Imagine telling a professional athlete:
“You’re great. So we’ll bring in a coach once every three years, give you a seminar with slides, and then expect you to win championships.”
Sounds absurd, right?
But that’s exactly how most corporate environments treat learning and development.
We expect high performance (under pressure, in constant motion) with almost no real training time.
In sports, training is 90% of the job. Practice. Coaching. Skill refinement. Performance is just the visible tip of the iceberg.
In the corporate world, it’s the opposite. We spend 99% of our time in performance mode. Back-to-back meetings, project deadlines, constant delivery and then hope that people will somehow grow on their own.
When we talk about “training,” we usually mean one-off events. Expensive. Occasional. Often disconnected from the day-to-day reality.
And when people struggle?
We assume it’s a performance issue. Not a preparation issue.
What if we flipped the script?
What if we stopped treating training as a rare luxury and instead saw it as part of the job?
Not more face-to-face workshops or more theory.
But real development: short, frequent, embedded in the work.
Because true development doesn’t happen in a classroom. It happens in context. In action. And with the right support.
Let’s be clear: when we say “training,” we don’t mean more seminars or off-site retreats.
We mean managers who coach.
You don’t need another $500k budget for outsourced training, you need leaders who sit down regularly with their people and ask, What did you learn this week? What would you try differently next time? What stretch can we give you next?
You need leaders who help their people build the right habits and step into more complex challenges.
Leaders who welcome feedback (in both directions) and make space for reflection.
What you really need are leaders who understand accountability, embody it, and lead by example every day.
The broken corporate mindset
Here’s what we see in so many organisations: performance is talked about, but what’s actually measured is output. Did the task get done? Was the report sent? Did we meet the deadline?
But performance is a different question. It’s not just about what was delivered, it’s about how someone is growing their ability to deliver, again and again, under new pressures, at higher levels. That’s the real measure of a thriving team.
The highest-performing teams don’t happen by accident. It has nothing to do with luck either. The team players have been coached, challenged, and supported. Not once a year, but every day, in small moments that build trust, skill, and confidence.
If we want people to perform at their best, we have to give them the conditions to do so. That means building cultures where practice is encouraged, learning is part of the rhythm, and growth is intentional, not something left to chance.
How about growing a culture where failure is celebrated for its lessons?
Because if we want employees to show up like athletes (focused, resilient, and ready) then we have to lead them like athletes too. And that starts with how we train.
