By Tony Gardner
Reskilling conversations tend to land in the same place: what people need to learn, and how quickly. The capability gap gets named, the content gets delivered, the completion rates get counted.
What's largely overlooked is a different question. How readily do people successfully use their new capability by adapting to the new way of working the reskilling is meant to prepare them for? That's a behavioural question, and it's the variable that decides whether the new capability is used as intended.
The volume of reskilling now underway is enormous, which makes whether it sticks a key driver of future organisational performance, not just a nice-to-have. With the investment required to reskill a workforce, a programme that builds capability that people can't or won't apply is hard to justify.
Two Kinds of Development, One Program
A useful distinction comes from Nick Petrie's work at the Center for Creative Leadership, building on Robert Kegan's research into adult development. Petrie argues that development comes in two forms.
Petrie's image is the cup. Horizontal development pours more into the cup. Vertical development makes the cup itself bigger. These two forms of growth respond to different methods, different timelines, and different measures. Treating them as the same thing is where most programs quietly go wrong.
Horizontal development is the adding of new knowledge, skills, and competencies: more capabilities ‘poured’ into the person, measurable through tools like 360-degree feedback and as simply as manager observation.
Vertical development is different. It's the advancement of a person's thinking capability, so they can handle more complex, uncertain, and interdependent conditions and successfully deploy their new capabilities. In most capability change settings, vertical development the difference-maker between slow and resisted change and successful adaptation.
Most reskilling is horizontal by design. It asks what people need to know, assembles the content, and delivers it. That's necessary work. But helping be able to adapt to changed conditions – new ways of working - is the critical vertical work. Deciding differently under pressure, navigating ambiguity, letting go of a familiar way of working, collaborating across a new structure: these depend on how people think and behave, not just what they know.
The challenge is that horizontal development can be transmitted from an expert, but vertical development cannot be simply transferred; it needs to be seeded and developed, even nurtured, in the person. Programmes that only design for the transmittable half are designing for half the job.
What the Evidence Shows
Research on adaptive performance makes the point. Elaine Pulakos analysed over a thousand critical incidents across 21 jobs and arrived at an eight-dimension model of what it takes to perform well when conditions change: learning new tasks and technologies, interpersonal adaptability, solving problems creatively, dealing with uncertain situations, cultural adaptability, and physical adaptability, handling work stress, and handling emergencies and crises (Pulakos et al. 2000).
Only one of those eight, learning new tasks and technologies, is the technical piece reskilling programmes focus on. The other seven are behavioural. They're the vertical dimensions: how people respond when the situation is unfamiliar, pressured, or ambiguous. So when we design and evaluate reskilling around content and training course completion, we're optimising one of the eight things that actually determine whether someone performs after change. The other seven are not extras to pick up once the technical skill is in place; they are what allows that skill to function in real conditions.
This helps explain a stubborn finding. Training transfer is poor, with cited estimates putting it under 20% of what's taught making it into practice. A more useful insight comes from Blume and colleagues' meta-analysis, which found that transfer "varies predictably": it's higher when the work environment supports it, when people believe the skills are useful, and when they get the chance to practise.
The biggest levers, manager support and the opportunity to use the skill, are precisely the ones the training itself can't provide. Transfer is a behavioural and environmental problem before it's a content problem. That reframes the brief. The question stops being 'did we deliver good training' and becomes 'did we set up the conditions in which the learning can take hold'.
It's also a personal one. Longitudinal research on training transfer shows that personality traits predict whether technical learning actually sticks (International Journal of Training and Development). The behavioural profile of the learner shapes the return on the technical investment.
The Market has Already Decided
While L&D programs keep defaulting to horizontal content, employers are naming the vertical half as the capability most needed. According to the World Economic Forum, resilience, flexibility, and agility rank among the top core skills employers want. These are behavioural, not technical.
Korn Ferry's research on learning agility makes the commercial case. Highly learning-agile people are promoted at roughly double the rate of their peers, and companies led by highly agile executives show around 25% higher profit margins (Korn Ferry; Korn Ferry 2014).
The demand side has already decided adaptability matters. The supply side, how we design and deliver training programs, hasn't caught up.
What designing for both looks like
None of this requires abandoning technical reskilling. It does require designing it as half the picture rather than the whole of it. Four things can help.
First, make adaptability a stated outcome, not an assumed by-product. Name vertical development - advancing a person's thinking capability, so they can handle more complex, uncertain, and interdependent situations - in the program brief and evaluate against it, not just "did they complete the module." In almost all our leadership development work we overtly identify vertical learning in the first workshop.
Second, design transfer conditions, not just content. Build in a manager briefing before launch, reinforcement at sensible intervals, and a clear expectation that the skill will be applied on the job. Encourage managers to take about implementing capabilities not just completing training.
Third, assess the behavioural profile of who you're reskilling. We baseline technical skill as a matter of course; we rarely baseline the adaptability-related traits that predict whether the learning will be used. Openness, learning agility, tolerance for ambiguity: these are measurable, and they predict transfer. Baselining behavioural traits is more accessible than people think through tools like DISC Profiling.
Fourth, measure or at least observe, behaviour, not the training certificate. Shift evaluation from completion to whether something actually changed on the job. This is where most programs stop measuring, and where most of the value is lost.
What this Means for L&D
Technical reskilling gives people new capabilities. Behavioural adaptability decides whether they'll do things differently. The two are interdependent, and ignoring one limits the return on the other.
The good news is that vertical development can be designed for, deliberately, rather than left to surface as engagement scores or attrition. But it can't be transmitted the way content can; it has to be built into how the program is structured, the conditions, the assessment, the measurement, not just what's in it.
Reskilling at the scale now facing organisations is too expensive to get half right. Programs that design for both horizontal and vertical development are the ones that will move the numbers L&D is measured on.
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About the Author: Tony Gardner
Tony Gardner is a leadership consultant, facilitator and founder of Archetype Leadership + Teams, where he partners with organisations in Australia and New Zealand to develop leaders, teams, strategy and change capability. A former CEO and board chair, he brings over 20 years of real-world leadership experience across New Zealand, Australia, Europe and Asia, combined with more than a decade coaching leaders and leadership teams across a wide range of private and public sector organisations. Tony is an Accredited Partner in DISC and a Gallup-Certified Strengths Coach, and draws on both frameworks in his work helping organisations baseline the behavioural traits that determine whether new capability actually transfers into changed ways of working. His consulting and facilitation style is built on trust, pragmatism and outcome-focused delivery, helping leaders and teams navigate ambiguity and complexity rather than simply acquire new technical skills. He writes and speaks regularly on leadership, team performance and the behavioural dimensions of organisational change. Learn more at archetype.nz
