Why Doesn't Training Change Behavior?

In brief

Leadership training usually fails because of what’s waiting back at work, not because of the course.
Every company already has its own version of leading, communicating and coaching. Generic training teaches a different one.
Until your version has a name, no course can teach it.

Years ago I worked for a global shipping company that had a turnover problem. Shipping is a small world. Everyone deals with the same customers, the same containers and the same headaches, so when someone in sales or customer service gets good, a competitor calls. People left, and it was hard to keep the ones we wanted.

Leadership’s answer was a management training program. Our training and development team put together a full slate of courses: delegation, communication, and a well-known situational leadership course. The thinking made sense. If our managers led better, people would stay.

I went through all of it. I like learning, and the courses were good. Situational leadership stuck with me most. The idea is that you read the person and the situation in front of you, then decide what they need from you. Some people need direction. Some need coaching. Some need you to get out of their way.

Then we all went back to work.

What happened back at work

Nothing changed. The performance review never asked whether a manager had coached anyone. When an employee struggled, nobody stopped to ask whether that person needed directing or coaching. The question was the same one it had always been: did the work get done or didn’t it.

Coaching, when it happened at all, got handed to HR.

Here’s the part that still gets me. I was in HR. We were the department rolling this program out and telling managers it mattered. When it was time for my own performance review, I was told to work on the things I needed to work on. Nobody told me what those things were. No coaching, no direction, nothing from the course we had all just taken.

The company even bought software to help managers have better conversations with their people. You logged in and it walked you through the conversation. But every conversation it supported was tied to a task or a revenue number. None of them were tied to who we were as a company.

Why better training isn’t the fix

It would be easy to say the culture was the problem. I don’t think it was.

That company had a real personality. You were expected to know the job and go do it. Nobody was going to hold your hand, and the people who did well there were the ones who could figure things out on their own. That’s a legitimate way to run a business, and plenty of good people wanted exactly that.

The course was built for a different kind of company. How you led there and what the course recommended overlapped a lot, but communicating there looked different and leading there looked different, and those small differences were the whole game. Nobody had named them, so the course couldn’t teach them. Under pressure, managers did what everyone does. They went back to what the culture actually rewarded.

Your culture overrules your training every time.

Situational leadership could have worked at that company if someone had translated it. In a figure-it-out culture, directing someone doesn’t mean walking them through every step. It means being very clear about the standard and then letting them find their own way to it. Coaching means asking how they’re working it out instead of doing it for them. That version would have fit the place. Nobody ever wrote it down.

Why companies keep buying the generic version

Most training is built to work anywhere, which means it was built for no company in particular. Delegation, communication, leadership, conflict. Every program teaches the same list in the same general way.

Those skills matter. They’re just generic, and your company isn’t.

When a course teaches one way of leading and the culture rewards another, people learn the course and practice the culture. You end up paying for the training twice: once for the program, and again when the turnover it was supposed to fix keeps happening.

What changes that is knowing what leading, communicating and coaching look like at your company specifically, and training to that. It starts with naming who you are, which is the work the Culture Code does. Here’s how that shows up in training.

Before the next program

Before you buy the next course, ask your leadership team one question: what does good leadership look like here? Here, at this company, with these people.

If their answers don’t match, that’s what your training is up against.

Start here