70/20/10 Model

What the 70/20/10 model is

The 70/20/10 model (نموذج السبعين والعشرين والعشرة) is a formula used in leadership and employee development. It says that most of what a successful manager learns on the job comes from practical experience, less from relationships and feedback from other people, and least from courses and reading. The percentages are written in that order: 70% from challenging experiences and tasks, 20% from relationships and coaching, and 10% from formal training. Learning and development specialists in establishments use the formula as a framework for dividing effort among courses, assignments and mentoring.

The model is a management concept about the design of development in an establishment, and it is not a calculated rule to be applied by the numbers. What follows is an explanation of the concept and of its limits. It does not claim that the percentages describe every learner, or that following them guarantees a result.

Where the percentages come from

The division is attributed to the researchers Michael Lombardo and Robert Eichinger, and its roots are linked to research by the Center for Creative Leadership in the 1980s. That research produced the book “The Lessons of Experience: How Successful Executives Develop on the Job” by Morgan McCall, Michael Lombardo and Ann Morrison, published by Lexington Books in 1988.

We verified the details of the book in the Crossref record of a review by Hellriegel in the journal Academy of Management Executive in 1989 (volume 3, issue 3, pages 251 and 252). Crossref now lists that journal as Academy of Management Perspectives.

The percentages in the form that circulates come from secondary summaries that attribute them to a development planning tool which Lombardo and Eichinger issued afterwards. We did not read the text of the tool or of the book, so we present the formula as attributed and not as quoted.

The research began with a question put to successful managers about the events that shaped their careers and the lessons they drew from those events. In the summaries, the percentages are described as a summary of their answers, not as a measurement of hours. That difference is lost whenever the percentages are used as a measure of hours.

The three sources

We label the three sources as follows, and the labels are our own choice:

• Learning from experience (70%). The employee performs real tasks that go beyond what the employee is used to, such as leading a project, taking on new work or dealing with a problem that the employee has not dealt with before.
• Learning from other people (20%). The employee learns from the manager, colleagues, mentors and feedback, including conversations in which someone else directs the employee’s thinking.
• Learning from formal training (10%). The employee learns from courses, workshops, reading and online learning.

The model draws attention to the fact that formal training is not the only thing that builds competence. In this formula, a learning design that stops at the classroom leaves out the sources that carry the most weight.

How the model is used in an establishment

The model needs no special programme. It needs a review of how activities are distributed in a development plan. The sources appear in practices that are described in other terms:

• Experience. The employee moves through different tasks, as in job rotation, and watches the work closely before taking it on, as in job shadowing.
• Learning from others. A more senior employee builds a relationship with a more junior one, as in mentoring, and a coach asks questions, as in coaching.
• The formal side. Classroom, self study and application are combined, as in blended learning.
• The record. The employee’s goals, activities and dates are written in an individual development plan, which shows whether the formal side dominates.

A simple question helps in reviewing the plan: what will the employee actually do during the period, as distinct from what the employee will attend?

How the model differs from the Kolb cycle

The 70/20/10 model describes the sources of learning in a manager’s career. How an individual learns from a single experience after it happens, through reflection, a conclusion and a trial, is described in the Kolb experiential learning cycle.

The two do not conflict. The model names experience as the main source, and the cycle reminds designers that experience is not enough unless reflection follows it. An employee may be given a difficult task that the plan counts in the experience share, and then nobody sits with the employee to ask what was learned from it. The source exists and has not been used.

A hypothetical example: a development plan and the numbers of its distribution

Take a hypothetical establishment that prepared a development plan of 200 hours for the year for a new team manager. If the percentages were applied literally, experience would take 70% of 200 = 140 hours, relationships 20% of 200 = 40 hours and formal training 10% of 200 = 20 hours. The total is 140 + 40 + 20 = 200 hours.

At the end of the year the record showed 110 hours in new tasks, 36 hours in mentoring and feedback meetings and 54 hours in courses. The total is 110 + 36 + 54 = 200 hours. The share of experience is 110 ÷ 200 = 55%, the share of relationships is 36 ÷ 200 = 18% and the share of courses is 54 ÷ 200 = 27%. The courses exceeded their target by 27 minus 10 = 17 percentage points, and experience fell short of its target by 70 minus 55 = 15 points.

The difference does not mean that the plan failed, or that 70% is the right figure. The new manager may have needed more courses because the field was new to the manager. The calculation shows that the plan leaned toward the classroom more than intended, so the question is why, and the distribution can be adjusted if needed. The figures are hypothetical and set to illustrate. They do not represent an establishment or a study, and the example does not mean that a distribution of 55, 18 and 27 is customary.

Do the percentages suit every employee and every stage?

The formula does not say. It is attributed to research on successful managers. It may not apply to a junior employee who needs a theoretical foundation before being given work, to an occupation that requires formal qualification before practice, or to a skill that an individual learns from scratch.

The suitable distribution can change with the job, the experience of its holder and the nature of what is learned. The percentages describe the learning sources of a particular group when that group was asked, and they are not a yardstick by which every programme is judged.

How the model is misused

• Treating the percentages as a strict rule. Hours are counted to match 70, 20 and 10 exactly, which the formula in its origin does not say.
• Treating courses as low in value. The training budget is cancelled on the ground that courses are 10%. The formula does not say that a course has no effect. It says that the share of courses in that survey was smaller.
• Assigning difficult tasks without support. The employee takes on work beyond the employee’s capacity and finds nobody to guide, and the result is confusion and not learning.
• Measuring the shares by hours alone. An hour on a routine task is not an hour on a difficult one, and what matters is what the employee learned from it.
• Attributing effect figures to the model. An example is saying that following the model raises performance by a given percentage, a claim with no support in the formula.

Questions for reviewing a plan

Instead of measuring the plan by how closely it matches the percentages, whoever prepares the plan can ask questions that are close to the work:

• Which tasks will the employee be given in this period, and what is new in them for the employee?
• Who will sit with the employee after each task to ask what happened?
• Which courses are essential because the employee cannot perform the task without them?
• How will it be established at the end of the period that the employee actually learned something?

If the plan has an answer to these questions, it has done what the model is meant to do, whatever its percentages.

The role of the direct manager

The two largest shares in the formula, experience and relationships, are in the hands of the direct manager more than of the training department. The manager chooses the task that is assigned, sits with the employee afterwards and gives an opinion on the employee’s performance. When distributing work, the manager can ask who would benefit from a task more than others would, and can set aside a short time after the assignment to discuss it.

Whether working conditions allow the employee to apply what was learned is a separate question, called training transfer.

Is there a study behind the percentages?

We do not state that the 70/20/10 division is established by experiment. In the sources we reviewed, we found no published study that measures these shares across a range of working groups and supports them with figures. Criticisms of the formula have been raised in the learning and development literature. They are that it rests on a survey of a limited number of successful managers, that the percentages are approximate and rounded to round numbers, and that they invite being treated as a rule.

We adopt no alternative figure of our own. The formula is treated as a reminder that learning has several sources, and not as a yardstick to cite. Each establishment looks at what its employees actually learn and from where.

The distribution comes after identifying what employees need, as in training needs analysis, and the evaluation of programme results comes after it, as in the Kirkpatrick model. If what is to be learned and how it will be measured have not been defined, no percentage helps in distributing activities.

The formula remains a quick way to remind those who design development that a course is part of the picture and not all of it. It points to a place that can be forgotten in a plan, and what is decided afterwards rests on the employee’s need and on the nature of the work.

This is an explanation of the concept, not legal advice.