Knowledge

If your answer is "management" or "communication" or "negotiation", you haven't done your homework yet. What exactly do you want to improve? Exactly what performance needs improvement? What specific behavior do you want to enhance?

Are you convinced that improving it is a priority?

There are so many nice things to learn, but so little time and budget available for learning. It is easy to waste your time while having a good time). But you can have a good time AND make a great use of your training resources. Make sure training will focus on what really matters both for your organization and for the participants. Is there a compelling reason for this training? Is it really important to have it now? Does it efficiently support the strategic objectives of your organization? Is it a "must have", or just a "nice to have"? What do you risk if you don't do the training?

Will better skills lead to better performance?

Sometimes, the reason for poor performance has nothing to do with lacking skills. If I learn to swim, my swimming performance will be zero if I don't have a swimming pool. If I learn creativity, I won't be able to use it and be more creative if my boss is a risk-averse tradition lover who won't leave me any room for innovation. Training is very often a bad solution to a real problem. Don't make that mistake. Make sure the bottleneck is indeed about skills, and not about anything else such as lack of strategic focus, inefficient organization, conflicts among decision-makers, laziness, lack of motivation, etc.