Leadership plays a key role in organizational communication by being the connection point between strategy and the front line. For individual contributors, their leaders provide the only insight they get into higher-level strategy. This is often most critical during times of change, but that isn’t the only time leaders should be making use of their unique role.  

Learning and development (L&D) teams are continuously faced with the challenge of connecting training to actual business impact. Often, individuals go through training but fall short of bringing that training into their day-to-day workflow. Leaders can change this by taking on a more significant role in the training process, connecting training to strategy and becoming an accountability partner for their team members.  

This partnership between L&D and leaders often goes untapped because of a lack of structure and understanding of “how” to make it happen. Here are four key moments between a leader and follower that result in better training transfer. 

1. Pretraining

Before an individual attends training, leaders should set up a meeting to discuss what the training involves and align goals for applying the new skills or processes to their work. This is where the leader has the opportunity to bring in the context of big-picture organizational goals the performer might not be aware of. It’s the leader’s responsibility to help the performer make connections between the training and how that can translate into impact. 

3. During Training  

Here’s where the responsibility falls on the performer. During training, the individual needs to keep the agreed-upon goals front of mind, actively considering how they might use what they are learning. By creating expectations upfront, they can go into training with greater buy-in and a clearer understanding of what is expected of them. 

3. Post-Training 

One to two weeks after training, it is critical that the leader and their team member reconnect about the training. This allows them to discuss what the individual learned while it’s still fresh in their mind. Both parties should come out of this meeting in agreement on tangible ways the individual will apply the training to their work in alignment with the goals they discussed pretraining. It’s all too easy to fall back into the flow of work and miss this opportunity to sit down, reflect and plan ahead, but it is necessary for tying training to real business impact. 

4. Ongoing 

Training might be a single event but applying that knowledge is an ongoing process. Leaders can be the difference between past training falling to the side and being forgotten or becoming the forefront of an individual’s development. Ongoing touchpoints to follow up on the action items you agreed on post-training enable you to hold your team member accountable and create a space to discuss and resolve any challenges in translating training to the real world. 

Taking a more hands-on role during team members’ training is just one way leaders can act as a conduit between the C-suite strategy and the front line. These kinds of check-ins, alignment on goals and discussions of how individuals’ work ties to business outcomes should be a regular practice in leadership.  

This doesn’t just benefit top leadership. It results in higher engagement for individual contributors by giving them a clearer path to success and connecting their work to a larger purpose. Most people want their work to have meaning. Often what they’re missing is information and direction. Leaders can fill that gap.