Training Before Diagnosis? Why?

“Can you send us a proposal for a leadership program?” This is probably one of the most common requests that L&D professionals receive. And the temptation is to immediately start designing modules. Communication. Decision making. Delegation. Feedback. Conflict management. Leadership styles. Done. But what if the organisation doesn’t actually need all of that? At Skillentials, we increasingly find ourselves asking a different question: “What is happening in the organisation that makes you believe leadership training is the answer?”

That question changes everything. For one of our leadership interventions, we spent weeks before the actual workshop understanding the organisation. Discovery conversations. One-on-ones. FGDs. TNI. TNA. Stakeholder conversations. Business context. Only after that did the program start taking shape. For a manufacturing organisation, the issue wasn’t simply “leadership”. There were challenges around priorities, decision making, ownership, communication and the ability to balance immediate business requirements with future sustainability. For another client, the issue appeared to be accountability.

But when we explored it further, we discovered that the team and the managers were looking at accountability very differently. For a project team, what initially sounded like a communication issue was actually about functional interdependencies and unclear ownership across a long project lifecycle. This is why we don’t believe in “off-the-shelf” behavioural programs. Not because standard content is bad. But because the context is different. The same word — accountability, leadership, communication, collaboration — can mean completely different things in two organisations.

Training begins with diagnosis. Otherwise, we are simply prescribing a medicine without asking what hurts.