Insight Inclusive leadership and management practices
Training managers is not enough
Training managers is necessary. It is not sufficient: without also reaching the whole team, and without the conditions for transfer, a training room does not by itself change how people work together on Monday morning.
WHAT TRAINING ACTUALLY DOES
It gives people a shared language, and that is already a great deal.
Let us start by giving it its due. Training brings together people who do not always speak to one another, puts into words situations each of them thought they were facing alone, and provides a shared vocabulary for discussing them. It reveals that the same incident was understood in three different ways by three people in the same room. That realization cannot be decreed in a memo.
It also produces something quieter: permission to find the situation difficult. Many managers, and many employees, do not dare say they do not know how to respond to a cultural misunderstanding, a request for accommodation or a team tension. Saying it in a room, among peers, lifts a real block.
Training opens things up. It does not embed them.
A COMMON BLIND SPOT
Training only the supervisors leaves the rest of the team without reference points.
An organization that trains its managers and stops there has gone halfway. A well-equipped manager can correct a situation when it reaches them. They cannot be present at every exchange between colleagues, at every remark on a job site, at every misunderstanding that gets settled or escalates before they even hear about it.
That is why awareness has to reach all workers, not only those with a management title. A shared language about what is expected, what is not, and how colleagues from different backgrounds speak to one another is built at the scale of the whole team, not only at its top.
A manager who has been through it changes their own decisions. A team that has been through it changes what gets said when the manager is not in the room.
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT
Monday does not look like the training room.
In training, the situation is presented complete: the context is known, there is time to think, and no one expects an immediate answer. In real work, the same situation arrives truncated, at a bad moment, alongside three others, and often in front of witnesses — whether the person concerned is a manager or a team member.
Someone who hesitates three seconds too long in front of colleagues quickly learns it is better to fall back on what they know how to do. This is not a lack of will: it is the rational behaviour of someone who has to act now with what they have. And what everyone has under pressure is their old habits.
THE CONDITIONS FOR TRANSFER
What is missing is almost never motivation.
Transfer does not depend on participants' enthusiasm — that is generally there when they leave the room, among managers as much as in the rest of the team. It depends on four far more prosaic things.
First, an explicit expectation from leadership, applying at every level: without it, applying what has been learned becomes a personal initiative, and therefore optional. Next, reference points short enough to be used in the heat of the moment; a seven-step framework does not survive a corridor. Then opportunities to practise on the organization's real situations, not on generic cases. Finally, someone who comes back to talk about it a few weeks later, with the managers and with the teams — the only moment when you find out what was actually tried.
When those conditions are missing, the observed effect is always the same: genuine enthusiasm, then a gradual return to old habits. The organization often concludes that the training was not the right one. That is rarely the case.
THE CONSEQUENCE
Training is a way in. The question is who it reaches, and where it leads.
This does not mean training less, or reserving training for one level of the hierarchy. It means an organization should ask who needs to be reached — managers and teams — and what will come next: what will be expected, what will be equipped, what will be practised and what will be checked later.
Who, in our organization, has never yet been reached by this conversation?
A practice is embedded the day applying it no longer takes any particular courage, because it has become the normal way of doing things — for managers as much as for teams, including for the person who has never attended a training session.
This text goes deeper into one dimension of our expertise The full argument, the evidence and the possible forms of engagement are set out on the expertise page.
Inclusive leadership and management practicesCONTINUE
Other insights on inclusive leadership.
- Insight Inclusive leadership plays out where the work actually happens A policy can be common to the whole organization. Yet a team's experience of it is built in very local decisions.
- Insight Leadership should not disappear when the leader leaves the room The test of transferable leadership often begins the moment the person who usually decides is no longer in the room.
- Insight A title gives you a responsibility. Not necessarily the right to act. The org chart says who is accountable. Daily life reveals who can actually decide without asking permission.
- Insight The next big challenge for managers is already here Some responsibilities end up changing the very way people manage. Martin Lépine saw one take hold twenty years ago. He sees another one today.