‘The Great Training Letdown: Why Nothing Changed’

As a business owner I spent many years, 10s of 1000s of dollars, and a lot of lost time on training my teams and seeing no difference.

Big spend – zero shift. Sound familiar? If you’re like me you gave up. So why doesn’t it work

1. No accountability after the training – Your key people attend the session… and then nothing. No follow-up, no expectations, no change in behavior is tracked.
2. One-off events don’t create new habits - A single-day workshop can't undo years of habits. Without repetition or reinforcement, it fades fast. Consider a 4-touchpoint program
3. Training is misaligned with real-world challenges - Sessions can often feel too theoretical or generic. If the facilitator can’t adapt content into workplace specific scenarios it just won’t stick.
4. There’s no ‘Why’ - If your team-members don’t understand the relevance to their role, their team, their business, they mentally check out. Take the time to discuss why you chose them for further development and the value you see in their presence.
5. The culture doesn’t support the learning - You can train someone to lead better but if the company culture punishes or rejects change, nothing moves.
6. Wrong people in the room - Sometimes the ones who most need leadership training are too senior to attend—or think they don’t need it.
7. No buy-in from senior leadership - If execs don’t model the behaviours being taught, it sends a loud message: we don’t really care.
8. Information overload – Leadership training is like a buffet. Don’t pile your plate high and hope you can change the world. Choose 1-2 things to work on per month. Less is more.
9. No followup – If nobody cares about the training received enough to find out what they’ve learned, how they will apply it, and what others learn from it …. Why bother…..

Learning, growing and creating change takes intent. It’s not just an investment in time and money, it requires ongoing curiosity and followup by management to imbed new learnings until they stick. Contact Shiift to help build a training program that works for you. We create long-term programs to create sustainable positive change and even step in to help create accountability when you’re just too busy.

Contributed with thanks to Judy Porter of Shiift

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