Leadership development without the training room
"We can't have people sitting in training rooms for days, we've got work to do."
I hear this a lot. And honestly, it's a fair point. Operational pressures are increasing and many of the leaders I work with are running teams that are already stretched, with a bigger workload, fewer bodies to get stuff done, deadlines that can’t be moved, and stakeholder expectations that keep climbing. Pulling key people out for a three-day off-site feels, quite reasonably, like asking a cardiac surgeon to step away mid-operation to attend a workshop on bedside manner.
I take the time objection seriously but I’m also honest about something: the training room isn't actually the problem. The problem is what happens, or rather, what doesn't happen, afterwards. This is where your training investment actually goes to die.
Do you recognise this pattern?
The organisation invests in a leadership programme. People go off to a venue. They come back energised, full of new frameworks and good intentions. For about a fortnight, things feel different. Then the workload reasserts itself, no one's reinforcing what was learned, no one's checking in, no one's holding space for the new behaviours, and within a month the organisation is more or less exactly where it was, except the budget is gone. The structure of the training and what they got from the day can’t bear the weight of real life.
That's the real issue. Not the days in the room. It’s the thundering silence and lack of implementation afterwards. Most "training doesn't work" stories aren't really about training failing. They're about training being treated as a complete intervention when it was only ever going to be a step in a longer journey.
When I learned to drive I did all the usual things; I went out with the instructor once a week, went out in the car with my Dad a few times in between if I was lucky and practiced until I was ready for my test. Learning to drive in a car with extra pedals and with someone who intervenes at any moment is worlds away from being behind the wheel of your own car, with no-one sitting next to you to save you. That first drive on my own after I passed my test, maybe I lost a wing mirror and that wasn’t ideal, but what I gained made me a much better driver than if I carried on learning in a controlled environment. Leadership development works in much the same way. You wouldn't expect someone to learn to drive by sitting through three days of theory and then never touching a wheel. But that’s the model we apply to leadership development, and then we act surprised when people drive into ditches.
Reframing the choice
Here's where I want to challenge the original objection. "We don't have time for training" usually frames the choice as this or that: either we do the residential programme, or we do nothing. Both options are bad. The residential programme on its own won't stick. Doing nothing means nothing changes.
The actual choice is different and it's between:
A traditional model: heavy upfront training, no follow-through, predictable disappointment.
A blended model: lighter formal input plus deliberate work to embed it in the day-to-day.
The second option uses far less time away from the job. It also produces far better results because the bit that changes how people lead doesn’t happen in the training room. It's the intentional practice, conversation, and reflection that happens around it.
What the research has been telling us for forty years
The 70-20-10 model has been around since the 1980s, developed by researchers at the Center for Creative Leadership. They studied successful executives and asked where their development had actually come from. The answer, on average:
Around 70% from challenging on-the-job experiences
Around 20% from relationships including coaching, mentoring, feedback from others
Around 10% from formal courses and reading
The exact percentages aren't the point. The point is the ratio. Most leadership development that actually changes how people lead happens in the work and in the conversations around the work. Formal training has its place but it's a smaller place than we usually treat it as.
Now look at how most organisations spend their development budget. The figures vary, but it's not unusual to see 70-80% going into the 10% category. The thing that produces the smallest portion of actual development gets the largest portion of the investment, and the activities that produce most of the development get almost nothing.
It’s not a time problem. It's a strategy problem.
Why context matters
There's a far bigger problem with treating the training room as the whole intervention. It strips out the context where leadership actually has to happen.
In the training room, you discuss a difficult conversation in the abstract. You roleplay it with a colleague who's playing your difficult employee. You leave with a framework. Then you go back to your actual workplace, where the difficult employee is your actual employee, the relationship has actual history, your actual workload is bearing down on you, and your actual boss is watching how you handle it.
The framework you learned doesn't always survive contact with the real situation. Not because there was anything wrong with the framework but because the difference between the simulated situation and the real one is enormous, and that's where most of the difficulty lives.
This is why the work around the training room matters so much. It's what bridges the gap. It's what turns an "interesting model" into "different way of leading." It’s where behaviour changes in the real world.
What a blended approach looks like
If you stop treating training as the whole intervention and start treating it as one element in a wider design, what do the other elements look like? Not anything exotic. Most fit around existing rhythms.
Coaching. A leader spends an hour with a coach working through a real situation they're facing right now. They leave with insight that applies immediately, because it was generated about something already happening and not filed away in the back of their brain in case they need it someday.
Short, focused sessions. Sixty or ninety minutes on one specific capability, giving feedback, running a one-to-one, handling conflict, followed by deliberate practice in real situations and a debrief. You don't need three days. You need three well-designed touchpoints.
Action learning sets. A small group of leaders meeting regularly to bring real problems they're working on. They challenge each other, share approaches, and hold each other accountable. The "training" is the conversation. The "application" is what they go and do between sessions.
Reflective practice. Building structured reflection into existing rhythms; what happened, what worked, what I'd do differently, what I'm learning about myself as a leader. Done well, this is more developmental than most courses.
Stretch assignments with support. Giving someone a project slightly beyond their current capability, with a coach or sponsor to help them think it through. The development is in the work.
Peer pairings. Two leaders working on similar challenges checking in with each other every couple of weeks. No formal programme, no provider, almost no time cost. Just sustained attention to how they're each leading.
These elements can sit alongside formal input including workshops, programmes or courses and that's where change (change that you can see, feel and measure) happens. The formal input gives the language and the framework. The wraparound gives the embedding. Neither does the job alone. Together, they change how people lead.
Building into what you already have
The next shift is to stop treating development as something you bolt on, and start treating it as something you build in.
Your one-to-ones are already happening. Are they coaching conversations, or status updates? The same thirty minutes can develop your leader or just inform them.
Team meetings are already happening. Is there a slot for reflection; what did we learn this week and what would we do differently or do they go straight into operational matters?
Projects that are already underway. Are you assigning them with development in mind and stretching this person into a new area, giving that one experience of something they haven't done before? Or are you just allocating the work?
Mistakes are already happening. Are they being treated as material to learn from, or as failures to be moved past quickly?
Most of what good development looks like is already sitting inside your existing operational rhythm. It's just not being used that way.
What next?
If "we can't spare the time" has been your reason for not investing in your leaders' development, I'd gently suggest the real issue is that you've only ever been offered one model and that model genuinely is a poor return on the time it demands. Send people away for days, hope something sticks, watch most of it evaporate by the end of the month. Of course you don't want to do that. You don’t want your leadership development investment to be the most expensive buffet you ever bought.
A blended approach uses far less time away from the job, embeds learning in the actual context where leaders need to use it, and most importantly, it doesn't end the moment people walk out of the room.
It costs less time, often costs less money, and produces more change. The only thing it costs more of is thought: about design, about follow-through, about what you actually want different at the end of it.
Which, if I'm honest, is where most development programmes fail anyway.
If the only model you've been offered is "send people away for days and hope something sticks," that's not a reflection of what development has to look like. It's a reflection of what you've been sold.
A blended approach looks different with less time out, more embedding in the work, and a design that doesn't end when people walk back through the door.
If you're done writing off leadership development spend as an acceptable loss, its time to talk about a better way to use that budget.