“Can you do it in half a day?”
If you design or deliver leadership development, you’ll have heard some version of that question. Then comes the next one: can it be bite-sized, can it go online, can people do it between meetings?
The pressure behind it is real. In the CIPD’s most recent Learning at Work survey, lack of learner time was the most cited barrier to learning, ahead of engagement and budget. Operational managers want their people to develop. They also need the work covered. So every programme runs into the same question: how can we release them?
Why does training keep getting shorter?
Because shortening it is the answer that fits the question we’ve been asking.
If the problem is framed as “people can’t be away from work for long”, the obvious fix is to take them away for less time. Full days become half days. Half days become ninety-minute sessions. Sessions become five-minute modules on a phone.
I understand that pressure from both sides. As an operational manager, I wanted my staff to grow, and I still needed the shifts covered. Later, working in training, I was the one asking managers to release people. Both sides wanted the same thing, and the work pulled against it every time.
Does bite-sized learning change behaviour?
It can help people remember information. There’s much less evidence that it changes how leaders behave.
Microlearning has a sensible idea at its heart: short, focused content is easier to fit in and easier to finish. But when researchers reviewed the evidence on mobile microlearning for adults, they found only nine studies that met their criteria, mostly measuring completion, satisfaction and what people remembered shortly afterwards. The authors described the field as still nascent.
That isn’t evidence that microlearning fails. It’s evidence that nobody has shown it’s enough on its own to change something as complex as how a leader handles a difficult conversation. Knowing what good looks like and doing it under pressure are different problems.
What question should we be asking instead?
Not “how short can the training be?” but “where should the learning happen?”
For behaviour change, the answer is at work. That’s where the conversations, decisions and pressures are. It’s also where the behaviour has to show up for anyone else to notice it.
There’s evidence behind this. Habits are triggered by the situations they were practised in, not by good intentions. A behaviour rehearsed only in a training room is tied to the training room. A behaviour practised in Tuesday’s one-to-one is tied to Tuesday’s one-to-one.
The research on learning transfer points the same way. Whether training gets used depends heavily on what happens back at work: whether there’s support, whether there’s a chance to use it, whether anyone notices. And leadership training does work. A large meta-analysis of 335 studies found it improved learning, on-the-job behaviour and results, with stronger effects when programmes were spread over several sessions, included practice, and happened on site.
So the question changes from “how do we take less time away from work?” to “how do we put more of the development inside it?”
Why does this matter so much for behaviour change?
Because behaviour change is judged by other people, and they only see it at work.
I often say this in training rooms: the organisation hasn’t paid for the training. It’s paid for the impact. The workshop is a means. What the organisation actually wants is a leader who raises a risk earlier, listens before deciding, or does what they said they’d do, and a team that notices the difference.
That impact is rarely measured. In the same CIPD survey, only about a quarter of L&D professionals agreed their organisation assesses the impact of learning, and just 7% strongly agreed they had a process for supporting transfer. When the evidence stops at attendance, shorter sessions look like pure savings. When you follow the behaviour back to work, the picture changes.
What does learning inside the work look like?
It keeps the facilitated time and changes what happens after it.
- Use the session to set the focus. Each leader picks one working relationship that matters and one behaviour to practise in it.
- Give them a short, specific prompt. A short activity names the behaviour and the moment to use it.
- Let the work provide the practice. The leader tries it in real conversations over the following days, rather than in a role-play.
- Record what happened. A short Reflection captures what they did, how the other person responded and what they’d do next.
- Bring it back. The next session, or the programme review, starts from what leaders actually tried.
This is how we designed the Trust Leader Hub. An activity takes around 10 to 15 minutes to work through, and the leader then has at least two days to practise before they can reflect on it. The Reflection is self-reported, so we treat it as evidence of practice and reported movement.
Where does that leave shorter training?
Shorter sessions still have a place. The mistake is treating them as the whole answer.
If the time pressure is real, and it is, the most useful change isn’t a shorter version of the same thing. It’s moving more of the practice to where the behaviour is needed, and measuring what changes there. If you want to test that properly, start with one programme, and record participant and facilitator time, release time and where the practice fitted the work alongside what leaders report.