Across Africa, organisations spend considerable time and money training employees in the hope of improving productivity, strengthening customer service, increasing sales and achieving business objectives. Yet, for many organisations, after the workshops have ended, certificates have been issued and employees have returned to work, performance often remains substantially unchanged.
Management becomes frustrated. Employees are accused of lacking commitment. Another training programme is commissioned, perhaps with a different facilitator and a more exciting theme. The cycle continues, but the desired results remain elusive.
The problem may not be the quality of the training. It may be that the organisation never correctly identified the problem in the first place.
Training is an intervention, not a diagnosis. When organisations prescribe training without understanding what is preventing performance, they risk wasting resources treating symptoms while the actual causes remain untouched.
When training is the wrong prescription
Imagine a Nigerian company whose sales team consistently fails to meet its targets. Management concludes that its salespeople lack the skills to convert prospects into customers. A consultant is engaged to deliver a sales training programme.
The employees learn new techniques, practise their pitches and return to work with renewed enthusiasm. Three months later, sales figures have barely improved.
What went wrong?
Perhaps the salespeople already possessed adequate selling skills, but the company’s prices were uncompetitive. Perhaps the organisation generated too few qualified leads, its approval processes were painfully slow, or its managers set unrealistic targets. It is also possible that the incentive structure rewarded activities rather than actual sales.
In any of these circumstances, sales training alone would be insufficient.
The same principle applies to manufacturing companies experiencing declining output, banks struggling with customer complaints and service businesses dealing with employee disengagement. The visible performance problem does not automatically reveal its underlying cause.
If equipment is unreliable, training will not repair it. If supervisors intimidate employees, a motivational seminar will not transform their behaviour. If employees are punished for reporting mistakes, a workshop on accountability will not create a culture of openness.
The effectiveness of an intervention depends on how accurately the problem has been diagnosed.
The leadership blind spot
Why, then, do organisations so often resort to training before investigating the causes of poor performance?
One reason is that training is a familiar and convenient response. It demonstrates that management is taking action. It’s relatively easy to organise and produces measurable activity: participants trained, workshops conducted and certificates awarded.
Unfortunately, these figures do not establish that performance has improved.
Another reason is that leaders may misinterpret the problems they observe. A managing director might conclude that employees lack commitment because they do not take initiative. Yet employees may have learnt that taking initiative attracts criticism, that challenging a supervisor is dangerous or that exceptional effort goes unrewarded.
The leader sees an attitude problem. The employees experience an environment that discourages initiative.
This is where leadership blind spots become particularly consequential. Leaders may struggle to recognise how their own decisions, management practices and assumptions contribute to the problems they are trying to solve. Employees, meanwhile, may be reluctant to communicate the truth for fear of repercussions.
Consequently, management may commission interventions based on incomplete or distorted information.
This does not mean business leaders are incapable of understanding their organisations. It means that familiarity and authority do not automatically produce an accurate diagnosis. Sometimes, an independent perspective is necessary to uncover what has become difficult for insiders to see.
Why independent diagnosis matters
When persistent performance problems have unclear causes, an organisational culture and performance consultant can provide the independent investigation required to establish what is happening.
Rather than immediately recommending training, the consultant examines the evidence.
What performance gap exists? What results are expected, and what is actually being achieved? Do employees possess the necessary knowledge and skills? Are expectations clear? Do employees have adequate resources, appropriate authority and effective supervision? What behaviours are rewarded, tolerated or punished? Do organisational systems support the results management expects?
These questions help distinguish capability problems from barriers created by leadership, systems, processes, incentives and workplace culture.
Consider a company that demands innovation but penalises employees whenever an experiment fails. Management may organise creativity workshops, hoping to generate new ideas. Yet employees will probably continue avoiding risks if the consequences of failure remain unchanged.
The problem is not necessarily a shortage of creative thinking. It may be a culture that makes expressing and testing new ideas unsafe.
An independent consultant can investigate these contradictions, challenge established assumptions and identify the conditions that must change. The consultant must also remain open to evidence that the problem is not cultural at all. Sometimes, the answer really is additional training.
The objective is not to replace management’s assumptions with a consultant’s opinions. It is to establish a defensible diagnosis using evidence.
From training activity to business performance
African businesses, particularly those operating with limited resources, cannot afford to confuse activity with results. Money spent on unnecessary training is money unavailable for other investments that could improve performance.
A more disciplined approach begins by defining the performance gap, investigating its causes and selecting interventions that address those causes.
Where employees lack essential competencies, provide targeted training. Where managers undermine performance, address their behaviour. Where inefficient processes create delays, redesign the processes. Where incentives encourage the wrong behaviours, change the incentives. Where cultural norms discourage accountability or initiative, intervene at the cultural level.
Sometimes, several interventions will be necessary.
Crucially, organisations must establish how success will be measured before implementation begins. Did employees acquire the required competencies? Are they applying them at work? Have the relevant performance indicators improved? Has the improvement endured? And what evidence suggests that the intervention contributed to the result?
Training attendance and participant satisfaction may provide useful information, but neither is a substitute for evidence of improved performance.
A better question for African business leaders
The next time your organisation fails to achieve its targets, resist the temptation to ask, “What training do our employees need?”
Ask instead: “What is preventing our employees from delivering the performance we require, and what evidence supports our conclusion?”
Where the causes remain unclear, particularly when leadership behaviour or organisational culture may be contributing to the problem, engage a competent, independent organisational culture and performance consultant to investigate.
The consultant should diagnose and recommend; leadership must take responsibility for acting on the findings. Independent diagnosis is valuable only when management is willing to confront uncomfortable truths and make the changes required.
The objective is not to train employees for the sake of training. It is to create the conditions in which people can consistently deliver their best work and organisations can achieve superior, sustainable results.
Stop training your way out of problems you haven’t diagnosed. Diagnose first. Intervene intelligently. Measure the impact.
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