Most management programs are trying to solve the wrong problem

This leads to courses filled with prioritisation, coaching conversations, delegation, feedback models. The programme teaches it, the managers practise in the room, the feedback forms come back positive, everyone moves on.

And then six weeks later nothing has really changed. This is corroborated by ROI stats recorded in the single figures for most training programs, and manager / employee engagement, and manager trust being at all time lows according to Gallup measures. 

Having worked with nearly 3,500 managers across industries including manufacturing, logistics, FMCG, construction and industrial services, the thing we keep seeing is that  a lack of skill is almost never the real blocker. 

By the time someone has been managing for two or three years they can usually have a good stab at prioritising - it might not be polished but they are trying. They've sat through the delegation e-learning modules. They know what a GROW coaching conversation is supposed to look like. Their knowledge isn't the gap or the issue - it is something else, and training keeps getting aimed at the wrong thing. It’s like the idea that when you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. 

Will, blind spot, friction

Walking into an organisation, we are looking at four things. Skill, yes - and the gap here is normally that they were taught but never shown how implementation works in their context, and there was no accountability and support to help them implement successfully. 

But also will, which is whether they believe they've got the permission or the safety to actually act on what they know, or are engaged enough to care - I refer to my earlier Gallup stat. 

Blind spots are where they genuinely can't see what's going wrong or arent aware of the problem needing to be fixed. Nobody told them that this was the priority, area of focus or even a problem so it is either ignored or mixed in amongst the thousand other things managers have to focus on.

And finally friction, which is the one nobody wants to talk about and yet is normally the most common. This can look like unclear authority, approval bottlenecks, structural ambiguity, the kind of organisational tangle that no individual skill program cuts through.

We see this time and time again. When you ask leaders to tell you what good leadership looks like they know the answers. The real question is why are they not enacting it? In a typical cohort of fifty managers, lack of skill is normally the smallest slice. 

Take for example a manager who won't delegate. She knows how. Of course she does. But the last time she handed a decision down, someone two levels above her overturned it, and now she doesn't trust the system enough to try again. Or when she tried, her boss added another log to the fire she was fighting. That's a will issue - not skill. You can send her on every prioritisation course going, it won't touch it.

Or she's losing half her week to work that belongs a level below and can't see it happening, which is a blind spot no course will surface for her. Or perhaps an organsiation has two teams and delegating means dropping it into a gap between two teams where it sits until someone escalates it back up or it is lost completely, so she ends up having to do it anyway at 2am in the morning before the deadline. This is three completely different causes, with the same symptom on the surface, and a skills program addresses none of them.

Why this matters 

Most HR directors sit in a peculiar position. You're rarely the one who feels a weak management layer most directly; that's the GM, the Head of Operations, the person watching good people stall out because friction has collected around them. Your job is to recommend the intervention to “grow capability” and then prove it worked, which is harder than it sounds when the thing you bought was solving for the wrong blocker.

So here's the one thing to test before you sign: does the provider diagnose before they prescribe? A skills curriculum delivered to everyone regardless of what's blocking them is training. Working out whether each person is stuck on skill, will, blind spot or friction and then going after what's really there, that's performance work. They look identical in the proposal document but are vastly different in the real world.

The key information here is that skills are the most expensive to improve. Friction removal, Blindspot removal and Will resolution are significantly cheaper and have a higher ROI. 

Ask their bosses after the event

Think about the last time your organisation signed off a leadership spend. Did anyone go back to each manager's boss afterward and ask what changed?

Almost nobody does this. Most internal programs get scored by the people who attended them, a satisfaction number collected in the room on the day. Then when leaders return to the real world, are weighed down with meetings and emails, and have a bad week on site, all the best new intentions wash away. 

The person sitting one level above each manager can tell you in ninety seconds whether escalations slowed down, whether decisions started landing where they should, whether the coaching conversations lasted past the first fortnight. That is the lag measure to help you determine if you had the right solution and is one you could enact now based on your last spend, before kicking off another leadership program - perhaps look at a friction removal solution first.

Sometimes people genuinely do need new skills, and good training can make a significant difference.

The problem is assuming that skill is always the reason performance isn't where it needs to be.

The key to investing in development is choosing the right tool for the right job. If HR business partners and specialists aren't correctly identifying the problem, they can end up delivering internally or farming the work out to a familiar consultant who runs a generic leadership program. You can spend a lot of money solving something that wasn't actually the problem.

There is another layer to this, too. Managing individuals creates different challenges from managing managers, and managing a business unit creates another set of challenges again. The intervention needs to reflect the level and the problem, rather than assuming one management program will work equally well everywhere.

Training can survive on attendance. Real business performance comes from diagnosing and solving the right problem.

Jimmy Burroughes is the founder of JBL High Performance