The End of Now What? Creating Change That Lasts Beyond Training
Gillian is the Managing Director of Emerge Development Consultancy, which she founded 28 years ago. She is a Master Executive Coach for global CEOs and Managing Directors, an international speaker, and an award-winning leader. Recognized as a leading United Kingdom female entrepreneur in 2020 and Leader of the Year in 2023, she was named Businesswoman of the Decade in 2024.
After 30 years of being the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of a training company, I have watched thousands of people walk out of a training room (and, more recently, away from a virtual session) excited and motivated to go and try new tools and do things differently. I watch their physiology change as they engage with each other and the training material and think about how to be, act, and think differently. It’s almost like watching lights switch on. So many different rooms, different years, different reasons for being there, but the feeling is always the same. They've just spent a day, or two, or three, working out how they want to lead, how they want to show up, and what they're finally going to stop putting up with. For a short period afterward, they are intentional, clear-headed, and ready to implement their actions.
Then Monday happens. When I say Monday, I use that as a loose metaphor for real life. It could take a month, a week, or even, sadly, just a day, but “real life” takes over. The inbox is full, the meeting that was in the diary before the course is still in the diary. Nobody in the office was in the training room with them, so nobody knows what they meant when they say they're “going to be more assertive this time” or “actually deal with it properly” instead of letting it slide again. The energy doesn't disappear all at once, it just quietly runs out, probably on average somewhere around week three, when the old habit turns out to be a lot more comfortable than the new one.
I've been coaching and training for thirty years now, and I still find this the hardest part of the job to watch. We love to build reviews into our programmes, and often when I set them off for the review, they start by saying, “I haven’t really had much time to do anything, work has been overwhelming,” which is so disappointing. However, once they start talking, they often recognise that they have been doing small things, but not the big actions they intended to when they left the last session. Not because the training didn't work, it delivered everything that the client had asked for, often more, and people leave genuinely changed, at least for a while. The problem was never what happens in the room. It's what doesn't happen after it.
That's not a flaw in how the course was designed or delivered. It is a gap in how the whole industry is built. We pour everything into the room, the venue, the facilitator, the materials, and the follow-up survey two weeks later asking people to rate their experience out of ten. Then the momentum disappears. Aside from some very dedicated managers who do keep following up with them, there is little or no support. No one checking in when the new habit gets hard, no one there at ten past nine on a Tuesday morning when the exact situation the course covered turns up in real life, and the only person in the room is the one still deciding whether to do it the old way or the new way.
It is a perennial struggle for Human Resources (HR) and Learning professionals in a business. Most of our clients will talk to us during the contracting stage about how we will make the coaching stick, how to evaluate it, and how to understand the impact of the training, and we are always happy to give pages of meaningful suggestions. But the reality of embedding training and keeping the momentum going depends so much on managers really supporting people, the delegates having the time to review their training plans or meet up with their coaching buddies, the business staying calm enough not to make strenuous operational demands on people, and peers and colleagues encouraging them. It is very rare that those situations align in the right way. It is here that we have to start thinking creatively about what else can be done to truly support the learner and really embed the knowledge and skills.
Anyone who knows me knows that I am passionate about coaching, and as an early adopter of coaching 30 years ago, I was prolific in helping organisations put in robust systems for managing coaching in the workplace. I wrote my first coaching tool down in 2007, mostly because I kept doing something useful in a session and then forgetting how I'd done it. That became 50 Top Tools for Coaching in 2009, and now, six editions in, we are still adding chapters because coaching itself keeps teaching me things I didn't know I didn't know. But one thing hasn't changed across any of those editions: the tools work best live, in the room, with someone asking the next question at exactly the right moment. So we know that coaching works.
What actually helps someone hold onto a change isn't giving them more content, another workbook, or a video that they never quite get round to watching. It's a question, at the right moment, from someone who already knows their action plan and what they said they would do when they return to the workplace. When someone asks, “What did we say about this?” it can snap someone right back into the training room, where an exercise or discussion just hit a lightbulb moment, and reactivate the motivation to do something different. Without that question being asked, it is easy for someone to quietly talk themselves out of a change. If someone notices that they have gone quiet on the thing they were fired up about three weeks ago and reminds them of the benefits of the change, then it is far more likely that the training gets applied.
However, that is genuinely difficult to deliver at scale because budgets are continuously being squeezed, and organisations cannot afford to attach coaches to every training programme. Some organisations are insightful enough to put in mentoring programmes, but even those probably only meet every month or so. Often my delegates say, “I wish you could be in the workplace in that situation with me,” and sadly, I can't be in everyone's Tuesday morning to give them a shot in the arm of confidence and assertiveness. I wish I could.
I think the next real shift in our industry isn't going to be about running better courses. We are already quite good at that part. It's going to be about what happens in the six months after the course, once the momentum is long gone and the only person left in the process is the one who actually has to live the change. I don't think that gap gets closed by more training. I think it gets closed by something willing to show up in the ordinary, unglamorous moments, the Tuesday mornings, not just the big two-day event everyone remembers fondly a year later. It’s time to spend more energy and creativity thinking about what else happens after the training rather than the actual event. This is true for online training, webinars, videos, and any other type of blended learning.
I don't have a tidy answer to what that looks like yet, not one I'm ready to talk about publicly quite yet, but it is one that has been occupying our thoughts for most of this year. If you've ever left a brilliant course fired up and then quietly slipped back to who you were before by the time autumn came round, you already know exactly the gap I mean. I don't think you were the problem. I think those of us who run the courses left you on your own at the exact moment you needed someone most.
That's the part I want to fix next.
Read more from Gillian Jones-Williams
Gillian Jones-Williams, Emerge Development Consultancy
Gillian is Managing Director of Emerge Development Consultancy, which she founded 25 years ago. She is a Master Executive Coach working with many CEOs and Managing Directors globally. She is also an international speaker and in 2020 was named by f: Entrepreneur as one of the leading UK Female Entrepreneurs in the #Ialso campaign. In 2024, she was awarded Businesswoman of the Decade by the Women’s Business Club. Gillian founded the RISE Women’s Development Programme, which is delivered both in the UK and the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, and is her absolute passion. If you want to know more about our Diversity and Inclusion solutions, or leadership and management development, please get in touch. We are working with many organisations on their Diversity and Inclusion interventions, strategies, policies and programmes. For more information, contact us on 01329 820580 or via info@emergeuk.com. She is a Certified Non-Executive Director and has spent three decades working with boards and leadership teams on the behaviours that determine how well they function together.
