director of ZEN Coaching
