By Tim Andrews
February 11, 2026
There is growing revolution, a major disruption in Training & Development today, nothing less than a revolution. Not a trend, not “soft skills” repackaged, but an industry disrupting change that is now challenging the Training & Development industry across the world. And most every company developing new up and coming leaders is blind to the movement and the opportunity.
The Issue
Now that I have your attention… here’s my favorite question to ask a new client, “How many management classes have you attended in your career…5, 10 or more?” And then I ask, “2 weeks later how much did you really change in what you said and did?” The experience may have been insightful, even informative. You may have walked away understanding more, even motivated about what you learned…yet very little really changed in what you actually say and do.
And the opportunity to create real behavior change is lost.
No one doubts that the current workplace facing organizations is defined by almost unbelievable change and increasing complexity. And we are in a significant social revolution as much as much as anything technical. It’s almost a cliché, because it’s so true. So, my next presenting question is… “In the past 25 years with so much Change & Disruption in every industry, every business sector, every company, every corner of the world… Why has Training & Development remained essentially unchanged…? Maybe some prettier slides, some new jargon, but that’s all repackaging the same old, same old. That thinking has become normalized, accepted and nothing changes. It is limiting the significance of our industry.
With the strong disruptions and advancements in technical, business and social arenas, why would the practices of developing leadership talent in organizations remain untouched? While the rest of the world is advancing, being disrupted rapidly, have we learned nothing to better the training and development experience for corporate talent?
Among the growing chorus of corporate complaints, there are 3 landmark studies published in the past 6 years strongly challenging how training of new behaviors and practices is done.
- The 2018 Harvard study of T&D trends showed that most all employees are critical of leadership development. They feel today’s learning & development programs do not meet their needs – too slow, too long, not relevant or practical, lack quality delivery, little on-the-job benefit, and too often delivered by unqualified people with little real experience and expertise.
- The recent extensive SHRM HR study across 700 Learning & Development Managers worldwide found the same criticisms—poor content, out of date, little practical value to the job, limited access, poor delivery, and here is my favorite-forgotten quickly!
- The highly recognized C-Suite HR consulting organization, the Gartner Group study gave us the same complaints. They summed it up this way, “The old ways of delivering training, especially necessary behaviors for today, aren’t working. Employees need to learn and apply new, more behaviors and skills faster; be more relevant and actually make a difference.”
- Over the next 2 years, Millennials and Gen Z will grow to 75% of the workforce in every company with Gen Z+ in the queue…and as you all know, with a different way of communicating, different ways of engaging in the workplace and especially different ways of learning. Right now, 40% of Millennials have 4 or more direct reports; fast becoming critical to leadership in organizations.
Millennials criticized this current training environment more than any other age group. 73% report a current lack of “meaningful” leadership training opportunities along with the poor quality offered.
PMI, SHRM, ATD, OD Network Association and so many others have written extensively about this needed change. Bottom line, there IS a disrupting training revolution underway. And it’s strong, and it’s ready to grow fast. The workplace is now organic, changing fast, much younger and socially complex. Companies are hungry for more meaningful learning experiences that actually improve performance and immediately – not a repackaged traditional training class.
The Growing Customer T&D Demands
Here is the heart of the issue in developing today’s growing leadership talent – they are given teaching “classes or courses” and not training workshops! These old ways of what is referred to training actually are “Teaching and Instructing”; they are NOT training. We talk about “High school students who take courses, about university students who go to classes.” And prettier, more business professional presentation packages are still teaching, not training. This is traditional, legacy teaching at its best. Companies are telling us they have adults and don’t want more than teaching classes or courses. They want employees to be trained and want to see real and immediate changes in their behaviors. When you are a plumber or electrician or an assembly worker, you are trained to do your job and learn hands-on by doing. Why would we not want this for our professional employees? Management Classes have served a purpose, but have not evolved to address current corporate demands.
I have bumped into and reviewed hundreds of the designs and materials of so many so called training companies. The designs and descriptions typically include a dozen or more academic models and theories, each requiring a minimum of 30-60 minutes with the teaching, explaining and then discussing. This only gives you some insights with a bunch of “should’s – You “should do this and that” – and never trains you “how” to do it. That’s teaching, not training, and it is not practical or easily applied in real life.
It can create a foundational understanding but provides no real behavior training or practice that actually changes what someone says and does.
As you might know, there is even a growing language for this in behavioral development field called “Power training”, “Microlearning”, Nano learning — breaking down complex leadership content into focused, easily absorbed, bursts of bite-sized meaningful pieces. But this is a limiting concept—the important words are “targeted, focused, relevant, practical and experiential, concise, relevant, immediately applied with repetitive practice with support.
New Behavioral Training Delivery at Its Best
That all sounds good, but how do you do this? New leadership behaviors don’t transfer; don’t stick unless they are supported by new and more powerful learning methods to make them real.
Again, these (what we are calling) Power designs are not introductory survey off the shelf “survey or intro courses”, but leading edge behavioral experiences that make a real difference—proven, repeatable behaviors and practices that will support participants for the rest of their life, at both work and home.
As a reminder, remember our clients, our audiences see traditional methods of training as too slow, too long, too general, academic and soon forgotten, not practical, poor delivery, easily forgotten and offer limited access.
Companies are demanding a better learning design and training experience, delivered “as needed” that makes a real difference by addressing the above criticisms and creates a newer, different and better learning experience.
And here is how we do it:
1) Concise, Targeted Learning
Companies and participants both want to conserve time away from the job, but not sacrifice the quality of the learning experience – make a real difference in the least amount of time. Gone are the days of lengthy PPT presentations, long academic lectures, models & discussions. In today’s fast paced, complex world, people can only digest content in small reinforced bites.
So, designs must focus on one target competency, not general leadership topics. Shorter, but with no compromise on quality. We make it relevant to their responsibilities; and begin immediately applying those practices with the clear intention to make a fast difference in their performance.
The research overwhelmingly shows this approach is more engaging, more cost effective, boosts retention and can create newer, smaller sustainable habits. We are talking about 3 hour intense virtual workshops, 1 day F2F with better outcomes than any current typical 2-3 day F2F “management classes or courses”.
2) Leading Edge Designs with Practical Behaviors, Tools and Practices
3) Assessments, Instruments & Behavioral Exercises that Support Growing Personal Awareness and Not-Conscious Biases
3) Assessments, Instruments & Behavioral Exercises that Support Growing Personal Awareness and Not-Conscious Biases
It’s very hard to change behaviors, if your often not conscious habits and biases limit or block you. One the more recognized “must have” leadership competencies for today’s socially advanced world is “self-awareness”. How your behaviors affect others, and how others affect you; how they limit you and how they support you. Promoting self`-awareness of behavioral preferences, biases or habits and how they affect their behavior with others must be a part of every workshop. And everyone likes to learn about themselves, insight into their behaviors, especially in a relevant context. Every workshop we deliver includes 3-4 self-awareness assessments and exercises!
In the open marketplace these assessments can be very expensive, messy, and time consuming to administer outside the workshop experience. We have more than a dozen self-awareness instruments & exercises that we have been including in our fee at no cost to the client. They are validated behavioral instruments – powerful, insightful and easy to administer during the workshop.
4) Highest Quality Behavioral Facilitators
These designs and the content require qualified Behaviorists to deliver with the Experience, behavioral education and background, accreditations, and certifications.
Workshop participants are asking for deeply experienced, qualified behavioral trainers. That means are your training teams…
- Professional “Organizational Behaviorists” with extensive behavioral backgrounds—degrees, experience and appropriate certifications; some even trained in therapy practices with extensive worldwide delivery experience.
- Supported by hands-on corporate experience — Having worked in real life in a real corporate experience is valuable to fully understand the content and to credibly present to others. For example, the participant experience is reduced if you are leading a workshop on Negotiating and never sat many times across a bargaining table with a union rep or customer.
- Credentialed/Certified Coaches with ICF Master level equivalency—At a time when everyone in the field is magically morphing into a coach, today’s complex interactions are best served—meaning a minimum of 200-4000+ documented session hours of real Coaching experience. .
- Certified, experienced or qualified setting up, managing and debriefing a variety of behavioral instruments & assessments.
So the marketing success question here is to consider that:
“If you have the highest quality, experienced PM and technicalInstructors in the business. Why would you accept less in Leadership Development?”
5) Highly Interactive, Engaging Learning Experiences
Audiences today, particularly younger audiences have grown up with a lot of interactive sensory stimulation and distraction, which now makes it necessary for designs and materials that keep them fully attentive and involved in learning experiences…for best learning results.
Our workshops are designed in a highly interactive format with a blend of presentation & facilitated discussion but with a Coaching approach, behavioral assessments, brief examples, tools, scripts, short 1-3 min. videos, as well as group & individual exercises to practice and reinforce the learning. Again they spend a maximum time practicing with their “real life” situations and often follow-up with Coaching support to reinforce, remove practice blockages and more.
6) Meaningful, Practical Reinforcing Support Materials
The historically cumbersome and expensive manuals, bound copies of slides with Notes pages, case studies or Handouts. Audiences want a “Toolkit”—typically a few pages written in organized narrative form that are comprehensive but concise, easily used, yet a thorough, comprehensive document. It follows the workshop design and is rich with the behaviors, tools and practices content being learned; easily downloaded and printed by participants. All of the workshop exercises and practice sessions can be performed in this Toolkit. Highly regarded by our clients, they also provide an easily portable/accessible reinforcement and reference after the workshop.
7) A Comprehensive Participant Experience
Every touchpoint in a training experience either furthers reduces the workshop learning, practices and skills. We offer a full participant experience, not just a drop-in the day of training… full participant support before, during and after workshop. Kickoff meetings, preparation emails and brief prework all to prepare their readiness and excitement for the learning experience—not come in cold the day of training. And providing post workshop support with Coaching (individual or group), follow-up contact, co-coaching with other participants, review of their exercises, responding to questions and providing reminders and further references are all ways to reinforce learning and practice.
As with all the studies, we have seen that even a single follow-up group Coaching session is not only reinforcing and sustaining, but motivating to making real behavioral change as participants check in with each other. This all adds to the “immersion” approach.
8) Multimodal Delivery
A rising training need in our busy challenging lives, is making the customer experience easily accessible with personal access to training “when I need it and fitting into my life”? Multimodal is the new jargon with concise workshop sessions, webinars for each competency and short online pieces.
Like workshops, webinars are not the typical informative webinar presentations with introductory academic overviews of a topic. These are targeted 1-1 ½ hour mini-workshops; concise learning experiences to get participants to understand a behavioral area or topic relevant to today and take away meaningful practices that will help immediately. Online bite size pieces of 15-20 minutes that can still be practical, hands-on informative with immediate applied practices are critical for easy access on my time, on my schedule.
Moving Forward
Bottom line, this fast changing workplace is now organic, much younger and socially complex; and the people are hungry for more meaningful learning experiences that are concise, relevant and practical and make a real difference—not a new and improved traditional teaching classroom. As Marshall Goldsmith the C suite Coach told us, “What got us here, won’t get us there.”
Does anyone really think Millennials, Gen Z and Z+ or anyone for that matter wants to sit in traditional classrooms for several days and hear instructors lecture them with academic management principles, leadership models and advice about what they “should do” to improve? Companies are telling us behavioral development in the workplace is more important than at any time, at all levels and across the organization. And we define this as a critical set of targeted leadership behaviors—behaviors and practices that are now “must have” not just the “nice to have” of 10-15 years ago.
There IS a disrupting training revolution underway. And it’s strong, and will continue growing fast.
Learn about the specific behaviors and practices to begin your journey as a coach! Join Tim Andrew’s Leading with Influence Workshop, as part of IIL’s Live Webcast series, People, Influence, and Purpose. Register today!
Tim Andrews, BSME, MBA, MS is an Organizational Behaviorist with 23 years of experience helping individuals and teams grow through leadership development and coaching. He brings a unique blend of expertise, having spent 21 years in the technical field, rising from Engineer to Vice President of Engineering.
His workshops and programs have reached over 48,000 professionals across leading corporations and training organizations. A credentialed Corporate Coach, and registered Counselor, he combines coaching with therapy methods with thousands of session hours in both corporate and personal settings. He has also trained hundreds of new Corporate and Life Coaches.
