In August 2018 I turned up in Dorset for my first paramotor course. The forecast said 8mph winds gusting to 45mph. Nobody flew. Not the students, not the instructors.
So we sat in a room. We spent the best part of the day on theory, meteorology and land features. I went home with a notebook full of good information and zero hours under a wing.
Two months later I stood on a field in Spain holding a half-size training wing. The instructors called it kiting. The small wing was less stable than the real thing, which made it perfect for practice. After an hour my arms were still shaking. A few days later, after class, I found an open patch of ground, drew a beach in the dirt and ran landing scenarios on foot. On the ground, a mistake makes you look silly. In the air...well...
The notebook didn't get me airborne. The reps did.
Dan Greene's Line
Dan Greene from Radical Candor joined Debra and me on Corey-osity Unleashed. One idea from our conversation has stuck with me ever since: you don't need training, you need reps. Feedback is a skill. Skills grow through practice, not theory.
Dan spent 11+ years in the Navy before leading sales teams at Google and Twitter. In his 30 leadership lessons he puts it in military terms: "Sweat more in peace, bleed less in war." Then the instruction: "Practice, train, and debrief. Then do it again."
Most companies do the opposite with feedback. They run a one-day workshop, hand out a framework card, and expect managers to deliver hard conversations well for the next twelve months. Picture teaching someone to fly with one classroom session and no wing.
The Workshop Fades Fast
You've heard the claim only 10% of training transfers to the job. Ignore it. The figure came from a personal estimate in a 1982 article, not a measured study. Ford, Yelon and Billington later called it "the 10% delusion".
The real numbers aren't much kinder. Their review put non-transfer at about 38% straight after training, 56% after six months and 66% after twelve months, as summarized by eLearning Industry. A year after your feedback workshop, two-thirds of it has gone.
A 2025 doctoral study at Colorado State University tested what predicts transfer among 108 healthcare employees. Motivation and good training design predicted what people intended to do. Only one factor predicted what they did: the opportunity to use the training.
Read the last line again. Not the quality of the slides. Not the enthusiasm in the room. Opportunity to use it. Reps.
Years Aren't Reps Either
Here's the trap for experienced managers. You think, "I've given feedback for fifteen years. I've had my reps."
Have you?
In 2005, Choudhry, Fletcher and Soumerai reviewed 62 evaluations of physician experience against quality of care. In 32 of them (52%), performance went down as years in practice went up, for every outcome measured. One single evaluation showed performance rising with experience across all outcomes.
Doctors don't get worse because they stop caring. They get worse because nobody watches them work anymore. Nobody corrects them. They repeat the same habits for decades with no signal about whether those habits still work.
Managers live the same story. Fifteen years of vague, softened, late feedback isn't fifteen years of practice. It's one bad year repeated fifteen times.
In my research, 99.5% of respondents said they've had one or more types of bad boss. I doubt most of those bosses missed the training. I'd bet almost none of them got a coach to watch a real conversation and tell them how it landed.
What a Real Rep Looks Like
Anders Ericsson spent his career studying how experts get good. In his 1993 paper on deliberate practice, he listed the conditions for practice to improve performance:
- The learner wants to get better and puts in effort.
- The task fits the learner's current level.
- The learner gets "immediate informative feedback and knowledge of results."
- The learner repeats the same or similar tasks.
He also wrote deliberate practice "requires effort and is not inherently enjoyable." And he found no benefit from practice sessions longer than four hours a day, with reduced benefit beyond two.
Critics later argued practice matters less than Ericsson claimed. In a 2019 reply, Ericsson and Harwell re-ran the numbers using only studies where the practice matched his original definition... a teacher, a plan, feedback. Practice explained 29% of the variance in performance, more than double the 14% the critics had reported.
So "reps" doesn't mean "more of the same." Repetition without feedback grooves the bad habit deeper. A rep counts when someone tells you how it went and you go again.
Engineering Teams Already Know This
Look at how your developers learn code review. Nobody sends them to a workshop on reviewing pull requests. They review small changes, several times a week, and get fast feedback on their comments from the author and the tests. Hundreds of reps a year.
Then look at how the same company teaches managers to give feedback. One workshop. One annual review cycle. One or two real conversations a year, with no one watching and no debrief afterwards.
I wrote about this gap in We Deploy Daily. We Train Leaders Once a Decade. Same problem, different angle. We built fast feedback loops for code and forgot to build them for people.
Five Ways to Get Your Reps This Week
1. Rehearse before the real one
Got a hard conversation on Thursday? Book 15 minutes with a peer on Wednesday. They play the other person. A third colleague watches and takes notes. Run it twice. This is my drawn beach in the dirt. Mistakes cost nothing here.
2. Shrink the rep
Stop saving feedback for the big moments. Give one specific piece of feedback every day, praise or criticism, under two minutes. Small and frequent beats rare and dramatic. Ericsson found long sessions add little. Short ones done often add up.
3. Debrief every rep
After each conversation, ask yourself three questions. What did I say? What did they hear? What would I change next time? Write the answers down. Dan's instruction was "practice, train, and debrief." Most managers skip the last word.
4. Get a witness
Ask someone you trust to sit in on a one-to-one and give you feedback on your feedback. It feels awkward. Do it anyway. Without a witness, you're the physician nobody watches.
5. Start where the stakes are low
Praise is the kiting wing. It's easier to deliver, and the cost of a fumble is small. Practice being specific with praise first. When you've got the habit of saying exactly what someone did and why it mattered, criticism gets easier too. I explained why specific beats generic in Equal Praise Isn't Fair Praise.
Count Your Reps
Nobody becomes a good free-throw shooter by watching a video about free throws. They stand at the line and shoot until their arms ache, and somebody tells them their elbow is out.
Feedback works the same way. Your workshop gave you the theory. Your notebook is full. Good. Now go and get your arms shaking.
Here's a test for this week. Count the feedback conversations you have, and count how many of them anyone helped you debrief. If the second number is zero, you're not practicing. You're repeating.
How many reps did you get this week?