You’re Coaching Everyone to Dribble. Nobody’s Coaching Anyone to Win 

A department books an off-site. Fifty thousand dollars, an outside facilitator, a really good breakfast spread. Everyone comes home with a notebook and a slightly firmer handshake. 

Three months later, the notebook’s in a drawer. Nothing has changed. Multiply that scene by however many departments run one of these a year, and the math gets uncomfortable fast. 

Mike Kuenzi, Titus Talent Strategies’ Vice President of Talent Optimization, has watched this exact scene play out with client after client. In a recent conversation on The Bosshole Chronicles with host John Broer, he summed up the pattern in one image: most companies are coaching their people to dribble a basketball, then acting surprised when nobody wins a game. 

That line applies to more than training. It describes how most companies write a job description, too, and it’s the same failure showing up twice, in two different departments, on two different budgets. 

Find the Pain First 

Ask Mike how a company should set a training budget from zero, and he won’t hand over a number first. He’ll ask which of three things is actually hurting: engagement, retention, or performance. 

Those three are the real levers behind every training dollar, and most executives push back on the first pitch the same way: prove the ROI before they’ll sign off. Mike’s honest answer is that the return is almost always indirect. A training investment isn’t a vending machine. It’s a lever on retention and performance that compounds over quarters, and that’s a much harder story to tell in a budget meeting than a hard number. Unlike a piece of equipment with a receipt attached, a training program’s return shows up in numbers that already exist somewhere in the business — turnover, output, engagement scores — just rarely labeled as training’s doing. 

Retention math is easier to make concrete than engagement, so it’s often the lever Mike starts with. A department bleeding people every eighteen months is paying, over and over, for a problem a defined development plan would have caught the first time. 

Companies that can’t tell that story tend to file disengagement under cost of doing business instead of treating it as a number worth attacking. That number is not small. Gallup’s most recent global workforce data puts the annual cost of disengagement at an estimated $10 trillion in lost productivity worldwide, a figure most leadership teams have never once connected to their own training line item. 

The Checkbox Budget 

Nearly every organization Mike works with has a training budget. Very few of them can tell him what it’s actually for. 

The pattern is almost universal: the line item exists because it existed last year, and if it goes unspent, finance claws it back. So it gets spent — an off-site here, a keynote speaker there — and “we did the training” becomes the finish line instead of the starting gun. 

U.S. companies aren’t shy about the dollar amount, either. Training expenditures climbed to $102.8 billion in 2025, up nearly 5 percent from the year before. Per-learner spend rose right alongside the total, from $774 to $874 in a single year, even as the average employee’s actual training hours fell from 47 to 40. The investment climbed. The time spent building anything durable with it shrank. 

Mike’s shorthand: a check gets written, a checkbox gets ticked, and a target that was never defined stays undefined. 

Practice Beats the Notebook 

Mike coaches his kids’ basketball teams on weekends, and the comparison comes up constantly in his client work. Showing a nine-year-old how to dribble takes five minutes. Turning that demonstration into a skill they can rely on in a real game takes months of repetition nobody in a conference room is around to see. 

Training is the demonstration. Development is everything that happens after the notebook closes — the reps, the coaching, the accountability that makes a skill stick instead of evaporating by Monday. 

The research on this is blunter than most L&D departments would like it to be. A 2025 review of learning-transfer studies found that only 10 to 15 percent of what people learn in formal training ever shows up in how they actually work afterward. The gap sits in a specific place: nothing in the system was built to make the new behavior survive contact with a Tuesday. 

You can watch ninety minutes of a soccer match and see none of the ten thousand hours of practice behind it. Training is the ninety minutes. Nobody’s budgeting for the practice. 

Mike’s read on why so much training stalls at the notebook stage comes down to appetite. People want the version that ships overnight — order today, arrives tomorrow, done. Behavior change doesn’t move at that speed, no matter how good the workshop was, and treating it like it should is how a genuinely good session turns into a wasted Tuesday. 

Mike points to something else that helps close the gap: a shared behavioral language. A tool like the Predictive Index gives a team common vocabulary for how people are wired to work, so a manager isn’tguessing at why a fast-moving captain and a detail-driven guardian keep colliding on the same project. Without that language, coaching conversations stay generic. With it, they get specific enough to actually practice against. 

Nobody Fails at Dribbling. They Fail at Not Knowing the Score. 

Ask a hiring manager what they want a new hire to accomplish by the end of year one, and Mike says the honest answer is usually silence. Most have thought through the duties in exhaustive detail. The actual definition of winning in that seat never made it onto the page. 

Part of that comes down to reps. Leaders are busy being good at their own jobs, not at interviewing, and it shows. Recruiters interview constantly — it’s the whole job, and they get sharp at digging past a polished answer. A hiring manager who interviews once a quarter is relearning the skill from scratch every time, working off instinct instead of craft, and a generic job description fills the gap instinct leaves behind. “Lift 50 pounds” and “strong interpersonal skills” tell a candidate nothing about what success actually looks like six months in. 

Compare that to how Mike coaches teams to write a sales opening: how many calls a week, what quota, what the actual sales cycle looks like — specific enough that a recruiter can tell in the first interview whether a candidate has actually done the job before. 

That fog costs real money on both sides of the desk. More than a quarter of candidates who reject a job offer point to poor communication or unclear expectations as the reason. On the employer’s side, SHRM’s 2025 benchmarking data puts the average cost of replacing a non-executive hire at $5,475, and north of $35,000 for an executive — a figure that’s climbed 21 percent since 2022. 

The fog reaches employees who already have the job, too. Gallup’s most recent U.S. workforce data shows only 46 percent of employees strongly agree they know what’s expected of them at work, down from 56 percent five years ago. Ten points, gone, in the exact metric that determines whether someone can tell if they’re winning. 

Mike’s fix starts before the job posting goes live: build the description around what it actually takes to win the seat — the specific actions, the specific number, the specific first-year outcome two different interviewers would describe the same way. 

Split the Risk 

There’s a moment in Mike’s conversation with Broer worth sitting with on its own. An executive once pushed back on him directly: it wasn’t fair to carry all the risk on a training investment when nobody could guarantee a return. 

Mike agreed, then offered something sharper. Split whatever the company was already losing to turnover, fifty-fifty, and both sides own the outcome together. 

The executive’s response came fast. He’d rather just buy the subscription outright. Most training pitches ask a leader to trust a process. Mike’s pitch asked him to trust a number instead, and the shift in tone was immediate. 

That reaction is the tell. Once risk and reward are actually shared, resistance to naming a real target tends to disappear fast. Executives don’t dodge commitment because they dislike accountability. They dodge vague line items nobody has connected to an actual number. Name the lever — engagement, retention, performance — attach a figure to it, and the same executive who wanted zero exposure will often take on all of it. 

The Wrap Up 

Training and hiring sit in different departments with different budgets and different owners, and they fail for the identical reason. An organization can run every drill and write every job description in the world, and still lose, because nobody defined what winning was supposed to look like at the other end. 

Start there instead. What does this training need to produce, specifically, six months out? What does winning this seat look like at the end of year one, specific enough that two different interviewers would describe it the same way? Get that answer on paper before the off-site gets booked or the requisition gets posted, and everything downstream — the coaching, the interview questions, the budget conversation — gets dramatically easier to build. 

The dribbling was never the problem. 

Ready to Define What Winning Looks Like? 

At Titus Talent Strategies, every search starts with a real scorecard, not a job description — behavioral benchmarks, a defined first-year outcome, the specific actions that separate a hire who wins the seat from one who just fills it. If your last few “great on paper” hires didn’t play out the way the résumé promised, the description probably wasn’t written around the win. 

Let’s talk about what winning actually looks like for your next hire. 

Frequently Asked Questions 

What’s the real difference between training and development? 

Training is the one-time transfer of knowledge or a skill demonstration — a workshop, an off-site, a course. Development is the accountability structure built around that training afterward: the practice, the coaching, and the repetition that makes the skill actually change behavior on the job. Most organizations fund the first and skip the second, which is why the impact rarely lasts past a few months. 

How much should a company budget for training and development? 

There’s no universal number, because the right figure depends on which specific problem — engagement, retention, or performance — the investment is meant to fix. A useful starting exercise is to price outwhat the current problem is already costing in turnover or lost output, then size the investment against that real number instead of last year’s line item. 

Why do so many job descriptions fail to attract the right candidates? 

Most job descriptions list duties and requirements instead of defining what success actually looks like in the role after six or twelve months. Candidates can sense that vagueness, and it shows up directly in offer rejections tied to unclear expectations. Benchmarking the role against a defined behavioral standard, rather than a generic duty list, closes that gap. We go deeper on this in Hiring Smarter with the 17 PI Reference Profiles. 

How do you actually define “what winning looks like” for a new hire? 

Start with the specific outcome the person needs to produce in their first year, described in enough detail that two different interviewers would recognize it the same way. Then work backward into the behaviors and decisions that outcome requires, rather than starting from a list of past job titles. This is the same principle behind setting behavioral benchmarks before a search begins, covered in The Executive Search Myth. 

What is the Predictive Index, and how does it relate to development, not just hiring? 

The Predictive Index is a behavioral assessment that measures how someone is naturally wired to work, giving teams a shared vocabulary for communication styles and drives. Beyond hiring, that same vocabulary helps managers coach more specifically, since they can name why a particular employee thrives under certain conditions and stalls under others. It turns vague feedback into a targeted development conversation. 

How long does it actually take for training to change behavior? 

Longer than a single session or off-site. Research on learning transfer consistently finds that only a small fraction of what’s taught in formal training shows up in actual job performance without deliberate follow-up, which is why real behavior change requires weeks or months of structured practice and coaching, not a single event. 

What does a bad hire actually cost a company? 

Costs vary by seniority, but SHRM’s 2025 benchmarking data puts the average cost of replacing a non-executive employee at roughly $5,475, climbing well past $35,000 for executive roles. Those figures cover recruiting and replacement alone, before factoring in lost productivity and team disruption. Defining the role clearly before the search begins is the most direct way to avoid paying that cost twice.