Most organizations assume a performance gap means a hiring problem. Laura Overton and Derek Bruce spent an hour making the case that it usually isn’t.
Most L&D teams already have good people in the room. The World Economic Forum estimates that 39% of workers will need a new core skill by 2030, and many teams are still asking whether their training closes that gap or just checks a box. In our latest webinar, Laura Overton, L&D researcher, founder of Towards Maturity, and co-author of The L&D Leader, is joined Derek Bruce, Chief Learning and Knowledge Officer at Easygenerator, to talk about why performance stalls even when the right people are already there.
🎥 Watch the session: Missed it live? Watch the full recording above.
The problem isn’t who you hired
Laura opened by asking what keeps performance stuck even when skills investment is high. Derek pointed to a pattern from his own career.
“I’ve struggled with the whole transition from program to performance, because sometimes the programs are not quick enough, or programs aren’t actually linked to what a business needs. We sometimes have this amazing idea, something which is new and shiny, really, really cool, and we put it into place.”
The team would often hear the same response a year later: this was needed sooner. The real question, Laura said, wasn’t whether the organization hired the right people. It was whether those people had the conditions to perform.
The TRI performance loop
Laura’s research into high-performing L&D teams led her to a simple loop rather than another model: tuning in, responding, and improving, applied continuously. What stood out in her data wasn’t budget or headcount.
“Those high performing teams, they weren’t the ones with the highest budget, they weren’t the ones with the best tech stack, they weren’t the ones with the biggest teams.”
Only 10% of teams have made the shift from producing content to enabling performance, she said, even with access to the same models and tools as everyone else.
Why McKinsey’s feedback problem wasn’t a feedback problem
Laura shared a case study from her book, built on an interview with a leader at McKinsey. When feedback culture broke down after consultants lost the informal moments where they used to give and receive it, the instinct was to build a feedback course. McKinsey’s team dug deeper first.
“It was an emotional barrier rather than a knowledge barrier of receiving feedback.”
The response wasn’t a course. It was Receive to Grow, a four-week email campaign run by local leaders and built on behavioral science.
Responding means choosing practice over content
“Match our response to the performance that’s needed rather than the training that has been requested,” said Laura.
Derek described what that looked like earlier in his career, at a bank that moved from a traditional HR model to an agile one. “We kind of evolved from a traditional HR operating model to an agile model where all the things we did became products. Performance management was a product. Reward was a product. It wasn’t an individual intervention. Each product team had an L&D person, a tech person, a marketing comms person and a business person.” At Signify, the same instinct meant asking first-level managers what they needed instead of designing a program for them. “The key thing was, rather than creating a course, we actually had this mindset which was, if we do something, so what? What’s the outcome?” Derek Bruce
Where practice breaks down
Scale is one barrier, consistency is another. Not every skill gap is a training problem.
“When you then determine if a person had the skill and if they applied the skill, nothing would change, then it’s environmental.”
He compared forcing a training fix onto a structural problem to “playing tennis with baseball bats,” adding that “the solution we’re going to give is never going to fix a problem.” One attendee summed up the manager side of it in the chat: “If a manager can’t coach, they shouldn’t be a manager.”
This is part of why Easygenerator built EasyCoach. “We have an amazing part of what we do called EasyCoach,” Derek said, describing it as a way for people to practice real workplace conversations with AI feedback instead of waiting for a live coaching slot. Laura added her own honest take. “I am a terrible coachee. When I’m working with a live coach, I am not very good at all because I always feel as though I have to perform for them.” She said AI coaching changed that. “I was introduced to some AI coaching and it completely changed how I look at that process.”
Improving means tracking what the business cares about
Laura warned against what she calls vanity metrics. “There’s a phrase I heard called vanity metrics, which are the things which we as L&D love to track. Bums on the seats, how many courses we did. Happy sheets. What needs to be tracked is the impact of what we’re doing.”
McKinsey eventually folded Receive to Grow into how the business already worked instead of keeping it as a standalone program. “They were willing to let go. They were willing to say, actually, this is becoming a way of the rhythm and routine of the way that we do work, the way we give and receive feedback.”
Getting access without waiting for permission
An audience question about reaching the right people without upsetting the chain of command led to one of the session’s most practical exchanges. “It’s almost like arts of forgiveness,” Derek said. “So sometimes just do stuff and ask forgiveness later, depending again on your culture, company.” He added that understanding what’s driving a blocker matters more than pushing past them.
Bottom line
The people in most organizations are usually capable of more than they get credit for. What separates high-performing teams isn’t budget, headcount, or a bigger tech stack. It’s whether L&D keeps tuning in to what the business needs, responds with practice instead of another course, and improves based on what the data shows rather than what looks good in a report.
👏 Huge thanks to Laura Overton for joining this conversation and sharing 20 years of research with us.
Speakers
Laura Overton
Derek Bruce
Ashling Moran
Q&A
Ask what would happen if the person already had the skill. If nothing would change because of how the environment is set up, the gap is environmental rather than a training issue.
Brief managers on what's happening, involve them in the design of a program, and ask them to help define what success looks like. High-performing teams equip line managers directly rather than leaving coaching to a central L&D function.
Match the response to the actual problem instead of jumping straight to a course. McKinsey's Receive to Grow program replaced a planned feedback course with a four-week email campaign. When practice really is the right response, tools like Easygenerator's Scenario feature let people rehearse real conversations before a course ever gets built.
Practice needs to feel low-stakes enough that people will actually try it. Easygenerator's EasyCoach lets learners practice real workplace conversations with AI feedback, which is why it came up directly in this session as a way to give people repeated practice at scale.
Course completions and satisfaction sheets rarely prove anything changed. Tools like Easygenerator can track completion, but the metrics worth watching go beyond the LMS, things like retention, promotion rates, and engagement scores of teams whose managers went through development.