The question I get most after a leadership development program is simple: “How do we make the training stick?”. More bluntly: “How do we make sure people don’t forget everything by Monday?”
It sounds tactical, but it isn’t. It’s more of an existential questions. Behind that question sits a deeper worry: “We’ve done development programs before… and little to nothing changed.”
You can sense the fatigue in that. After years of initiatives, toolkits, and models, many organizations quietly wonder whether skill-building is still worth trying. Or, as Marc Effron put it in early 2024: “Is the juice worth the squeeze?” (I admit, I love the formulation of this question.)
It’s a fair question. But, most development programs do not fail. Many just don’t survive in the days after the actual training, when people are asked to behave differently without being given the conditions to do so.
Because what most organizations call learning is in reality event management. And, we (me included) love the front end of the process. Designing the program. Curating the group. Picking the venue, the facilitator, the hotel with the right balance of “premium yet purposeful”. Choosing the activities that feel transformative but still fit before dinner.
Then the training happens. People are energized. The slides land. The breakout groups laugh. Someone says, “We should do this more often”.
It’s exciting. It’s visible. It’s where you can show that you really care… and don’t get me wrong, most really do care and do a great job here.
And the next morning, everyone flies home. The lights go off, the catering tables are cleared, and the work begins. That’s the part nobody budgets time or patience for.
The follow-up, the repetition, the small awkward attempts to apply new skills when no facilitator is watching.
It’s not glamorous. There’s no catering and you might need to pay for your own coffee. It’s the part that looks irrelevant from the outside… and yet it’s the phase where the actual transformation happens. And that’s the part we don’t talk about: The forgotten half of learning.
The Time Illusion of Learning
Many companies treat training like a software update: download the content, click “update,” expect immediate performance.
That’s not how learning works. Training provides exposure, not integration. Training creates awareness, sometimes excitement, occasionally clarity but that is far away from adoption. Capability emerges only through repeated application under real conditions. The key here is consistency over time.
During this period three processes unfold:
- Cognition becomes behavior:Understanding a framework is easy; acting through it under pressure isn’t. It takes deliberate repetition before new neural pathways stabilize.
- Old patterns lose dominance: The brain prefers efficiency. It clings to what is automatic. New behaviors consume more energy until they become efficient themselves. That conversion requires time and practice.
- The environment adjusts: Learning happens in systems, not in isolation. When someone starts behaving differently, the system initially resists. Colleagues question it, processes push back, social norms correct it. Integration takes longer than understanding because context must adapt too.
Neuroscience research on adoption and the formation of new habits suggests that it can take anywhere from a few days to many months for adoption to take place and stick. For practical reasons, I recommend thirty days with the disclaimer to access accordingly.
The classic Ebbinghaus forgetting curve showed that without reinforcement, people forget up to 70 percent of new information within 24 hours. Time alone doesn’t solve that, deliberate repetition does.
Even with reinforcement, results remain modest. Decades of learning-transfer research suggest that only a small share of participants ever turn new knowledge into lasting behavior. This has been echoed across countless corporate training reviews and leadership studies.
The Productivity and Morale Dilemma
Morale and productivity are the two variables almost nobody budgets for.
When participants return from a program and try to use new skills, something predictable happens: They get worse with what they do… temporarily.
We rarely say this out loud because it doesn’t fit the story of
Learn → Improve → Benefit
The real story looks more like
Learn → Apply → Slow down → Doubt yourself → Consider quitting
Productivity dips first. New behaviors demand conscious attention. What used to be automatic now requires thought. The leader trying to “listen more and talk less” suddenly finds meetings dragging. The team experimenting with “agile routines” feels slower and less certain.
Output per hour drops, not because people got worse, but because they’re re-routing their execution systems while running them. From the outside, this looks like inefficiency. From the inside, it feels like incompetence. And since most organizations are measured on short-term output, this phase gets misread as failure.
Then morale follows. The moment you understand what “good” really looks like, you see how far you are from it. That awareness hurts. It’s the emotional cost of progress.
Psychologically, this is where the “illusion of competence” collapses. Confidence drops before competence rises. We begin to doubt our abilities, or worse, the validity of the training itself. And then… we retreat to old habits that feel faster, more familiar, and safe.
As few companies manage this emotional valley intentionally, the new learning disappears in the noise of daily business. As the Association for Talent Development recently found, 58 % of organizations still rely on outdated assessments that fail to measure real skill adoption, focusing on immediate recall instead of sustained adoption.
We still measure memory, not mastery.
The Four Stages of Competence
Every skill, from feedback to strategic thinking, passes through four predictable stages.
They’re often taught as a tidy ladder. In reality, they describe a turbulence curve.
Stage 1 Unconscious Incompetence:
- The deficit is invisible. “I don’t know what I don’t know.”
- Morale: High (confident ignorance)
- Productivity: Normal. Old habits keep speed.
Stage 2 Conscious Incompetence:
- Awareness creates discomfort.“Now I see how little I know.”
- Morale: Sharp drop. Frustration, doubt.
- Productivity: Falls fast. Slower execution.
Stage 3 Conscious Competence:
- Behavior stabilizes with effort. “I can do this if I focus.”
- Morale: Recovering. Small wins matter.
- Productivity: Improving. Deliberate, not fluid.
Stage 4: Unconscious Competence
- Integration complete. “It’s second nature.”
- Morale: Stable. Quiet confidence.
- Productivity: Efficient again.
Stage 2 is the danger zone. Morale and productivity are both at their lowest. From the outside, the learner looks disengaged or unskilled. From the inside, they feel exposed and slow. This is where most programs get into trouble if nobody helps the learner survive Stage 2.
Organizations rarely manage this stage well, because what’s invisible can’t be reported, budgeted, or photographed. It doesn’t make for a good slide in the quarterly L&D review, so it gets ignored. Stage 2 is the chaotic, invisible process of turning insight into ability.
If you help people through it, they reach Stage 3 and start performing again. If you don’t, they revert… and the investment resets to zero.
What This Means for Leadership
Buying training isn’t the same as creating capability. Approving a program is part of procurement. Creating competence is part of leadership.
The leadership part requires five deliberate actions:
- Normalize the dip: Naming the cost removes the shame. Tell your team, “You’ll feel slower for a while, that’s expected”.
- Protect learning time: Don’t measure new behaviors too early.
- Stabilize morale: Praise effort while people are still clumsy. Adoption grows with recognition.
- Absorb the political friction: When others complain that things are slower, defend the learners. Say, “They’re upgrading their process. I asked for this.”
- Revisit purpose continuously: During discomfort, people focus on pain, not progress. Keep reminding them why the skill matters and what future it enables.
As a recent McKinsey study noted, even companies embracing “skills-based” transformation admit that execution lags because “organizations underestimate the infrastructure and patience real learning requires.” These aren’t “soft” moves. They’re operational prerequisites for change.
Leaders who protect the dip turn temporary slowdown into long-term capability. Those who don’t just keep buying content. Every new skill leaves a bruise where an old habit fought back. That bruise is not failure. It’s evidence of integration.
Competence is not created in classrooms. Competence is created in the quiet, clumsy days after… the days almost nobody schedules, measures, and protects. If we want training to matter, we need to stop asking “Did they learn?” and start asking “Can they survive Stage 2?”
Don’t ignore the forgotten half of learning. In the end, a learning culture isn’t built by programs. It’s built by leaders who protect the space between exposure and execution.