Thank you both Kristie and Michele for your thoughtful responses! I truly appreciate it. 

Kristie- I like the recommendation of budgeting seats per department. Out of curiosity, of those 5 people chosen by executives to attend the coaching program, were they expected to bring back knowledge to present to others who were not chosen to go? I also appreciate that you do a wrap-up to show managers where their team's money is being spent because I agree that sometimes training gets put on the back burner and commitments are not followed through on. 

Michele- thank you for the suggestion of implementing a Strategic Workforce Development Plan! I do think this is something that our organization has very loosely had in place for some time, but it has never been standardized across all departments with formal check-ins. It certainly sounds like it will help initiate those tough conversations and identify priority initiatives. In terms of quarterly check-ins, how many directors/managers were you typically working with to ensure their teams were hitting their identified benchmarks?

My budget covers the big company wide training expenses.  To make sure those are allocated fairly I allocate seats per team.  For example, we just had a coaching program.  I had budgeted for 5 people attend.  I went to the 4 executives that oversee multiple teams and told them they could each nominate one person.  For another program where we had 30 seats I did it a bit in reverse, knowing the target I placed people based on their role then sent it out to the executive team and asked if they wanted to make any changes to who was representing their teams.  In my quarterly or bi-annual talent meetings this year I have started to report back to each team on how much of the training budget that team has used so that I can get a benchmark.  I also want to make sure that I'm showing them where they are spending the money because in some cases they are spending money and people are not following through on their commitments.