Your next training request may already contain the wrong answer.
“We need coaching.”
“Our supervisors need accountability.”
“Managers must improve communication.”
“Our leaders are not ready for AI.”
These statements sound like needs, but they are usually proposed solutions. They name a subject people can teach, a workshop L&D can buy, or a competency HR can place inside a framework.
They do not yet tell you what is happening in the work.
For CEOs, this creates an investment problem. The organization may fund a well-designed program without knowing which operational failure it is expected to influence.
For L&D leaders, it creates a design problem. You may build an excellent learning experience around coaching, communication, or accountability while several departments are using the same word to describe completely different situations.
Before you train, change your questions.
Do not ask first, “What program do they want?”
Ask:
What keeps happening in the work?
That question moves the conversation away from topics and closer to the problem the organization can examine.
Everyone Brought a Training Request
At Meridian Customer Operations, a fictional composite in Impact-First Leaders, several leaders arrived at a meeting carrying solutions.
Ramon from Operations wanted accountability training for supervisors. Mira from HR believed managers needed coaching. Liza from Customer Experience wanted stronger communication and follow-through. Paolo from Technology had prepared an AI-readiness proposal.
Each request sounded reasonable.
Nobody entered the room trying to waste money. Each leader had seen something concerning and had chosen a familiar response. Accountability, coaching, communication, and AI readiness were respectable subjects with established programs, experts, and frameworks behind them.
Ana, Meridian’s L&D leader, wrote one question on the board:
What must move?
Ramon answered first.
“Supervisors need accountability training.”
“That is your solution,” Ana said. “What is happening?”
Ramon opened his report.
Meridian had recorded 241 rework cases during the previous year. Ninety-two were errors that had already appeared in the same team. In seventeen cases, a repeat error reached a customer order before someone caught it.
The supervisors usually corrected the immediate output. But they did not always investigate why the mistake had returned, assign the condition to someone who could repair it, or check the employee’s next output.
The request had been “accountability training.”
The pattern was: the same error keeps returning after the immediate work has been corrected.
Mira described a different pattern. Employees raised workload, schedule, and team concerns, but some cases travelled between managers and HR without one person owning the next response.
Liza described customer complaints that passed through several departments. Everyone added comments, yet the customer sometimes had to follow up before anyone became responsible for resolving the case.
Paolo admitted that several AI pilots had produced the same data-cleaning mistakes. Technology fixed the files each time, but team leaders had not helped analysts determine why the errors continued.
The four leaders had brought four program requests.
What they actually described were repeat errors, unresolved employee concerns, ownerless customer responses, and experiments that kept producing the same failure.
Once the patterns became visible, the training titles no longer seemed like obvious starting points.
A Topic Is Not a Problem
“Communication” is not a problem.
People may communicate constantly while an important handoff remains unclear. They may send emails, attend meetings, update shared files, and copy several leaders. The quantity of communication can increase while ownership becomes harder to find.
“Accountability” is not a problem.
It may describe an employee who avoids responsibility. It may also describe work assigned without sufficient authority, a commitment with no deadline, a case passed between departments, or a manager who takes over whenever someone hesitates.
“Coaching” is not a problem.
Leaders may request coaching because employees repeat mistakes, new managers struggle, high performers need development, or experienced staff appear disengaged. Each situation may require a different response.
The topic groups several concerns under one attractive label. That makes the request easier to place in a catalogue, but harder to solve.
The first task is to cross out the training language long enough to see the work underneath it.
Complete this sentence:
People asked for this program because __________ keeps happening in the work.
The blank should contain something observable.
“Supervisors lack accountability” is still an interpretation.
“Supervisors correct the immediate error, but the same condition reaches the next shift” describes something the organization can investigate.
“Managers need communication skills” remains broad.
“Decisions leave the weekly meeting without an owner or response time” gives leaders a workplace pattern they can examine.
When you name what keeps happening, you create the possibility of discovering why.
Look for the Repeat, Not the Dramatic Incident
Organizations often respond to the most recent incident.
A customer complains publicly. A senior leader receives an escalated employee concern. A major deadline is missed. A costly error reaches the client.
The incident creates urgency, but one event rarely reveals enough to justify a complete training program.
Ask whether the problem repeats.
Where else has this happened? How often? Under what conditions? What did people do immediately before and after it? Where was the problem first visible? When could someone have interrupted it?
A repeat gives you something more useful than a dramatic story. It gives you a pattern.
At Meridian, the issue was not one operator choosing the wrong package code. The stronger concern was that similar mistakes returned after supervisors had already corrected previous outputs.
That distinction matters.
One incorrect selection may call for clarification or guided practice. A repeat after several corrections may point to an obsolete instruction, confusing system option, weak shift handoff, missing ownership, or a supervisor who knows how to repair the output but not the condition.
If you begin with the topic of accountability, you may teach supervisors to take responsibility.
If you begin with the repeat, you are more likely to ask what made the wrong action easy and why the earlier correction failed to travel.
Find the Moment Where the Pattern Can Be Interrupted
A business problem may be large, but the useful intervention point is often small.
Repeat errors may cost the organization thousands or millions of pesos. Customer losses may affect an annual target. Employee turnover may concern the entire executive team.
Yet the pattern usually travels through specific moments.
A supervisor notices that an error has appeared before.
A manager receives an employee concern.
A customer case moves from one department to another.
An analyst discovers that the same data issue has returned.
Ask what should happen in that moment.
Should the supervisor distinguish between a skill gap and a broken condition? Should the manager name an owner before forwarding the employee concern? Should the customer-service leader require a recommendation before escalating the case? Should the project team stop fixing the same file and examine why the source data remains unreliable?
This brings the problem closer to action.
It also helps L&D determine whether training is needed. People may lack knowledge or skill. But they may already know what to do and be blocked by authority, information, workload, workflow, tools, or incentives.
Without this diagnosis, training can become an attempt to improve people who are working inside a condition that repeatedly defeats the desired behaviour.
Ask What Makes the Familiar Response Sensible
People rarely repeat an unhelpful behaviour for no reason.
They may delay a decision because earlier decisions were reversed. They may avoid raising risks because the last person who reported bad news was blamed for the number. They may forward every concern because nobody knows where their authority ends.
The familiar response may be weak, but it usually provides some immediate protection.
This is why telling people to become more accountable, proactive, courageous, or agile often produces temporary enthusiasm rather than lasting change. The training promotes a new behaviour, but the workplace continues rewarding the familiar one.
Ask what employees gain by doing what they currently do.
Does escalation protect them from blame? Does silence help them avoid conflict? Does correcting the output feel faster than investigating the cause? Does waiting for clearer guidance reduce personal risk?
Then ask what would make the better response possible.
The answer may include practice. It may also require clearer decision rights, better information, a named escalation owner, a changed measure, or a leader who responds differently when someone acts.
This is not an excuse for poor performance. It is a more serious form of accountability because it examines both the person’s move and the field surrounding it.
Do Not Diagnose From the Conference Room Alone
Leaders often discuss workplace problems using reports and summaries. Those sources provide useful evidence, but they can hide the sequence of events.
Go closer to the work.
Open several actual cases. Observe the meeting where the decision stalls. Follow the complaint from the customer’s first message to the final response. Watch what happens when an employee asks a supervisor for help.
Ask the people involved to show you what they saw.
The purpose is not to catch them doing something wrong. It is to understand the conditions under which the familiar response becomes likely.
You may discover that employees received two versions of an instruction. A supervisor may have corrected the work but lacked authority to remove the obsolete option. A case marked “closed” may simply mean someone sent an email. A handoff may have failed because each department believed another owned the next action.
The report tells you that the problem occurred.
The work shows you how it survived.
The Same Repeat Can Require Different Responses
A repeated error does not automatically prove a training need.
Suppose three employees make the same mistake.
The first employee is new and has never performed the task. Guided practice may help.
The second knows the correct procedure but receives an outdated instruction sheet. The document must be replaced.
The third knows the procedure and has correct information but rushes because an unrealistic production target rewards speed over checking. Leaders may need to examine the measure and workload.
The visible error is the same. The causes and responses are different.
This is why “train everyone” is attractive. It allows the organization to respond uniformly without doing the harder work of diagnosis.
But uniformity is not always fairness, and completeness is not always usefulness.
Impact-first leaders ask what the evidence has earned. Some people may need practice. Some conditions need repair. Some cases require both.
Decide Whether Training Has a Job
Training becomes more valuable when it has a specific job to do.
Perhaps supervisors need to recognize a repeat earlier, examine the work with the employee, choose an appropriate response, assign what they cannot fix, and check the next result.
Now training has a contribution.
It can give supervisors a small play, let them practise with real cases, and help managers observe the response during actual work.
The organization can also identify the conditions Operations, Technology, Quality, or HR must repair.
This is different from promising that one workshop will eliminate rework or solve turnover. Training does not control every part of those results.
It can contribute by improving a move close enough to the problem to practise and inspect.
That is the purpose of practical leadership training. It should not begin with a subject simply because the subject is valuable. It should start where the game is stuck and help leaders practise moves that can change what happens next.
The Better Request
By the end of Meridian’s meeting, the leaders had not proven that coaching, accountability, communication, or AI-readiness programs were unnecessary.
They had done something more important.
They had stopped pretending that the program titles explained the problems.
Ramon could now say that the same errors were returning because immediate corrections did not consistently become diagnosed, owned, and checked responses. Mira could show employee concerns that moved without clear ownership. Liza could trace customer cases that remained unresolved across handoffs. Paolo could identify experiments where recurring data failures were repaired but not examined.
Those statements gave the organization somewhere to begin.
Before you approve the next training request, write its title on a page.
Then ask what keeps happening.
Do not accept another topic as the answer. Find the repeat, locate the moment, examine what makes the familiar response easy, and identify what must happen differently.
You may still decide to train.
But this time, the training will have a problem to solve, a move to practise, and a contribution the organization can follow into the work.
About Jef Menguin
Jef Menguin is a leadership development consultant, professional speaker, and founder of Strategic Learning Consultants. He helps CEOs, HR leaders, and L&D teams connect leadership development to business goals and turn strategic priorities into daily leadership behavior.
Explore his work in leadership training, learn about his motivational speaking programs, or connect with him on LinkedIn.