As learning professionals, we often are approached with problems that are really about employees being hired poorly, incentivized inappropriately, managed badly, and not being given good tools for their jobs… in short, things that training can’t fix.

But how often do we actually push back and say, “That’s not a training problem”?

Even among those of us who know better, I suspect the answer is “Not enough”. Maybe we are afraid of being viewed as uncooperative. Maybe we are trying to prove our own value.  Maybe we don’t want to lose the contract or the client. Maybe we just genuinely want to solve the problem.

I don’t have any magic fixes and I’m probably not telling you anything you don’t know.* But I’m encouraging all of us – including me – to more often take a pause to consider this when a project arrives at the door. And if it’s not something your best effort in training can fix, take a breath and try to trust a little more that the person you’re saying No to will value you all the more in the long run for saying it.

* Update: If, on the other hand, this is new information and you don’t know how to determine whether it’s a training problem, this column by Jane Bozarth is a great place to start.