L&D leadership training sessions often “feel” successful. A program is designed, a workshop is delivered, and employees leave feeling informed and engaged. But if that training isn’t applied in the workplace, did it actually happen? If we focus entirely on the “learning” but not the “development,” we’re wasting huge amounts of time and money. So let’s take a look at the current situation first.

The reality is stark; according to Harvard Business Review:

  • Only 12% of employees apply new skills learned in L&D programs
  • Just 25% believe their training measurably improved performance
  • We forget 75% of what we learn within six days unless we use it

That first stat is astonishing. Only 12% applying their learning? We wouldn’t accept that return for many things in life. These numbers together expose a harsh truth—that most training programs focus on the event rather than the impact. Organizations check the box, employees attend, and everyone moves on as if something has been achieved. But real learning isn’t about attending—it’s about doing. It’s about changing practices for the long term.

Why might so many L&D teams be satisfied with one-off training events? There seem to be two main reasons:

  1. It’s easy to report on. A training event is tangible—it happens, people show up, feedback is collected. That’s a clear deliverable.
  2. Measuring real impact is both difficult and uncomfortable. If companies dig deeper, they may find little to no behavioral change. Acknowledging that means admitting past efforts may have been ineffective. It’s also not easy to measure changes in behavior.

Perhaps with the worry in mind that long-term change is proving tough to achieve, there’s another trap many fall into: overcomplication.

Complexity kills implementation

In the search for more impact, it’s tempting to believe that making training more complex makes it better: more models, more frameworks, the latest research. It can make the learning feel sophisticated and smart—but it also makes the material harder to use.

McKinsey research found that many leadership training programs overwhelm participants with an “alphabet soup” of theories—leaving them unsure of what to actually do in the moment. And when the pressure is on, people don’t reach for complex frameworks. They fall back on habits. It’s our job within L&D to change those habits so they become the go-to behaviors.

Of course, this is not to say that these frameworks and research can’t be useful as part of a program to enhance strategies or to get leaders thinking. But they’re not the things people fall back on in one-to-one conversations, like the ones they have daily with their team.

If training doesn’t simplify action, it won’t be used.

Experiential training: The missing link

Imagine trying to learn how to ride a bike by watching a presentation. You wouldn’t get far. Yet many training programs do exactly that: They rely on passive learning—listening, reading, discussing—without hands-on practice. It’s playing the game of “hoping” that, having been told about new skills, people will go away and implement changes. But leadership is essentially a set of practical skills that require practice. You have to get on the bike and try riding it, no matter how prepared you think you might be.

The question is how best to ensure that learning translates into long-term behavior change.

All the research seems to point in one direction: Make the training experiential and repeat it regularly, and the odds of the learning being applied skyrocket. Here are two key stats:

  • Experiential learning (or learning by doing) gives knowledge retention rates of about 75%, compared to just 5% from lectures or 20% from audio-visual learning, according to the National Training Laboratories’ “Learning Pyramid.”
  • Spaced repetition improves knowledge retention to 80% after 60 days. Considering the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve shows us knowledge retention falls to 25% after just 6 days, this is a huge improvement.

So we need to do two things in training.

  1. Make it experiential. Give opportunities for participants to practice skills.
  2. Regularly hold refresher sessions to provide spaced repetition and cement the skills long-term.

What do these experiential methods actually look like?

Broadly, we can categorize them into two groups:

  1. Demonstration: Business actors perform workplace scenarios, showing real-world interactions. Participants can stop the scene, offer feedback, and experiment with different approaches. They can see how changes in behavior affect outcomes and this lays the ground for feedback-led, iterative learning.
  2. Small-Group Practice: Instead of “performing” in front of a large group, participants work in small groups to practice real conversations with structured feedback from a business actor. The pressure is removed, mistakes are welcomed, and learning sticks. They get the chance to try things out and observe others doing the same.

In my experience, those lightbulb moments rarely come from when people are listening. They come when they try something new, see that it works, and resolve to actually try it out for real in their role. And those moments are nearly always after a simple change—waiting a little longer for someone to fill the gap, asking one more question than usual, or holding back on offering a solution. The learners feel the difference and that’s why it sticks. It also gives them the confidence to try it when the risks are higher. Without that visceral knowledge that it can work, people fall back into safer, less effective habits.

From training events to real impact

Training isn’t about how much content is covered—it’s about how much is applied. Organizations must move away from delivering training and toward embedding behavior change.

Ask yourself: Is your training being used, or is it just being attended? Because if it isn’t applied, it hasn’t happened.

 

Image credit: VectorMine