Training Is Probably Not the Answer

Training Is Probably Not the Answer

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The request almost always sounds the same. Managers are getting restless. A competitor down the street is running some kind of leadership academy. Someone on the executive team wants a program built, and they want it soon. So the people team gets to work, designs something thoughtful, runs the cohort, and waits for the needle to move.

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Six months later, the needle has not moved. The managers who were restless are still restless. And the company is now convinced that development "doesn't really work here."

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Ash Panjwani has watched this play out at company after company. Over thirteen years she built performance and leadership infrastructure at VMware, Twilio, OneTrust, and most recently Procore, before stepping back to start Work Happy, where she does the same work for companies ranging from Series A to post-IPO. The pattern she kept seeing was not a training problem. It was a sequencing problem. Everyone was sprinting to close a gap nobody had bothered to define.

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The meeting that defined the work

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The clearest version of the problem hit her in a performance calibration meeting. The team was moving through the cycle, rating people, comparing notes, and then they got to the leaders in the room.

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"Everyone kind of just pauses, and we're like, wait, I don't think I know how to assess the different kinds of leadership in the room," Ash recalls. "I don't think we've done the work of defining what a good manager looks like versus what a great manager looks like, or a director, or a VP. And that is a feeling that I never want to feel again."

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It is a quiet kind of failure, and it has loud consequences. When the people responsible for consistency cannot agree on what good looks like, that inconsistency flows straight into promotions, pay, and who gets stretched and who gets passed over. As Ash puts it, "we're talking about real-life decisions that this impacts." The research backs the instinct: in one widely cited McKinsey finding, only 11 percent of executives believe their leadership development efforts achieve and sustain the results they were after.

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The three-layer approach

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Ash's fix is a sequence she describes as a three-layer approach, and the order is the entire point.

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The first layer is setting the standard. Before anyone designs a workshop, the company has to create a common blueprint of shared expectations and behaviors. What does good actually look like for a manager, a director, a VP? And just as important, has anyone said it out loud? This is where the real cost hides. "When you don't say it out loud and when you don't state it explicitly," Ash says, "someone else will define it for you."

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The second layer is building the system. Once the standard exists, it gets hardwired into the decisions the company is already making: who gets hired, who gets promoted, how feedback flows up and down. The goal is an environment where leading the right way is the rewarded way, not a poster on the wall.

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Only after those two layers are in place does the third one make sense: bridging the capability gap. This is the training, the coaching, the programs. It is the part everyone wants to start with. "So often we jump right to, let's go bridge the gap," Ash says, "yet we don't know what the gap is. We're just jumping into activity and programming without actually talking about it."

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So when a leader comes to her asking for a new program, her first move is not to design one. It is to ask what they are actually trying to solve. Are sales targets slipping? Is top talent walking out the door? Are people not taking ownership? Run through those questions, she says, and "chances are training is probably not the answer." More often the real issue is a clarity gap, a communication gap, or an accountability gap. "It's usually not just a skills gap."

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Why trust is eroding, and why it isn't comp

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The conversation turns to a problem nearly every people leader is tracking right now: trust between employees and their leaders is low and falling. Ash is careful not to reduce it to one cause, but the pattern she sees most often is simple. The strategy keeps shifting.

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"This is now quarter two and here we go again," she says, describing the employee's experience. "What we set in quarter one is no longer true today." Both sides of that are real. The executive has been in the room, watched the market move, and has to adjust. The employee has now lived through three pivots and has stopped believing the next one will hold. What erodes in the gap is not pay. It is communication and transparency.

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That leads Ash to a claim she knows is contrarian. When companies lose their best people, the easy story is that someone offered more money. "I don't think people are leaving just because of comp," she says. "If you give them a reason to stay, they will, beyond just financial means. They have to feel like they're part of something. They have to feel like they understand what's happening across the organization."

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Her prescription is a habit she traces back to an old manager who used to tell her, "you need to show your work." The same is true, she argues, for the VP making a call in a quiet room. Announcing the decision is not enough. "People aren't just going to buy the decision that you're shipping out to them," she says. "They're going to buy whatever journey you've been on." Walk them through the trade-offs, and they stop merely complying and start owning the outcome with you.

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The way to do that without drowning the team in anxious updates is to make it a rhythm. A standing Monday update covering what was true last week, what is still true, what changed, and what might shift next. Do it consistently enough, Ash says, and "your people aren't anticipating change. They now know this is the rhythm of the business."

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Drop the HR buzzwords

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The sharpest moment in the episode is about language. Ash argues that HR routinely talks itself out of the room.

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"When HR walks into the room with the CFO and says, hey, we have a trust issue in the company, we should address that right away, the conversation has ended before it even had a chance to start." The problem is real, she is quick to say. But wrapping it in HR language hands the CFO a puzzle instead of a priority.

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Now imagine leading with the business symptom instead. Sales is missing targets. Engineering and product have stopped talking. The company is going to miss its bookings number. "Suddenly the CFO is more interested in what's going on," Ash says. "If we want business leaders to actually meet us where we're at, we got to drop the HR buzzwords." The trust conversation still happens. It just happens in a language the business already speaks.

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Codifying for humans, and for AI

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The same discipline, Ash argues, is what AI demands. When a leader says the company needs to "drive AI adoption," she hears another training request in disguise. "I feel like we've kind of lost the plot," she says. Adoption is not the goal. The goal is to codify what good use of AI looks like, what is acceptable, what is not, and then wire those expectations into how people are hired and held accountable. Same three layers.

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He draws a useful parallel to onboarding. When a new hire stalls out, you often cannot see it for three or six months, and it usually was not a skills problem. They were never set up for success. AI just compresses the timeline. "If you don't take the time to onboard your AI, if you don't take the time to codify," Ash says, "the output will be garbage." You see it immediately, which is exactly why so many people conclude too quickly that AI does not work.

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How fast a company should move depends on one variable: the cost of a mistake. Where mistakes are cheap and recovery is fast, experiment aggressively. Where a mistake is expensive and slow to undo, in construction, in healthcare, move with more care. Ash points to her time at Procore, building software for the job site. "If something messes up in that world, the cost is high. There is now an incident in the workplace." And before any of it, she says, name the fear in the room. "When we are not addressing someone's fear, I think we've lost them in the conversation."

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The test to leave with

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Ash closes with a diagnostic any leader can run this week. Go find your most junior employee, or your newest manager, and ask them two questions: what is our strategy this half, and how does your work connect to it?

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"If they can't answer plainly in five minutes," she says, "you probably have a very large gap between what the executives are doing up top and how the company's really operating at the bottom."

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It is a humbling test, which is the point. Strategy that lives only in the executive team is not strategy yet. It is intention. The work of a people leader, in Ash's telling, is closing the distance between the two, and that work starts long before anyone builds a training program.