Almost every L&D budget I've seen includes a leadership program. The catalogue varies - situational leadership, coaching for managers, executive presence, emotional intelligence. The shape doesn't.
Three months after the certificates are handed out, most graduates are leading the same way they were before they enrolled. The same meetings, the same decisions, the same quiet frustrations from the people they manage. The difference shows up in a feedback survey six months later, and quietly disappears from the conversation.
The training didn't fail. The operating model around it did. Specifically, in three places.
The program taught frameworks. The job demands decisions.
The most common shape of leadership training is here is a model for X, here is a case study about X, now apply X. The participant leaves with a vocabulary - "psychological safety," "radical candor," "servant leadership" - and a sense that they understand something they didn't before.
But understanding a framework and changing a decision are not the same thing. The decision the manager will make on Monday morning is not which framework applies? It's do I push back on this deadline, knowing my VP will not love it? Frameworks are not what answer that question. Practice does. So does watching what the senior person in the room does when the same situation lands on their desk.
If your leadership program is heavy on models and light on real decisions made by real people in the room, you are paying for vocabulary, not behavior change.
The graduate's environment didn't change
A leadership program is, in effect, an experiment in the participant. We are asking them to behave differently. But behavior is shaped at least as much by the environment as by the individual.
If a manager goes through a coaching program and then returns to a culture that punishes vulnerability, the program loses. If they learn to delegate and return to a workload that requires them to do the work themselves, the program loses. If they're trained to give difficult feedback and their own VP never models it, the program loses.
The L&D function is usually the last function to know any of this - because the metric on the dashboard is did they complete the program, not did the system around them allow the new behavior to take root.
The honest fix is uncomfortable: leadership development needs to come bundled with a small intervention in the team or the structure around the graduate. Otherwise the new behavior will not survive its first conflict.
There was no measurement of the thing that was supposed to change
Here is what most leadership programs measure:
- Attendance
- Completion
- Net Promoter Score on the program itself
- A self-rated competency assessment six months later
Here is what they almost never measure:
- The actual decisions the manager makes
- Whether their team's psychological safety scores moved
- Retention on the team
- Whether their direct reports describe their manager differently than before
The first list tells you the program ran. The second list tells you the program worked. They are not the same thing, and you cannot trade one for the other.
If you cannot articulate what behavior the program is supposed to change and how you will know it changed, you do not have a leadership program. You have a budget line.
What the successful programs had in common
The leadership work I've seen actually shift behavior had three things in common, and none of them are about the curriculum.
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The program included a small operating change. A new check-in format with the manager's team. A quarterly reflection with their own manager. Something tangible that lived in the calendar after the program ended.
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There was a 90-day re-entry plan. Each graduate left with two or three concrete behaviors to practice and a real person - usually a peer in the cohort - they were committing to, with a check-in date.
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A behavior outcome was named upfront. Not "be a better leader." Something measurable: reduce time-to-decision in our weekly leadership meeting from 45 to 25 minutes, or increase psychological safety score by 0.4 on the next pulse. When the outcome is concrete, the conversation about the program becomes useful. When it isn't, the conversation becomes ceremonial.
The curriculum matters less than people think. The system around the curriculum is doing most of the work - or most of the damage.
If the leadership program you're scoping is the same shape as the one that ran two years ago and didn't move the needle, the budget isn't the question. The shape is. We're happy to compare notes on that before you sign the next one.
- Mohammad Firikh, Founding Partner