We are living in an era where every true leader cares about the development of their people. But caring about people isn’t the same as developing them.

However, the best part is that the information available to employees has never been easier and cheaper to access. YouTube, podcasts, audiobooks, AI, internal LMSs, company online course subscriptions. The modern world of education is unbelievable. As long as you have the internet and a company or leader who cares, there is nothing stopping you from learning.

Yet despite this ridiculous flow of information, the fundamentals of employee development are coming up woefully short.

Companies spend over $340 billion a year on employee development. As little as 10 to 15 percent of it changes anything about how people actually work and perform. That number should bother every leader who has direct reports or has ever approved a training budget.

The majority of companies and/or their leaders respond to this in one of two ways. Throw more content at the person, or replace the person with an AI agent or someone else. Previously, we have seen more of the former. In the future, we will see more of the latter.

I sat with a company recently that is trying to do it differently.

Here's the pattern behind most development efforts. A VP of Sales, a CHRO, someone in L&D, hears about a skill gap on their team. They pull together some content. They host a training session. Everyone shows up and even enjoys themselves. None of that is bad. It's just incomplete.

I'll admit something. Sometimes, as a keynote speaker and someone delivering training sessions, the event does exactly what it's supposed to do. A lightbulb goes on for someone in the room, and they sprint toward application on their own. For example, this week we did a virtual session for a sales and marketing team called "Your Next Level of Performance." It went great. This was the text: "It was exactly what we needed! It was perfect, and everyone loved it."

My heart was full as I read it. I want that for everyone. So it's tempting to believe if I just keep delivering the content well enough, eventually the lightbulb goes on for the whole room. But there's an old lesson buried in that hope.

Some people walk into a session already leaning forward. Others walk in because it was on their calendar and they had no choice. That's one of the real issues with corporate training. Some of it is elective, and a lot of it is voluntold.

The secret is to lean into filling the application gap. Which means if you want to get serious about truly developing people, there is a formula called The Application Loop.

Give people something true about themselves or their work that they didn't fully see before that will help them perform better. An idea, a model, a principle, or a story. This is the material in the training session, the coaching conversation, or the 360 feedback. The internet and AI have made this easier than ever before. However, what you must know is that: Insight without application is just information.

Every insight needs a specific commitment: what they'll do differently, and by when. Vague intentions don't survive a busy week. What is the smallest action you are willing to take to apply the insight? It doesn't have to be everything in the workshop; it just requires a specific action.

Someone has to be intentional about providing positive or constructive feedback about the action. Now it's easy to lean into what someone does wrong, and that is essential for development. But what someone does well can also cue more of the right action in the future. A leader observing the action and providing feedback is what turns a training moment into a real chance to change behavior.

Most development stops at Insight and hopes for a lightbulb. The organizations that actually help mold and develop people to meet their potential build Action and Feedback into the system, so they're not depending on hope at all.

The alternative to Insight, Action, and Feedback isn't more content. It's replacing people who never got the chance to grow.

So the question isn't whether your people learned something this year. It's whether anything about how they work is different because they did.

Use your gifts,

John Eades

Founder of LearnLoft | The Sales Infrastructure

P.S. I am getting ready to board a plane to Denver, CO, to spend time with a fantastic group of 80 leaders to deliver the Change Funnel workshop to help them activate change! My whole mission is insight, application, feedback.

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