Blog article from 'The BecomingX Files'
by Paul Gurney, BecomingX CEO
Here’s something that might surprise you… Most organisations get learning and development very wrong. I see it everywhere – corporates, SMEs, government, schools - not doing enough, training people on the wrong things, in the wrong ways, and spending their limited budgets on programmes that have little to no impact.
Done well, professional development is one of the greatest competitive advantages an organisation can ever have, done badly and it’s a waste of time and money that is just as likely to make people leave.
BecomingX has worked with a lot of great companies on learning and development. And with 15 years of consulting before that, I think I’ve seen it all. But alongside the bad, there are also great insights from high-performing organisations and individuals that can make a real difference.
So here are five common issues I see all the time - along with some recommendations to avoid them.
1) Not doing enough
This is learning and development 101. Too many companies simply don’t train their employees enough – or at all. This is especially true of smaller companies. We’ve worked in corporates where people have come in from a start-up background, and they have never had formal training their entire careers. That’s not to say they aren’t good, but they can almost always be significantly better.
And as soon as times get tough, learning and development budgets are usually the first to go. We’re seeing it right now, with companies nervous about the economy.
The simple truth is that without good training in place, your company will underperform. The evidence speaks for itself. An impossible to find study by the Association for Talent Development (ATD) apparently found that companies with comprehensive training programmes have 218% higher income per employee than those without, and a 24% higher profit margin. Whilst I can’t find the study. I can believe it. There’s so many other stats about training’s impact on performance, talent attraction, and retention (admittedly some of which I can’t put huge credence in), you’d be hard-pressed to argue that not investing in learning and development is a good move for the long term.
2) Focusing on the wrong things
Doing nothing is a very low bar to start from, but companies shouldn’t assume that doing ‘something’ necessarily increases your return on investment. Training done badly, can actually be a negative experience for employees. But done well, it can be totally transformational.
With the best intentions, so many companies spend their time training people on ‘knowledge’ they simply don’t need and couldn’t possibly remember, whilst totally neglecting the skills, attitudes and relationships that will actually improve their performance. Perhaps ironically for a learning and development company, alongside recommending a shift in focus, we tell a lot of clients that they could actually cut down some of their training programmes.
Here's the three things we see time and again:
a) Too much focus on company information: Of course, employees need to understand the business, but trust me, giving them days of information about their multi-billion dollar company, with hundreds of thousands of employees, won’t help them do that key presentation to their manager. Instead, give employees the fundamentals, direct them to where they can learn more and spread training out over time.
b) Overloading on knowledge instead of skills: Industry trends, market insights, analyst reports, tech evolution… are all important – but learning about them is most effective when employees need that information for a time bound outcome. Far more effective, especially for early careers is focusing on the skills they actually need - research and analysis, problem-solving, communication, and presenting. Knowledge is easy to acquire when needed. Skills take time to develop.
c) No defined outcomes: If training has no clear outcome, it’s unlikely to make an impact. When we ask clients, “What’s the outcome you want?”, the answer is often vague or knowledge-based (e.g., “They need to know XYZ”). As you’ll find out below, that’s not always a useful metric. Instead, frame training as ‘They need to be able to… (engage 1,000 people on stage, analyse complex data sets, mentor a peer etc)’. The focus and outcomes become clear.
3) Confusing ‘listening to a speech’ with ‘training’.
So many companies operate under the false pretence that ‘listening to someone talking’ or ‘watching a video’ will equate to a material change in the audience’s performance. I see it all the time. ‘We need to do some training…’, ‘OK, let’s find a speaker to come in for an hour’. It’s a terrible irony of my job as a professional speaker and trainer, that I tell my clients that guest speaking, whilst hopefully ‘inspiring’, ‘entertaining’ and at best ‘enlightening’, won’t significantly improve business performance in isolation. Perhaps controversial, but here’s the evidence.
a) Speeches and videos transfer knowledge, not skills: If we asked Roger Federer to come and present to a client on tennis, the audience would no doubt have an incredible time (he is one of the nicest humans you could ever hope to meet)… but I can assure you they wouldn’t become better tennis players. Case in point, I’ve had significant one to one time with some of the best athletes on the planet, and whilst I’d like to think I’ve learned a lot from them, I can assure you that the only material difference in my own performance is my actual training.
b) People forget things – quickly: Google ‘Ebbinghaus’ Forgetting Curve’ – a study from the 1880s (since replicated many times) that shows how quickly we forget information. There’s lots of variables, but the simple message is that in just one month, there’s a good chance your audience will only be able to recall 10% of what was presented.
At BecomingX, we teach people how to maximise impact through storytelling, technical speaking skills, body language, emotion etc.), but the truth is quite simply that listening to someone in isolation is not effective learning. If you hire us to train your employees on how to become effective communicators, you shouldn’t be surprised that it won’t be us doing most of the talking!
It should be listen, implement and practice. Not just listen.
4) Thinking that training must be ‘fun’ to be effective.
This one really winds me up. I get it - employees are taking time out from their day to come to a training session, so you want them to come out smiling at the end of the day and tick a box to say it was ‘great fun’ and that they’d ‘recommend it to a colleague’. But that is not how the highest performers see training. To really learn and grow, training has to be hard and push you way beyond your comfort zone. That’s where real learning happens.
Yesterday I spoke to an amazing Navy SEAL soldier we work with about this. Do you think they ‘enjoy’ things like ‘Hell Week’ – days on end spent freezing cold and wet, carrying heavy weights, and covering huge distances whilst surviving on minimal sleep? Guess what. They hate it. But they also know it is some of the most effective combat training in the world.
Just a couple of days ago I saw tennis star Andy Murray, post this. It says everything. Great training is not about ‘fun’, it’s about impact.
5) Delivering training so dull you want to cry.
That said, whilst training definitely doesn’t have to be ‘fun’, it does have to be ‘effective’. Most corporate learning I have done has been eye wateringly dull:
a) Online courses where I can’t click ‘skip’ fast enough to get to a quiz my seven-year-old could have completed.
b) Sitting in a session about something that is only tangentially relevant to me, with a speaker who couldn’t even remotely engage the audience.
c) Perhaps worst is the cringe worthy ‘forced fun’ role plays where you can feel the collective exhalation from the audience hit the back of your head (by the way, role play done well is exceptionally effective, done badly makes you question your employment status).
All in all, a total waste of time and money. You may have saved money and ticked a box to say ‘we put on training’, but your return on investment was actually negative.
The best training I have ever done – my personal protection training for my role across Africa, a kidnap training course (useful given some of my travel choices) and a very intense week of training in the arctic in preparation for a race to the North Pole. What did they all have common?
a) They were all relevant to me.
b) I really cared about the outcome.
c) They had excellent facilitators.
d) I had to be totally engaged throughout where I was mainly doing, not just listening.
e) They all pushed me, in a very practical way, beyond my skill level at the time.
Companies really must strive to provide genuinely excellent and engaging training. As above, it absolutely does not have to be ‘fun’ at the time (I can assure you camping at -38c and jumping in freezing water is NOT fun), but it absolutely must be relevant, engaging and exceptionally delivered.
Final thought:
There’s so many more things I could have added to this – the focus on huge group training sessions vs personalised development, the infrequency of learning, the lack of mentoring and structured on the job training – but the fundamentals remain the same. Done badly, training is a total waste of time and money. Done well, it is one of the most powerful strategic capabilities an organisation can have, and we’re proud to help some of the best in the business.
