Leadership training fails. Actually, you already know this.

Let me explain…

You’ve been to any number of training courses before. For some of them your evaluation may have been, “Great lunch and good content.” Yet, four or five months later how much of what you learnt were you really applying? Some, but in all probability not a lot I suspect you’ll agree.

A well-quoted study by Neil Rackham provides the data to back up your experiences. Rackham, the founder of US sales consulting, training and research company Huthwaite, carried out an evaluation of sales training in the Xerox Corporation. By establishing the degree of carry-over from the classroom to the job, he hoped to gain a better understanding of the effectiveness of the company’s training.

The results stunned everyone. The study showed, on average, participants lost 87% of their new skills within one month.

Close investigation showed an interesting exception in the Xerox data. Some sales people showed a smaller loss and some showed a skill gain. When Rackham investigated these exceptions, he found those who lost least, or continued to gain skills, had managers who systematically managed the application of the new behaviours by their sales people immediately after the training.

Now, sales skills and leadership skills are not the same, although they both include a specific set of interpersonal and communication skills. This research simply shows what happens when training is regarded as an event that people attend without any effort being made to ensure competent on-job application of the skills learnt.

Why this happens can be simply explained through the concept of a performance equation. You may have seen more complex performance equations, but at its essence we can consider on-job performance in the following way:

Ability x Motivation = Performance

Ability is about the person. Their natural talents and inclination, work experience, industry knowledge and task knowledge and skill. Motivation, on the other hand, refers to how willing people are to apply what they know and can do.

It is self-evident that performance is maximised when people are both willing and able. Yet, training only deals with ability. It doesn’t address willingness. This is equally true for frontline staff, frontline leaders and senior executives. So leadership training will fail unless the participants are supported and motivated to apply what they have learnt in training back in the real world.