Training Creates Potential; Practice Builds Value

The Center for Creative Leadership’s 70-20-10 model shows that about 70 percent of growth comes from experience, 20 percent from feedback and coaching, and only 10 percent from formal learning. For every hour you spend learning, you should spend several more applying the learning and seeking feedback.

Without practice, learning remains an uncollected invoice. Just as I needed a system for collecting newspaper payments, you need a system for skill development.

The first step is to decide where you want to invest.

Identify Your Investment

Here is an obvious but often underutilized principle when it comes to training: You are more motivated when it is personally rewarding.

For example, if you know that developing better listening skills will improve the relationship with your boss, you will invest more. If you think that improving your persuasion skills will help you close more deals and get a promotion, you’ll dedicate more time.

Nobody seems to get excited about the annual cybersecurity refresher course until they’ve been the victim of an attack. Real growth happens when the learning connects to something that matters to you.

What would help you advance in your career, improve your work life, and allow you to be more effective? Considering new projects, leadership opportunities, and organizational changes, what skills would be personally relevant in the next six to twelve months?

Pick one to three skills that feel both energizing and useful. Be specific as possible. For example, instead of “Leadership skills,” write down “Giving direct feedback” or “Running effective meetings.”

Next, create a system for tracking your development.

Create a Skill Ledger

Just as accountants use a general ledger to track investments and returns, you’ll create a Skill Ledger to make your practice visible and focused. This can be a simple spreadsheet or note with four columns: Date, Skill, Action, and Result.

The format isn’t as important as building a habit of recording your efforts. Write down the skills you’ve decided to focus on, and use the ledger to track the actions you take to make the learning tangible and practical. Then note what you learned from the practice.

For example, an entry might look like this.

Setting up a Skills Ledger ensures you focus on the most important part of the learning process: putting it into practice.

Do the Training

Now it’s time to actually learn the skill. Unless your organization provides specific training material, you’ll need to survey the options available to you.

Choose one resource to start, and do the training. Read the book, take the course, or listen to the podcasts. But remember, this is only 10 percent of the equation, and it’s where most people stop. They finish the training, feel inspired, and move on. That’s like delivering newspapers but never collecting payment.

The training isn’t the investment; it’s the practice that follows.

Put It into Practice

It’s tempting to wait for just the right opportunity to practice a new skill. People read, for example, about giving feedback and think, “I’ll try this during the next review,” which is three months away. Or they learn about strategic thinking and wait for the next big planning session.

Instead, create opportunities to practice your new skill, and use the Skill Ledger to record your efforts and results.

Want to practice giving feedback? Give a piece of specific positive reinforcement to a co-worker before the day ends. Want to improve your presentation skills? Volunteer to do the team update at the next all-hands meeting. Want to get better at delegation? Look at your calendar for next week and find one meeting you could send someone else to.

When you create a system, you see returns. For example, Sally and Bob are two managers who were both told they needed to “delegate more,” a common but vague directive.

Sally added “Delegation” to her Skill Ledger. She read a few articles, listened to podcasts, and decided on an approach to test. She identified two employees she would delegate to. She reviewed her tasks and upcoming calendar and found things she could delegate to them.

Each time she did so, she logged the action and the result. After a few weeks, she met with her boss, shared what she learned, and received coaching that helped her improve.

Bob read the same resources and delegated a few things. But he didn’t track what worked or didn’t. When things went bad, he blamed the employee or the task. He couldn’t identify patterns and didn’t adjust his approach. His discussions with his boss focused on his frustration rather than improvement.

Six months later, Sally’s team was thriving. She had successfully delegated large parts of her workload, freeing up time to invest in strategic initiatives, and putting her on the path to a promotion.

They both trained, but only one practiced with purpose, and only one used a Skill Ledger to hold themselves accountable. That made the difference between potential and value.

Reinvest for Growth

Your Skill Ledger can be a source of long-term growth too. Every few months, take some time to review it and reflect on your progress. When you recognize and celebrate your achievements, you fuel your motivation and confidence. You can also identify what works and capture insights about how you learn.

Ask yourself:

• Which of my target skills showed the most improvement? Should I keep practicing, or is it good enough for now?
• What new challenges am I facing that require different skills?
• Where is my energy and curiosity pointing me next?

Most managers wait for others to identify training opportunities. They attend, and then never put it into practice. Great managers build a skill development system. They design their own learning, track progress, and collect the full value of every investment they make.

The system is straightforward: practice deliberately, track consistently, and reflect regularly. Each time you use a new skill, log it in your Skill Ledger. Every few months, review what’s working so you realize the full return on your investments.

If I’d collected every dollar owed on that paper route, I’d have been the richest kid in my neighborhood. More importantly, I would have learned earlier that there’s a difference between activity and results. Completing the work is only half the equation. The value comes when you collect on what you’ve earned.

The same is true for your professional development. Training creates potential, but practice builds value.

Don’t leave money on the table. Create your skill development system today.