Why Traditional Training Does Not Stick – Leadership Development Program in Edmonton

If you have ever sent somebody on a training course and watched them come back and do exactly nothing differently, this is why.

In this conversation Bruce Baker of The Business Builders by Workplaces goes into the mechanics of how the leadership and management development series is delivered, because the delivery model is what makes it work, not the content.

Why traditional training does not work

Almost eighty percent is lost

Bruce: Training in general is not impactful. Almost eighty percent is lost, and if any is retained you are lucky to keep ten percent. That is purely from classroom. What we want to do is change behaviour through learning.

Trevor: So it is not that the content is bad, it is the delivery.

Bruce: It is the delivery, in a big way. What are you trying to do in training? Transfer knowledge. What a lot of trainers miss is that when the learner goes back into the field they might recall some core components, and ten percent is optimistic. The investment in training is too high to lose that much of it unapplied.

What week one looks like

Short in the classroom, long in the field

Bruce: The big difference is a significant field application component. People come in for two, three, maybe four hours. We are not big on eight or nine hour days. In construction, two or three hour bursts a week are plenty for the classroom.

What matters is that the case studies, and the theory, which is a word that scares people, are customized for that industry, and then customized again for that specific company.

Then here is the magic. They go out into the field and take what they learned as a structured assignment, and apply it. This is not, if you get the opportunity, and if you do not, that is fine and we will carry on. No. The training stops if that is not done.

When they come back the week after, or every other week for some companies, which gives them more chance to apply it, there is no classroom session. No new content is delivered. It is a tailgate or toolbox meeting, an accountability session, and that is where the learning happens.

A site super talks about how they applied it, whether it worked or failed. Then others talk about the same thing. If one succeeded and another did not, what did you do differently? Ah, you twisted it a little. So it is not exactly what we taught in the classroom, and that is fine. You made it work for you and your crew. That is where the real learning starts.

What a field assignment actually looks like

Getting a crew to hold itself accountable

Bruce: One of the key areas is accountability. Framing a culture of accountability is not being a jerk or treating employees badly. But a lot of leaders are scared to enter into conflict. They do not want to lose good people, they do not know how to articulate it, and frankly it is too much work. So they avoid it.

We work on how to create accountability, how to hold people accountable, how to handle conflict. We need that out of the way so you can produce results. Then the assignment is to go and produce accountability in the field. How do I set expectations and hold my guys accountable? And here is the key. How do I get them to hold themselves accountable?

Think about your top A player. If only I had more guys like him. What this does is start getting crew members, not all of them, because some people will never change, to see the light themselves. And what we see over and over is that the site super stops working so hard to make it happen. They work smarter.

Culture that shows up in the margin

Why “culture eats strategy” stayed a buzzword

Bruce: Around 2009 the big saying was culture eats strategy for breakfast. Everybody used the buzzword. People understood the essence of it, but nobody understood how it would actually reduce their rework, or put a few points back on their margin. When humans cannot see the connection, they do nothing with it, so it stays a buzzword.

Here, culture becomes tangible, because we measure the change in behaviour against the bottom line. I spoke with a client this week whose key concern is rework. Their accountant asked what they could do if they simply squeezed more out by reducing it. They are growing nineteen percent year over year, which is fantastic, but growing the top line does not mean you are growing the bottom line. The whole thrust of this training is to grow the bottom line through culture.

The mastermind

Peer accountability, and why it sticks harder than a manager’s

Bruce: The mastermind is the master stroke. It is similar to a tailgate meeting. People talk about what is working, and if something is not working, what are we going to do about it and what is the commitment. If it is working, can we all adopt it as a consistent practice.

One interior renovation client I have worked with for years said, this is all good stuff, but we need our leaders aligned. Alignment and consistency are critical, because what is culture? Culture is language. It is the consistency in how we talk and how we execute, whether that is leadership, quality control, deliveries on site or how we deal with our trades.

Vistage research from 2020 found that delivering it this way drives retention to around seventy or seventy five percent, against the traditional ten to twenty. In the learning and development world that is astronomical. Imagine tripling the effectiveness of every training dollar you have already spent. And that translates into the bottom line. This is not a top line exercise. With one company I worked with over two years we saw at least a two to two and a half percent increase in bottom line, which is substantial on margin.

Why toolbox meetings specifically

Bruce: Good construction companies already start the morning by getting the crew together and doing the field level hazard assessment. The top tier crews go further. What did we do yesterday? What have we committed to today? How are we going to do it? What are we going to avoid? What are we going to strengthen? What do we expect?

That is a commitment with the crew, and the site super running it is creating alignment. Good practice is morning, midday and end of shift. From a leadership development standpoint this is deliberately familiar to people in the field. Create alignment and commitment, see what worked, and where something did not work, that is fine as long as it is not repetitive. What are we doing to prevent it next time?

The 70-20-10 model

Traditional training has the ratio backwards

Bruce: It sounds fancier than it is. Seventy percent is field application. Twenty percent is peer accountability. Ten percent is classroom. Traditional training flips that narrative completely.

Supervisory accountability, where the site super reports to a second level manager, is relatively strong, but its influence comes from compliance, as it does in most positions of authority. Where accountability truly sticks is when the peer group holds each other to it. That is why twenty percent sits in those tailgate meetings, and that twenty percent is built on the seventy percent of field application. Classroom is the minor part. Flipping that narrative is where you get the profound change in behaviour.

How much more effective

Bruce: Two to three times more effective, and that is not my opinion, it is research shown over and over. The problem is that hardly anybody does it this way.

That is where the drive from our team comes from. Enough is enough. We see far too much pain in construction around leadership and managerial effectiveness. People are not ready, and when they are ready they do not have everything they need to be impactful, so they burn out. We have people who are miserable and not enjoying themselves. That is what we set out to change.

Trevor: The more they do it, the more they want to do it. It is a flywheel.

Bruce: Flywheel is a great analogy, and so is momentum. You cannot climb to the fifth step without taking the first two. When people look back and think, I actually did that, it is the best motivation in the world. Now you are ready for the next step, because you have mastered that one.