Why your manager training failed

Design a great training. No one shows up. And what to do about it.

This is a summary version of this week's article in Yen's Newsletter. You can read the full article here.

I talked to a learning designer the other day who had spent months crafting a quarter-long manager training course. We’re talking scheduled guest speakers, carefully crafted modules, peer learnings groups––the whole enchilada. But when it came time to launch, he had more no-shows than attendees. They had to post-pone the kick-off to the following quarter because managers were too busy to attend.

When that designer caught me grimacing, he shrugged and gave a tired smile. “That’s the reality of L&D sometimes. Learning is a business priority, until it isn’t.”

The problem of low learning program engagement is so widely reported by thought leaders and industry reports, it’s almost become cliché. When we asked our LinkedIn community how to drive better engagement, some incredible leaders joked about bribing learners with cakes, pictures of bunnies, and chocolate. It almost feels like L&D leaders have to pull off PR stunts to draw attention to their programs.

Low engagement is particularly real with managers, who are simultaneously the highest priority population to train and the most likely to skip a training. While it’s an uphill battle for L&D leaders, I’d argue it’s a battle that companies can’t afford to lose .

So why the hell is it so hard to get managers to attend trainings? And what can learning designers, facilitators, and PX leaders do about it?

Let’s dig into this.

We asked dozens of People Ops leaders, what’s the hardest part of training managers?

If you know the Kona team, you know we’re always talking to thought leaders and on-the-ground executives to get these big questions answered. We’ve talked to a few dozen People Ops and L&D leaders in 2024 so far.

We asked each of them, “What’s the hardest part of manager development?” Here’s some of the most common answers we’ve heard so far:

#1 - “Managers lack the time.”

The most common struggle we heard had to do with manager bandwidth and time management. This was best summed up by a conversation I recently had with Robyn Barton , Learning Business Partner at Coinbase:

One of the most challenging aspects is time. Managers tend to be some of the busier people in a company, especially the higher you get up the leadership chain. And so getting dedicated time for learning can be difficult.

With reorgs and more ambitious goals, it’s no surprise that managers are stretched thin from back-to-back meetings and forced to ruthlessly prioritize. It’s easy to sum up manager no-shows as managers being “too busy” for training.

Real-talk: managers aren’t prioritizing training. This isn’t necessarily their fault, especially when companies approach trainings with a “nice-to-have attitude” and higher-level executives fail to allocate any time in the week for up-skilling. (These are the same executives who pay lip-service to their company’s continuous learning culture and career growth opportunities, by the way.)

Fighting against manager priorities, L&D leaders have to do backflips to advertise their programs and prove the immediate ROI that a manager will get from attending. This reduces learning to asking a manager to “do their job” or “take on extra work”. Bribery with bunnies feels like a sane solution at this point.

#2 - “Managers won’t DIY their learning.”

A lot of trainings are designed for self-driven learning. This async-friendly approach is brilliant in theory for the increasingly distributed and remote-first environments that managers exist in. Vast content libraries, documentation, and pick-up-where-you-left-off courses allow managers to learn on their own time.

The only problem, as we just discussed in No. 1, is that managers don’t have time for training. And while L&D leaders can design fun materials and readings, those are probably the last thing managers want to think about as they’re signing off of work or enjoying free time on a weekend.

On top of that, self-drive learning typically goes against our existing relationship with learning. Lavinia Mehedin?u , Co-Founder and Learning Architect at Offbeat , sums this up best:

I think it's a systemic issue. The first thing is the way that we have been learning in school. If you think about it, it was a lot of teachers driving the learning process [of] when you learn, what you learn, and so on.

There in lies the problem with L&D strategies that rely heavily on individual learning budgets and self-driven learning. Existing systems fail to provide a “when” for learning, making do-it-yourself programs a problem of driving engagement instead of driving learnings.

#3 - “Managers want actionable frameworks, not theory.”

Unfortunately, these tactical lessons aren’t usually the first topics covered in learning programming. Many manager trainings focus on more generalized, theory-based content to start. They may define great management at their organization or outline how to manage by org values. These foundations are important to get to the good actionable stuff, but can give the impression that all trainings are skippable.

So, duh, why not go straight to the good stuff? Manager training should be actionable, but the most tactical aspects aren’t easily covered by a one-and-done workshop. Managers can’t simply read a book on feedback and develop mastery, they have to continuously practice and make mistakes. That’s where peer learning groups, multi-week sessions, and coaching shines. But then we run into that tricky time issue again, see No. 1.

#4 - “It’s hard to design individualized programs that fit every experience level, function, and situation.”

Quick POV: you’re designing learning programs for your start-up’s 100 managers.

But it’s not really 100 managers. It’s a majority group of brand new managers, a tricky bunch of mid-level managers, and a few very particular execs. Some of them are technical, others non-technical. Some recently got a new team from the reorg and others recently lost 50% of their staff. Don’t get me started on remote vs. hybrid, cultural differences, and demographic markers.

It’s very clear that ONE manager training program couldn’t possibly rule them all. But you’re an L&D team of one, so good luck designing those 10 dream programs before the end of the quarter.

In this case, a lot of L&D leaders decide to divide and conquer. They may outsource their executives to a executive coaching benefit, build a mentorship program for their newest leaders, and focus the rest of their efforts towards designing an in-house course. Inevitably though, those courses end up feeling vague, see No. 2 and No. 1.

The vague workshop is how we get hilarious memes like this one:

#5 - “Experienced managers think they’ve graduated from training.”

I spoke recently with a HRBP about their current hiccups with management training, and their perspective surprised me. Their company’s most challenging population wasn’t the vast majority of first-time managers, it was their more experienced leaders.

Many of these experienced leaders believed that manager development was for new managers who have never managed before. In a way, they felt like they had graduated from training. According to this HRBP, the problems they ran into and certain skill-gaps said otherwise. In other words, experienced managers tend to have blindspots.

I wish that management skills could exponentially grow with time, but the reality is that experienced managers simply get better at their existing habits. Think about any bad boss you’ve had and the mind-blowing realization that they’d been leading for years, not months. Very experienced managers are more than capable of manager sins, and it’s more important than ever to help them grow their skills and lead well. As experienced managers take on additional teams and managers below them, their blast radius and the impact of those bad habits grows.

The misunderstanding that all manager training is for newbies isn’t helped by problems like No. 1, No. 2, and No. 3.

#6 - “Managers don’t trust People Ops to deliver.”

Let’s say you’re a L&D army of one, and you can design those great programs. The topic is tactical and actionable, it’s exactly what managers have been begging for, and there’s a plan to get it done within the necessary timeline.

You dive in and when you’re 30% done, the company announces a huge reorg. Or the People team’s priorities change. Or a key executive asks why there hasn’t been any executive coaching for their senior most leaders. Either way, this derails your project. You firefight to handle the other priorities that suddenly popped up.

The deadline approaches and managers ask when the awesome training you pitched will be ready. It’s been lowered to the bottom of your priorities. Oh shit.

More companies than we’d care to admit ran into this issue. It’s natural to have to reprioritize programs, but People Ops has an extra large blast radius when programs are overpromised and underdelivered. In the short term, managers simply have to figure it out while their training programs are ready. In the long term, managers start to lose trust in People Ops and L&D that trainings will happen or be useful to them. See No. 1 for why this sucks extra.

#7 - “We’re not planning learning goals according to how our brains work.”

Another challenge for manager training goals? Neuroscience.

There’s a lot of research out there on learning and how our brains pick up information. Unfortunately, this research doesn’t always align with company expectations around fast-paced up-skilling and one-and-done information retention.

The truth is, more L&D leaders need to learn about learning and how cognition affects our working memory, biases, and attention. We can’t expect ourselves to operate like machines and our brains are going to consistently be a factor so long as we work with humans. Leaning on evidence-based practices and less on pseudo-neuroscience (and knowing the difference) can help programs better accomplish their goals.

I’m far from an expert, but you can certainly pick up a thing or two from Lauren Waldman and Dominik Rus .

#8 - “We’re too understaffed to build every program.”

“Even with pledges and recognition that the people experience matters, HR and D&I are often seen as pure overhead and perhaps a little bit distant from the profit-making engine.” — Julie Coffman, Chief Diversity Officer at Bain

This point was touched on in No. 3 and No. 4, but I figure it deserves another honorable mention. Layoffs are disproportionately hitting HR and DEI teams, wiping out entire sub-departments and roles. Executives are asking HR teams to “do more with less” despite eliminating their staff of HRBPs and a good chunk of the budget.

A lot of People Ops executives we talked to mentioned how they’re having to up-skill themselves to meet the learning demands of their managers. They’re rapidly trying to teach their facilitators how to take on HRBP roles and coaching. They’re asking VPs of People to take lower latitude roles and run L&D programs. They’re staying up late to answer every manager DM and question that comes their way.

Every single People Ops leader told us that manager development was in their top three priorities, some had it in their top seat. However, those same teams are increasingly understaffed and trying to make it work. This ripples into No. 1, No. 2, No. 3, and No. 4.

The problem cycle of failed manager trainings.

You might’ve noticed that a lot of the problems I listed in the section above were linked to one another. Through our conversations with People Ops and L&D leaders, our team started to realize that these issues are not only related, but building on one another and making things worse.

That’s right. Manager training problems are stuck in a feedback loop.

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I’m Yen, co-founder at Kona . My goal is to help every manager be a great leader. You might be managing a team yourself, or supporting better managers at your organization. Hopefully, this newsletter helps you look at the ever-changing landscape of leadership in a new way.

Since late 2019, I’ve interviewed 1500+ remote managers, People Ops leaders, and tech executives to learn how they lead teams and design incredible distributed company cultures. While every company’s different, everyone’s trying to answer the same big question: “How do you enable amazing people to do amazing work, while remote?”

That’s the great thing about big questions, they bring people together. Learning is sharing, and I’ve always looked to share everything we know as soon as we learn it. That's the goal for this newsletter: capture and synthesize all of our remote management learnings in a neat and shareable archive.

Every week, I’ll alternate between self-written articles and interviews with industry leaders.

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