Your managers are probably your real learning system

A while ago, I was involved in a development programme for a business that wanted to improve commercial capability across several teams. The programme itself was good. People engaged with it, the feedback was positive and, during the sessions, there was plenty of evidence that people understood what they were being asked to do differently.

A few months later, the results were much less tidy.

In some teams, you could see the language, tools and behaviours from the programme turning up in everyday work. Managers were referring back to them in one-to-ones, people were using them to prepare for conversations, and examples from live work were being brought into coaching. In other teams, almost none of that was happening. The same people had attended the same programme, received the same materials and supposedly learned the same things.

It would have been easy to conclude that some people had simply “engaged with the training” more than others.

The more useful explanation was sitting between the training sessions.

Some managers had incorporated the learning into the way they managed. Others hadn't.

That distinction matters because businesses spend a lot of time thinking about the quality of learning and considerably less time thinking about the environment people return to afterwards. We worry about content, facilitators, platforms, learning pathways and attendance. All of those things can matter. But eventually somebody closes the laptop, leaves the workshop or finishes the module and goes back to work.

What happens next is where most of the commercial value is either created or lost.

Learning something isn't the same as doing it

This isn't a particularly new problem.

Training-transfer research has spent decades examining why something learned in one environment does or doesn't subsequently appear in another. A useful recent contribution comes from Blume, Ford and Huang (2024), who bring together research on formal training and informal workplace learning. Their argument is that managers play an important role in connecting the two, through direct assistance, guidance and emotional support for learning.1

I think this becomes much easier to understand if we stop thinking about learning as the acquisition of information.

Imagine we've taught a salesperson a better way to conduct discovery.

At the end of the session they understand it. They may be able to demonstrate it in practice. They might even score 90% on whatever assessment we've constructed to reassure ourselves that learning has occurred.

Then Monday arrives.

They have a target. Their diary is full. The client is impatient. The conversation goes somewhere unexpected. They become slightly uncomfortable, revert to the questions they've asked for the last three years and move on.

Nothing particularly surprising has happened.

Knowing a better behaviour exists is a very different proposition from performing that behaviour reliably under the conditions in which the real job takes place.

This is one reason I'm wary of discussions about whether training “worked” immediately after it happened. At that point, we're often measuring the moment when the conditions for success are unusually favourable. People have been given time to think. Someone is paying attention to their performance. The new behaviour is salient because we've spent the day discussing it.

The real test comes three weeks later, when none of those things is true.

There is some useful recent experimental evidence on precisely this problem. In a field experiment involving 226 Danish public managers and 4,442 employees, Jacobsen and colleagues combined leadership training with just-in-time implementation nudges designed to encourage managers to use what they had learned in development conversations. Employees subsequently perceived greater use of the targeted leadership behaviours, with the development dialogues helping explain the effect.2

Different setting, different population, and certainly not proof that a few reminders will transform a sales organisation. But the principle is useful: if we care about behaviour after learning, we need to design for the moment when the behaviour is supposed to happen.

The workshop is only one part of that system.

The manager decides what survives contact with the job

Managers have an extraordinary amount of influence over what happens to new learning, often without consciously exercising it.

Imagine two people return from exactly the same development programme.

The first has a manager who asks about it. Not “How was the course?”, which is a question almost genetically engineered to produce the answer “Yeah, good thanks.” They ask what the person is going to try differently. They create an opportunity to try it. They observe what happens, discuss it afterwards and come back to it the following week.

The second person's manager is pleased they enjoyed the programme and immediately asks about the pipeline.

Neither manager is necessarily good or bad. The second may be under enormous commercial pressure and have twelve other things demanding their attention. But the learning environment those two employees return to is completely different.

This is where businesses can accidentally send contradictory signals.

• The learning programme says: slow down and ask better questions.
• The manager says: I need more calls.
• The leadership programme says: coach people rather than solving every problem for them.
• The manager's diary says: you have eleven minutes before the next meeting.
• The organisation says: we want people to experiment and learn.
• The response to the first failed experiment says: perhaps don't do that again.

People are remarkably good at working out which of those messages actually counts.

Usually, it's the one attached to their everyday environment.

This is why training-transfer problems are often misdiagnosed as learning problems. Somebody has attended development, their behaviour hasn't changed, so we conclude that the programme wasn't engaging enough, memorable enough or practical enough. Sometimes that's true. Plenty of training is poor.

But sometimes the programme is being asked to create a behaviour that the surrounding system is quietly extinguishing.

The manager doesn't need to become the trainer

There is an obvious trap here.

If managers are important to learning transfer, we can respond by giving them another enormous responsibility called “being responsible for everyone's learning”.

They'll be thrilled.

Managers already occupy one of the most overloaded positions in many organisations. Lynda Gratton has argued that the modern management role has expanded substantially, with managers increasingly expected to deliver results while simultaneously developing people, maintaining culture, supporting hybrid work and responding to technological change.3

So I don't think the answer is to turn every manager into an L&D professional.

Nor do I think they need to deliver mini-training sessions every Friday afternoon.

What they can do is much more useful.

They can make the work itself developmental.

That might mean asking somebody to prepare for a difficult client conversation using the approach they've recently learned, then spending ten minutes afterwards examining what happened. It might mean resisting the urge to provide the answer immediately and instead asking the person to talk through their judgement. It might mean deliberately giving somebody a slightly harder piece of work because they're ready for it, while making sure support is available if they struggle.

This is informal learning, and much of it is so ordinary that organisations barely recognise it as learning at all.

Research into managerial coaching gives us some reason to take these everyday interactions seriously. Nyfoudi and colleagues studied 182 knowledge workers and their managers across 60 teams and found evidence connecting managerial coaching skill with team performance through the development of shared knowledge about how team members' expertise fits together, although the relationship depended on the manager's own learning orientation.4

Again, the interesting point isn't that “coaching works” in every circumstance. The study itself is considerably more nuanced than that.

It's that managers can influence whether knowledge remains something an individual possesses or becomes something a team can actually use.

That is a very different role from delivering training.

Design the return to work

If I were reviewing a learning programme with a leadership team, one of the first things I'd want to see is what happens after it.

Not the follow-up email.

The work.

What will people encounter in the first week that gives them an opportunity to use the new capability? Does their manager know what they're supposed to be practising? What would the manager need to notice to give useful feedback? Does the normal workflow make the new behaviour easier or harder? What happens if somebody tries it and gets it slightly wrong?

This doesn't require a vast bureaucracy around every piece of development.

For something commercially important, it might be as simple as agreeing three things before anybody attends.

What should this person do differently afterwards? Where will they get an opportunity to do it? How will their manager know whether it's happening?

Those questions change the design of the learning itself.

If we can't describe the behaviour clearly enough for a manager to recognise it in the real world, I'm not entirely sure what we're teaching.

They also expose some uncomfortable problems earlier. Perhaps the behaviour is impossible because the process doesn't support it. Perhaps managers don't have enough visibility of the work to reinforce it. Perhaps the target or incentive encourages the opposite behaviour. Perhaps the manager doesn't possess the capability themselves.

All of those are more useful discoveries than finding out six months later that everyone completed the programme and nothing much changed.

The learning system you already have

This is why I'm increasingly reluctant to draw a neat boundary around “learning” in an organisation.

Yes, there may be an L&D function. There may be an LMS, an LXP, external programmes, academies, workshops and qualifications. They all have a role.

But employees are also learning every time a manager reviews their work, asks a useful question, gives feedback, demonstrates judgement, allows a mistake to become instructive rather than punitive, or creates an opportunity for somebody to attempt something slightly beyond what they can currently do.

They're learning when none of those things happen too.

A manager who continually takes difficult work back teaches dependence. A manager who only discusses performance when something goes wrong teaches people to hide uncertainty. A manager who rewards output while ignoring how it was achieved teaches the team which behaviours really matter, regardless of what appeared on the last leadership programme.

That is why the manager is probably the most consequential part of the learning system that most businesses don't think of as a learning system.

And there is a useful practical implication.

Take one development investment that matters to your business. Sales training, leadership development, onboarding, AI adoption, whatever you've decided people need to do differently.

Don't begin by reviewing the content.

Follow one employee back into the job.

Look at the first month after the learning and ask where the new behaviour is supposed to appear, what happens when they try it, what their manager does with it and what the surrounding environment rewards.

If the answer is essentially “we hope they remember”, you've found the problem.

The aim isn't to make managers responsible for delivering all learning. It is to stop designing learning as though managers and the work environment have nothing to do with whether it survives.

Because the course can introduce an idea.

Practice can begin to build capability.

But the workplace decides whether the behaviour becomes normal.

And for most people, their manager is a very large part of the workplace.

RB