In pretty much one in every three meetings we have with prospective new clients there’s a moment when they tell us that they’ve done some training in the past and it didn’t work.

A lot of them are high growth businesses where the people are impressive, and with the right management development the company’s growth could go through the roof.

In purely selfish terms, hearing that they had a poor experience in the past isn’t too bad for me – if they hadn’t I wouldn’t be sitting here in front of them. 

On the other hand, it’s utterly depressing that so many of these growing companies have wasted precious money and time on useless “training.” Apart from the shame of throwing away their time and budget, if you believe the Chancellor we’re relying on these people to get our economy out of recession.

So I decided to write a series of short blog posts that answer these two questions:

1. Why did our training not work as well as we wanted?

2. What should we look for to make sure any other training we use will do the job?

I’ll put them up here over the coming days and weeks. Nothing I have to say is complicated or technical. You can find all of it elsewhere. It’s all easy to implement. It just seems to me that although lots of people know this stuff, very few companies actually do it.