It's Not Your Fault When the Learning Doesn't Stick

You go to the workshop and you love it. You swear this one is different, and you mean it. You set a goal. Maybe you get assigned a coach to help the learning come to life.

Then Monday arrives. Your team is at your door, glad you’re back, and one of them has been sitting on a blocker since Tuesday. Your inbox is in triple digits. The calendar you were away from filled itself in while you were gone.

So you get it all done. You still remember every goal you set. But everyone around you is expecting the same output as before, the same performance, and here’s the part nobody says out loud: practicing a new skill usually means your performance dips first.

Some of us slide straight back into the old way. Not from weak conviction. From the plain stress of the job.

The rest of us try the new thing, and it’s awkward, and it’s clunky, and it backfires. People stare. And the little voice says nope, not now, maybe when things calm down.

Give it three weeks. By then you’re mostly back to who you were. And the part that gets misread every time: it usually isn’t that the development didn’t take. It’s that the room needed you to be the old thing, and the room is stronger than the workshop.

And that last line isn’t even my claim. The research on training transfer has been saying it for forty years: whether learning sticks has less to do with the workshop than with the world people walk back into. Pfeffer and Sutton called it the knowing-doing gap. Organizations mostly know what to do. They fail at doing it. Knowing was never the problem.

A while back I wrote about how leadership development is broken, and how it takes more than sending someone to training or coaching. It takes intervening in the world around the leader. (leadership development is broken) I said that world does most of the work, and that a lot of it comes down to how a leader gets pulled. So let’s start there.

The group-relations tradition actually has a name for this. Two, if we’re being precise: valence, your own tendency to slide into a certain role, and role suction, the group’s pull to put you there. I’ll spare you the rest of the jargon, but the core of it is simple. A group needs certain roles filled to function. Someone who decides. Someone who pushes back. Someone who carries the worry when things get tense. Those roles don’t disappear because one person went off and got developed. Try to do something different? The group might not let it happen. It pulls you back in, or it pulls someone else in.

The vignette above is a version of what I see over and over again in my work. Often times it has to do with delegating, letting go of making decisions, or passing the work to people. And what pains me is when the manager ends up thinking: I guess I’m just not good at letting go. They blame themselves when, in reality, it is in part about a new behavior and also probably partially because the room they’re in won’t let them.

This is one pull. There are others: who’s actually authorized to make which calls, the everyday friction that makes leading well look like making everyone’s job harder, what the system truly rewards versus what the values poster says. Together they’re the architecture around a leader, the conditions that decide whether what got developed actually holds. The four pulls, how you read them, how the work runs. I decided to do some writing around this, calling the idea leadership architecture, in case you’re interested in more. For now, the short version:

Role suction. The one you’ve been reading about this whole time: the group pulling someone into a seat it needs filled.

Decision rights. Who’s actually authorized to make which calls. If the system has decided, through a thousand small accumulations, that the VP runs strategy and the directors execute, no amount of coaching the directors to step into strategic conversations will produce that behavior. The structure has to change, or the development is rehearsal.

Friction. Approval chains, cross-functional dependencies, compliance reviews. Most exist for legitimate reasons, and they stack into a system where the safest move is always the old move. When the system rewards keeping your head down, no coaching produces consequential decisions. The friction is the system telling you what it actually authorizes.

And this is the back bone to the leadership stance my whole practice runs on: leadership development is system intervention, not individual development. When someone hires me to develop their leaders, they’re hiring me to change something about the system those leaders work inside, even when the contract says executive coaching. Treating the leader without diagnosing the system is malpractice. Diagnosing the system without designing the leader’s relationship to it is analysis that never lands anywhere.

If you’re the leader this keeps happening to.

You don’t need the whole model to do something with this one today. A few things I find myself working on with leaders when this pull shows up:

• Name the seat. Not “I need to delegate more” — that’s the workshop talking. Ask instead: what role does this group keep pulling me into, and what does it need that role for? The answer is usually about the group’s anxiety, not your habits.
• Watch for the hand-back. When you push something down and it floats right back up, that’s the data. Don’t read it as “they’re not ready.” Read it as “this seat is doing a job for someone.”
• Make the empty seat safe. If the anxiety of a decision has nowhere to go, it comes back to you. Someone else can hold it only if holding it, and occasionally getting it wrong, isn’t dangerous. That’s a condition you can actually design. Let people know you’re trying something new. And make space for risk-taking.

If you’re building leaders inside the organization.

Your version is harder, because you own both the system and the program.

• Diagnose the system before you design the intervention. Ask where role suction lives, who actually holds which decisions, and what friction your leaders are absorbing as personal failures. That diagnosis is the design brief. Don’t assume it’s just a knowledge problem.
• Build for the return, not the event. The workshop is the cheap part. The three weeks after are where it’s won or lost, and if nothing about the room changes, you bought rehearsal. Plan for an alignment chat between the leader and their manager, as well as the leader and the team.
• Keep moving the unit of intervention. Don’t just coach the person; consider coaching the team. And, while team coaching is a real step up from developing leaders one at a time, it’s still a start, not the end. The next unit is the system itself. Consider what friction or reward systems are in place that might be inhibiting real change.

If you’re the coach or consultant coming in from outside.

• Read the hire underneath the contract. The paperwork says executive coaching or leadership program. The actual hire is: something about this system needs to change, and this leader is the door you’ve been given. Hold both.
• Coach the person, touch the room. If you only ever work the individual, the room wins and your work takes the blame.
• Name the theater early. Watch for the engagement where the system has no intention of authorizing what you’re being asked to develop. That isn’t development. Say so before the three weeks tell everyone for you.

None of this means the development was wasted. The leader (probably) really did learn something new. But a leader with new tools walking back into an unchanged room was never a fair fight. So the next time someone comes back from the best program of their life and it doesn’t stick, it’s worth asking a different question. Not what’s wrong with them. What is the room keeping them in, and who does it serve?