The archive
All articles
Everything the Journal has published, newest first. Each piece names its sources and carries the date it was last checked.
The number
is what EU employers spent per person trained in 2020, a quarter less in real terms than in 2005
Eurostat · Read the piece- Coaching & AI
Coaching's return can be measured
Rated by colleagues against a comparison group, coached managers improve more than others. The 5.7x and 7x returns quoted everywhere were client estimates.
- Change & Transformation
Team building improves how teams feel and work together
A 2009 meta-analysis found team building has a moderate positive effect, strongest on attitudes and teamwork. An earlier review found none on performance.
- Leadership Development
Feedback works best when it is about the task
Across 607 effects, feedback improved performance by 0.41 on average. It worked best when it pointed at the task, and less well when it turned to the person.
- Leadership Development
What companies really spend on leadership development
The 356 billion dollars quoted for leadership development is an estimate of all corporate training in 2015. Its source put leadership training at 3.4 billion.
- Leadership Development
Managers train less often than professionals
In 2025, 19.4 percent of EU managers had trained in the past four weeks, against 24.1 percent of professionals. German managers sat just below the employee average.
- Leadership Development
Simple feedback does as much as a 360 review
The largest meta-analysis of leadership training found no advantage for 360-degree feedback over feedback from a single source, on any outcome it could test.
- Coaching & AI
The AI Act's HR deadline moved. The emotion ban did not
Inferring employees' emotions with AI has been banned since February 2025. The high-risk duties for recruitment tools moved to December 2027.
- Coaching & AI
In the only direct test, human coaching came out ahead
The study behind the parity claim compared two trials run two years apart. A direct randomised comparison found effects only for human coaching.
- Change & Transformation
Where Buurtzorg's savings come from
Its nurses deliver home care in 108 hours a year against 168 elsewhere. Once hospital and physician costs are added, the total per client is average.
- Change & Transformation
Where the 70 percent change failure rate comes from
A peer-reviewed review traced the claim through five published sources and found no evidence behind any of them. Its originators called it unscientific.
- Change & Transformation
Kotter, ADKAR or Lewin: what each change model rests on
None of the three most used models has been tested against a control group. What separates them is not effectiveness but what kind of claim each is entitled to make.
- Coaching & AI
Coaching is a 5 billion dollar market of sole traders
The 5.34 billion dollar figure is the sum of what 110,492 practitioners earned. The average is 49,283 dollars a year from about four billable hours a week.
- Talent & Retention
What losing an employee costs depends on the role
The half-to-two-times-salary figure is published without a derivation. The two meta-analyses of turnover and firm performance disagree by a factor of five.
- Leadership Development
Europe spends less on each trainee than it did in 2005
Across the EU, employers spent 1,433 euro per training participant in 2020, against 1,488 in 2005. Adjusted for inflation that is a fall of 24 percent.
- Coaching & AI
Coaching works, and on screen as well as in person
Three meta-analyses find that workplace coaching works. The two that compared formats found remote coaching as effective as coaching in person.
- Leadership Development
Leadership training changes what managers do at work
A meta-analysis of 335 samples found leadership training improves on-the-job behaviour with a corrected effect of 0.82, the largest of the four outcomes it measured.
- Talent & Retention
Is anyone staying anywhere any more?
Median US job tenure is 3.9 years, the lowest since 2002. The age breakdown shows most of the decline is composition rather than a collapse in loyalty.
- Talent & Retention
Leadership training works best for junior leaders
Development has its strongest measured effect on behaviour at the junior end, and that is the level where budgets are thinnest and the role has changed most.
- Talent & Retention
The first year is where retention is won
Pooling 117 studies, the correlation between tenure and quitting is minus 0.27. People who leave go early, which is the one thing onboarding can act on.
- Coaching & AI
Coaching is priced by the session. Results are not
Three meta-analyses have tested session count against outcomes. None found a relationship. Coaching is still bought and priced almost entirely by the session.
- Change & Transformation
What Kotter's eight steps are built on
A ten-year observation of a hundred companies, and by the author's own account no examples or major ideas from any published source but his own writing.
- Leadership Development
How do you measure whether a leadership programme worked?
The four-level model behind most evaluation dates from 1959 and the levels do not predict each other. A programme can score well on three of them and change nothing.
- Change & Transformation
Kurt Lewin may never have said "unfreeze, change, refreeze"
A 2016 paper in Human Relations argues he never developed it and that it took form after his death. A 2020 reply argues the model is implicit in his field theory.
- Talent & Retention
Managers are disengaging faster than the people they manage
Gallup put manager engagement at 22 percent in 2025, down five points in a year and nine since 2022. Overall engagement moved one point over the same year.
- Talent & Retention
How managers shape who stays
Managers account for much of the difference in engagement between business units. The popular slogan stretches that into a claim about resignations.
- Leadership Development
Small firms train fewer people, not cheaper ones
Large European employers spend 859 euro per head of workforce on training. Firms with 10 to 49 staff spend 342. The participation gap is wider than the money gap.
- Change & Transformation
Zappos removed its managers. What happened next
210 of 1,503 employees took the buyout rather than continue. The company later stepped back from the model, and the person who led the rollout co-wrote the caution.
