Train to Ingrain The Plain Truth About Your Pain   The following is an accurate summary of the most common complaint we’ve heard from senior leaders over the years:   We agreed that our line leaders knew the business, but most of them weren't very effective with their people. Frequently we noticed friction and a lack of cooperation. Disagreements and arguments festered. You could sense the tension out there. Morale was low in many areas. It wasn't the positive, high-energy culture we wanted. We lost several of our best people.   We concluded that our managers needed to be better leaders, and we decided to bring in a top-flight leadership effectiveness program. The trainers were fantastic and our managers raved about it. We were satisfied that it was money well spent. In the months afterward, we saw an improvement in several managers, but we noticed that most of them weren’t using the new skills. To be honest, these were the same folks doing the same things.   A year later, I look around and can’t say there’s been much change at all. It’s hard to believe that a program of such high quality didn’t get better results in the long run. It’s been a huge disappointment.   The executives expected and deserved a far better return on their investment. The employees desperately needed better leadership from their managers. The programs should have been a big success story for the trainers.   This problem has existed for decades. Nearly 50 years ago, JamesN. Mosel reported “…mounting evidence that shows that very often the training makes little or no difference in job behavior.” The author concluded that ingraining a skill requires not just job-focused training, but “rewards and punishments, incentives and deterrents in the job situation,” all of which are controlled by management. (“Why Training Programs Fail to Carry Over,” Personnel (1957), pp. 56-64).   How widespread is this pain? From Tim Baldwin and Kevin Ford: “There is a growing recognition of a ‘transfer problem’ in organizational training today. It is estimated that while American industries annually spend up to $100 billion on training and development, not more than 10% of these expenditures actually result in transfer to the job.” (“Transfer of Training: A Review and Directions for Future Research,” Personnel Psychology (May 1982), pp. 63-105.)   The foremost authorities on this issue, Mary Broad and John Newstrom, concluded this over ten years ago: “Considering all types of training and low levels of transfer found by HRD researchers, a generous assumption is that perhaps 50% of all training content is still being applied a year after training delivery. Considering our rough estimate of $50 billion spent on formal training per year, that means a loss of $25 billion a year to organizations for training not fully used on the job.” (Transfer of Training,(1992), p. 12).   More recently, Robert Brinkerhoff and Anne Apking asserted in their book, High Impact Learning (2001), that "almost all organizational training is a marginal intervention and has only slight effects on performance improvement. They concluded further: "If we define 'training impact' as simply the transfer of knowledge and skills to on-the-job performance, research indicates that impact of training is realized only for about 15 percent of all training participants [S.I. Tannenbaum and G. Yukl, “Training and Development in Work Organizations,” Annual Review of Psychology (1992), pp. 399-441]. When we define the impact of training more rigorously, such as the application of new knowledge and skills to enhance performance in a way that makes a worthwhile difference to then business, then our evaluation studies typically show even more dismal results."   The researchers aren't saying that training never transfers to on-the-job performance. Certainly it has always been true that highly professional self-starters and lifelong learners believe in what they've learned and persist in spite of all barriers to change their work habits. But these exceptions don't add up to the result executives are looking for. This isn't the return on investment they expect and need.   Interestingly, the experts say the problem isn't with the training, but with what happens afterward. John Newstrom’s study surveyed trainers to identify and rank order the most serious barriers to transfer. He found that the most significant shortfall was “lack of reinforcement on the job.” The next most serious impediment was “interference by the immediate environment,” meaning work and time pressures, insufficient authority, ineffective work processes, inadequate equipment or facilities. (“The Management of Unlearning: Exploding the ‘Clean Slate’ Fallacy,” Training and Development Journal (August 1983), pp. 36-39).   This study concluded that any form of follow-up is rare: L. M. Saari, T. R. Johnson, S. D. McLaughlin, and D. M. Zimmerle: “A Survey of Management Training and Education Practices in U.S. Companies,” Personnel Psychology 41 (April 1988), pp. 731-743.   In 2005, Jack Zenger, Joe Folkman and Robert Sherwin probed the cause of this pain. “Talk to any group of layman or professionals about what is broken in the current learning and development process, and most will tell you it’s the lack of serious post training follow-through.” The authors concluded that less than 5% of training and development funds are committed to what happens after training. (“The Promise of Phase 3,” T&D (January 2005), pp. 30-34).   The irony is that decision-makers continue to support the myth of the single intervention. They persist in the belief that administering a round of 360-degree feedback or conducting a world-class training program will change on-the-job behavior. But experts have repudiated this notion for decades.   Why don't these programs, by themselves, change behavior more consistently? If you've experienced the pain of this kind of shortfall, this isn't a rhetorical question. There's a straightforward scientific explanation, and you need to know what it is.   Dennis Coates, Ph.D, CEO, Performance Support Systems, publisher of 20/20 Insight GOLD assessment software