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From Good to Great: How Training Elevates Performance
Why Most Professional Development Training Is Just Expensive Theatre
Walk into any Australian office and mention "professional development" : watch how quickly people suddenly remember important emails they need to answer.
After nearly two decades designing training programs from Brisbane to Adelaide, and here's what nobody wants to admit: about 73% of the professional development courses companies splash cash on are complete waste of time. The content isnt the problem : it's what happens when people return to their actual jobs that matters.
Had a client recently : big logistics company down in Adelaide : spent $47,000 on a leadership development program. Beautiful glossy workbooks, motivational speakers, the whole nine yards. Six months down the track, nothing had changed : same complaints, same turnover, same dysfunction.
Here's the bit that'll shock you.
The businesses getting actual returns on development investment have discovered something most haven't. They're not booking motivational speakers or sending staff to industry events. They've discovered something both clear and revolutionary.
Look at how Bunnings approaches staff development - it's not academic workshops about customer service. It's real managers working with real problems on real shop floors. Messy, instant, practical stuff.
Most training fails because it treats professional development like education when it should be treating it like apprenticeship. You dont become a chef by studying recipes. You learn by working alongside someone who knows what they're doing until you can do it yourself.
Here's my contentious opinion that'll probably irritate half the training industry: formal qualifications are overrated for most workplace skills. Met a shift manager in Darwin who learned everything on the job but was the best trainer l've encountered. Because real workplace knowledge comes from experience, not theory.
What drives me nuts is training designed by consultants who've never worked in the actual industry. Training designers who believe workplace skills follow the same rules as classroom subjects.
Wrong.
Genuine leadership skills are nothing like what you see in business school case studies. It's about navigating personalities, managing competing priorities, and making decisions with partial information. No amount of theory prepares you for real workplace leadership.
The penny dropped when l was facilitating conflict resolution training for a transport company in Cairns. Covered everything - assertive communication, feedback models, team dynamics. Workers were engaged, took notes, asked good questions.
Two months down the track, zero improvement. Same arguments in the lunch room, same communication breakdowns between shifts, same complaints from supervisors about workers not following directions.
This forced me to entirely rethink my approach to workplace training.
Everything changed when l began observing the real workplace environment. Turns out the communication problems werent about lacking skills : they were about shift handovers happening in noisy environments where you couldn't hear properly, outdated systems that didn't capture important information, and a culture where asking questions was seen as showing weakness.
No amount of active listening training was going to fix structural problems.
This is why l've become focused with what l call "embedded development" instead of traditional training. Instead of pulling people out of their work environment to learn theoretical skills, you embed the learning directly into their actual work.
For instance : skip the role playing workshops and have experienced staff coach newcomers during actual customer interactions. Swap classroom project management training for hands on involvement in actual project delivery.
The improvement is immediate and lasting. People learn faster, retain more, and actually apply what they've learned because they're learning it in context.
But here's the catch - and why most companies don't do this - it requires good people to spend time teaching instead of just doing their own work. The benefits appear in future performance metrics, not current training completion data.
CFOs hate this approach because it's harder to measure and harder to justify to boards who want to see certificates and completion rates.
Speaking of measurement, can we talk about how broken most training evaluation is? Post training satisfaction surveys that measure how people felt about the day tell you nothing useful. Of course people give it an 8. They've just spent a day away from their normal work, had some laughs, learned a few useful things. That provides zero information about whether any behaviour will actually shift.
Genuine assessment occurs months afterwards by examining changed behaviours, improved results, and different approaches to workplace challenges.
Companies skip proper evaluation because it's time-consuming and potentially embarrassing when results don't match expectations.
What really frustrates me are one size fits all development programs that claim wide applicability. The type advertised as "Universal Management Skills" or "Essential Leadership for Any Organisation."
Bollocks.
Restaurant supervisors deal with entirely different pressures than office managers. The communication skills needed for managing workers on a construction site are different to those needed for managing graphic designers in an agency.
Setting makes a difference. Industry experience counts. Workplace culture shapes everything.
The best professional development l've ever seen has been extremely focused, directly applicable, and quickly practical. It tackles genuine problems that employees encounter in their daily work.
Dealt with a factory in the Hunter Valley battling ongoing quality problems. They skipped generic quality workshops and engaged an ex-Holden quality expert to work directly with their team for several months.
Not to give presentations. Not to run workshops. To actually work the line, identify problems, and teach solutions in real time.
Defect reduction was both quick and permanent. Because people learned by doing, with an expert right there to guide them through the difficult reality of putting in place change in their particular environment.
You can't roll this out to massive workforces, but that doesn't make it less worthwhile.
Here's another uncomfortable truth: most people don't actually want to develop professionally. They want to do their job, get paid, and go home to their families. Development programs frequently seem like more burden that serves company goals rather than individual interests.
Effective development programs accept this fundamental truth. They make development feel less like homework and more like getting better at stuff you're already doing.
Consider Australia Post - their training focuses on practical service delivery, not theoretical management principles. It's about knowing your products well enough to actually help customers solve problems. It's concrete, directly valuable, and builds current role effectiveness.
That's training people remember and use.
Training providers persist in designing courses as though every worker is motivated by advancement and structured growth.
The reality is different - people mainly want to feel competent and learn shortcuts that simplify their workload.
This leads to my last observation about scheduling. Training typically occurs during peak pressure periods when staff are overwhelmed with regular responsibilities.
Then organisations question why participation lacks energy and engagement.
The companies that get this right integrate development into quieter periods, or they actually reduce other workload expectations when people are going through intensive development.
What an innovative approach, right?
Professional development that actually develops people professionally isnt about courses and certificates and completion rates. It's about building workplace cultures where skill development happens automatically through coaching, challenge, and practical application.
The rest is just expensive window dressing.
Website: https://traitonline.bigcartel.com/product/emotional-intelligence-for-managers-perth
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