There are many leadership training sessions available, free/paid, online/in-person, standardized/custom-made, and a plethora of other varieties. Unfortunately, a majority of these sessions are not effective in achieving the desired results.
Some sessions are just outright bad, while others provide a lot of information and sometimes entertainment, and are rated ‘good’. However, the true measure of a training session is whether or not it produced the desired change. Many fail this test.
Here are a few reasons why leadership trainings fail.
1. Trainer Does Not Have High Credibility
This reason is chronologically the first. The trainer or the company (when external) needs to be perceived by the trainees as credible and carry authority in leadership training. This is true of all trainees. Leaders, however, demand more; they are already at top of their game, their time is more expensive and they expect to get high value from the time and resources they are spending on training.
With easy access to background information and history, this is an easy one to avoid. If you are making a selection, do your due diligence to ensure a reputable and credible company is selected so trainees see them as trustworthy from the get-go.
2. Training Material is Not of High Enough Quality
Even though this is obviously a major reason for poor training sessions, it can be very easily avoided. Select companies who have a good track record, have plenty of references, and when online ratings are available, ensure they are rated highly. If you plan to spend on an ongoing training session for many of your employees and leaders, it’s a good idea to talk to a few referrals before making a selection.
3. Training Information is Forgotten
Excellent training material delivered well by an expert will still be forgotten after a surprisingly short while.
A study at the University of Waterloo shows how quickly new information is forgotten by trainees.
Training received on day 1 has 50% – 30% retention after only one day, and less than 10% after a month.
It is easy for leaders and managers to forget since they have a lot going on in a typical day as they jump from one to another topic. A new topic, idea or information doesn’t stick if it is a) not repeated, or b) not made relevant or both, see below.
4. No Connection is Made Between New Ideas and Their Application
When children learn they just absorb all new information and ideas. Adults learn by making connections to the ideas they already know. UPCEA notes:
Thus, to understand how the [adult] brain learns is to understand that teachers, trainers, and facilitators simply must find some way to connect new information to something the learner already knows. Without that connection, learning is simply not taking place.
If new information, ideas, and material are not connected to what leaders already know, and how it can be put to us, it won’t stick.
New ideas in a training session should be relevant, applied quickly and should lead toward clearly defined goals.
It’s important that as new information is presented, it is also applied to situations specific to each trainee. This is not always easy since trainees may have very diverse situations.
There are two ways this can be done: training should be in small groups, where discussion with each trainee can be had on their specific situations, roles and issues, while also keeping it generic enough to be interesting to other trainees. Second, people in these groups should have similar backgrounds, roles and/or issues, so any discussions remain relevant and trainees can learn from each others’ issues.
5. Application is Not Always Relevant to the Job of Trainees
The theory of andragogy (adult learning) also highlights that adults tend to learn better when they can use the newly learned information immediately. Consider the following from research.com:
The orientation of adult learning is for immediate applications rather than future uses. The learning orientation of adults tends to slant towards being task-oriented, life-focused, and problem-centric.
This means if the training material is not immediately applicable to the jobs of the trainees, leaders cannot start using the new information and ideas right away, they’ll forget it quickly.
Good leadership training makes the session relevant and immediately usable.
6. Goals are Not Clearly Set
This applies to everything in life. In Ziglar’s words:
If you aim at nothing, you’ll hit it every time.
If the goals of the training were not well defined at the beginning it won’t matter how good it was, how well it was delivered and how relevant it was. Good training should start with well-set goals. (Check out our blog “How to Make Your Training Sessions More Effective“).
7. There is No Objective Tracking of Goals
If training goals were set but there was no objective way to track those goals, there is no knowing if trainees are on track to reach their goals or even if they’ve reached it. Good training sessions not only set the goals for the leaders but also establish objective and clear ways to track progress towards those goals.
Check out the various training sessions we offer. Effective Personal Productivity is a good place to start with any or all of your team members, supervisors and leaders. We avoid all pitfalls noted above and guarantee results from our each of training sessions.
