A manager once said to me, “I cannot send Sally on that programme. Who will do her job?”
We both laughed. Then we both went quiet. Because he meant it.
You have probably heard a version of that too. Or the sequel: people come back from a workshop energised, then hit an overflowing inbox and ‘business as usual’. The unspoken message is clear: thanks for learning, now please stop changing.
I think of this as ‘permission to change’. Not the glossy endorsement at the kick-off event, but the cultural lived permission in the diary, the workload, and the conversations back at work.
Research on learning transfer keeps pointing to the same thing: if managers and leaders protect time and reduce pressure after training, people are far more likely to actually apply what they learned. Without that, most of us quietly revert to old habits.
So, a few questions for you this week:
• What explicit permission do learners get to experiment, make mistakes and work differently after your programmes?
• When they are in the classroom, who is doing their job?
• When they are practising new skills afterwards, what happens to their ‘day job’ tasks?
• What do sponsors and line managers say and do that signals, “I expect you to change, and I have your back while you do it”?
If you are designing or commissioning learning right now, try one small shift: build ‘job cover’ and practice time into the programme from the start, and make the executive sponsor say that out loud to participants and their managers. Even a simple statement like, “For the next month, I expect you to spend two hours a week trying this, and your manager will help you protect that time”, can change the whole feel of a programme.
Because if nobody makes space for people to do their job differently, we should not be surprised when they quietly keep doing it the old way.
