A tale as old as time.
It’s Monday morning, you open your inbox, and there it is. The sales director is frustrated with the team. Sales are closing more slowly, and the team is negotiating pricing when they shouldn’t be. They want a training program to address poor negotiation techniques.
You could say yes.
Then your gut starts nagging you.
You know that building training for a problem that isn’t training related is just a waste of time. You feel that familiar churn in your stomach. The temptation to ignore the twinge and just get on with it is strong.
However, when we ignore what our instincts tell us, we’re failing to acknowledge that we’re making that decision with full knowledge of the consequences for our stakeholders, our team, and, frankly, for ourselves.
It trains your stakeholders to keep pushing the easy button. Treating L&D like a course vending machine that sells nothing but junk food. You get that sugar rush, but at the end of the day, it’s empty calories, and you feel icky. It sets your team up for a result nobody can defend. And it quietly chips away at the credibility you’ve worked hard to build.
So let’s talk about how to stop that cycle.
How Do You Know When It’s Not a Training Problem?
The fastest diagnostic tool you have isn’t a fancy needs analysis framework. It’s one question:
“If there were a $500 bonus riding on getting this right today, would they be able to do it?”
The principle comes from the work of Robert Mager and Peter Pipe in Analyzing Performance Problems. If the answer is yes, they could do it if the stakes were high enough, then you’re not looking at a knowledge or skill gap. You’re looking at something else entirely.
That “something else” usually falls into a few buckets:
- Motivation or incentive issues. The system is rewarding the wrong behavior, or there’s no clear consequence for the problem behavior. A course on “Sales Negotiation” won’t fix a commission structure that punishes reps for doing exactly what good negotiators do: taking time to build relationships.
- Process or workflow problems. The steps are unclear or broken. No amount of training will fix a process that was poorly designed from the start or software that has been Frankensteined to death.
- Environmental or resource constraints. People don’t have the tools, access, time, or support to do what’s being asked of them. A course doesn’t change their environment.
- Management or communication gaps. Expectations haven’t been clearly communicated, or feedback loops don’t exist. That’s a leadership problem, not a learning problem.
When you can map a performance gap to one of these categories, training alone isn’t going to move the needle. It might temporarily raise awareness of the problem, but that’s not going to solve it.
The Real Cost of Saying Yes When You Shouldn’t
But let’s bring in some stats, shall we?
According to the ATD (Association for Talent Development) State of the Industry 2025 report, organizations spend an average of $1,254 per employee on training annually. When that training is set up to solve the wrong problem, it stops producing results – if it ever produced results at all.
But the financial waste is actually only one part of the cost.
The bigger issue?
The same report found that 75% of organizations measure L&D success by the number of learning hours delivered. Not by whether the problem was solved.
And 85% track success by the number of employees trained. So here we are STILL, in 2025, counting butts in seats and hours on the clock, and calling that a win.
People. Seriously.
As usual, our L&D scoreboard isn’t measuring the right actions.
All that aside – let’s think about our relationship with leadership. Every time L&D delivers training that doesn’t solve a problem, the next conversation with that stakeholder gets harder. Their trust has eroded a little. They start to wonder if L&D is really being helpful, does training really work?
And, boys and girls, when leadership starts asking those types of questions, and eventually they will, they will stop looping you in on training discussions. Because why would they, when the output is always the same?
Saying yes to the wrong solution doesn’t buy goodwill. It spends it.
Think of it this way: if your car keeps pulling to the left and the mechanic keeps rotating your tires, at some point you stop trusting the mechanic, even if the tire rotation is technically competent work. The problem was the alignment. L&D has an alignment problem, and rotating tires doesn’t fix it.
Redirecting a Stakeholder Who Has Already Made Up Their Mind
This is the part that makes most of us sweat. The stakeholder hasn’t come to you with a question. They’ve come with an answer. And now you have to be the one who says, “Actually, let’s pump the brakes for a second.”
The good news: you don’t have to blow up the conversation to do this. You just have to redirect it.
Start with agreement, not opposition.
Don’t walk in hot and say, “That’s not a training problem.” Nobody has ever responded well to being told they’re wrong. Instead, start with what you can agree on: there’s a real problem, it’s affecting the business, and solving it matters.
Now, you’re on the same team.
“I completely agree that this is a priority. Before we build something, I want to make sure we’re targeting the right root cause, because I’d hate to deliver something that doesn’t actually move the needle for you.”
That’s not pushback. That’s framing it as protecting the outcome, not questioning their judgment.
Ask a few well-placed questions.
This is where a brief conversation and good questioning do the heavy lifting.
Just ask:
- “Can you walk me through what’s happening specifically? Where in the process does it break down?”
- “Is this happening with all salespeople, or with certain people or teams?”
- “Is there anyone on the team who is getting this right consistently? What are they doing differently?”
These questions do two things simultaneously: they gather real data, and they invite the stakeholder to hear themselves think out loud. Often, that’s enough to shift the conversation.
And pay attention to that third question, if the answer is “Actually, yes, Dave never seems to have this problem,” you’ve just learned something important. Dave didn’t get special training. Something else is different.
That’s your real starting point.
Name what you’re seeing and offer an alternative.
Once you have enough information, name the root cause without making it accusatory:
“What I’m hearing is less of a skills problem and more of an incentives problem. If sales people are rewarded for closing fast, they’ll close fast. No matter what a negotiation course tells them to do. Training can’t out-muscle misaligned incentives. What if we looked at this from a different angle before we build anything?”
Notice you’re not refusing to do training. You’re offering something better and giving them the option to choose a smarter solution.
What If They Still Want the Course?
Sometimes, even after the best redirect, they still want the course. This happens, and now, you have a choice to make.
You can push harder and potentially damage the relationship or you can comply and risk the outcome. Or, how about this…in your design document or project notes, you can state your concerns. Make note of the likely root cause of the performance gap and build in a checkpoint that will clearly tell the story when the results come back.
What does this look like? It’s one paragraph in your project notes:
- What you observed prior to the course being built
- What you think the real cause is
- What you recommended instead.
When the training doesn’t move the needle, that little project note becomes your most important CYA.
That last approach isn’t giving up. It’s playing chess instead of checkers. When the training doesn’t solve the problem (and it won’t), you now have the data and the documented conversation to say, “Here’s what I flagged. Here’s what happened. Here’s what I think we should do instead.” That’s how you build the credibility to have a more outcome-focused conversation the next time someone tries to push training.
Start Here: Three Things You Can Do Right Now
- Build your diagnostic skills: The next time a training request lands in your inbox, before you open a new project file, write down three possible causes of the performance gap that have nothing to do with knowledge or skill. Get comfortable with the habit of looking wider before you look deeper.
- Practice redirecting: Print out or save the phrase: “Before we build something, I want to make sure we’re targeting the right root cause.” That’s your opening. Use it until it feels like yours.
- Start documenting your concerns. Even when you can’t change the outcome, document your analysis and the alternative you recommended. Stack enough of those documented moments and something shifts. Maybe leadership stops seeing you as the L&D vending machine.
Anyone can build a course.
Not everyone has the skill, or the nerve, to say ‘I don’t think that’s the right call, and here’s what I think we should do instead.’ That’s the difference between an order-taker and a trusted advisor.
You already know which one you want to be.
That’s not being difficult. That’s being a professional.
