Why your last leadership programme didn’t stick
Staff training and development is one of the biggest headaches and pressure points for HR and L&D professionals. The message from on high comes down: this is what we want. You put the leadership programme together. It gets commissioned. The budget gets approved. The participants attend. The feedback forms come back glowing, 4.8 out of 5, “excellent facilitator,” “really made me think.”
Three months later, nothing has changed.
Six months later, you’re back where you started. Same issues. Same frustrated senior leaders wondering why their middle managers still can’t delegate, still avoid difficult conversations, still create bottlenecks instead of developing their teams.
And somewhere, there’s an invoice for £15,000 that feels like money you might as well have set on fire. Next year’s training budget is toast if you can’t show value for money and measurable improvements in performance.
Is this the pattern you’re stuck in?
The organisation invests in leadership training. There is initial enthusiasm. Maybe even some good intentions about “putting this into practice.” Then everyone goes back to their desks, back to their inboxes, back to exactly the same environment that created the leadership gaps in the first place.
Within weeks, the insights fade. The new approaches get abandoned under pressure. The behaviours revert to default.
And the conclusion? “Leadership training doesn’t work” or “Coaching is a waste of money.”
You’re not alone in reaching this conclusion. Globally, organisations spend over $366 billion per year on leadership development. And yet, according to research cited by McKinsey, only 11% of executives strongly agree that their leadership development efforts achieve desired outcomes. Some studies suggest that up to 75% of leadership knowledge is forgotten within a week of completing training.
That’s not just disappointing. It’s negligent. The programme probably wasn’t the problem. Your implementation was.
Why excellent feedback scores mean nothing six months later
Those glowing evaluations you received? They measured how people felt in the room. How engaging the facilitator was. How relevant the content seemed in that moment.
They didn’t measure whether anyone actually changed their behaviour. They couldn’t. Because behaviour change doesn’t happen in a training room, it happens in the messy, pressure-filled reality of leading teams through budget cuts, restructures and competing priorities.
That’s where most leadership programmes are set up to fail. Not because the content was poor. Not because the leaders weren’t committed. But because organisations send people on programmes and then do precisely nothing to help them apply what they’ve learned.
Leadership experts largely agree that we now have a work culture that prefers performative improvement to actual transformation. High attendance at a popular leadership bootcamp doesn’t translate to high application back at work. The bad habits remain. The toxic patterns persist. High performers continue to walk out the door, taking their experience and organisational knowledge with them.
Leadership flows from identity, not instruction
The leadership development industry is built on a faulty premise: teach people better behaviours and they’ll become better leaders. Show them how to delegate. Give them frameworks for difficult conversations. Train emotional intelligence. Teach the competencies, and the leadership will follow.
Except it doesn’t. Because leadership flows from identity, not instruction.
You can teach someone the five steps to effective delegation. You can give them scripts, frameworks and accountability. But if their identity is still rooted in being the person who knows all the answers, the fixer, the expert, the one who swoops in to save the day, those five steps won’t survive pressure.
Change happens from the inside out. When people change how they feel, they change how they act. Behaviour change without identity shift is exhausting. It becomes a constant performance, fighting against who you believe you need to be in order to lead differently.
Real, sustainable change happens when people shift how they see themselves as leaders.
When someone moves from “the person who has to have all the answers” to “the person who develops others to find answers,” delegation stops being a technique they’re trying to remember. It becomes who they are.
When someone shifts from “I’m responsible for solving everything” to “I’m responsible for creating the conditions where my team can solve things,” the frameworks they’ve learned finally stick, because they’re aligned with identity, not fighting against it.
Why most leadership training doesn’t stick
Traditional leadership development treats symptoms, not causes. It addresses the what (behaviours, competencies, skills) without addressing the why (identity, beliefs, self-perception). It teaches people to act differently without helping them become different.
Then organisations wonder why, three months later, everyone has reverted to old patterns. Why the micromanaging manager is still micromanaging. Why the conflict-avoider is still avoiding. Why the person who can’t delegate still has a team that can’t function without them.
It’s not because they didn’t learn the material. It’s because the material never addressed who they believe they need to be.
This work is harder. It’s slower. It doesn’t fit neatly into a one-day workshop with before-and-after competency assessments. But it’s the work that actually changes people. Because once someone’s identity shifts and they see themselves differently as a leader, the behaviours you’re trying to teach become the obvious next step, not a performative effort held together by willpower.
That’s the difference between development that fades in six weeks and development that fundamentally changes how someone shows up, even under pressure.
But even when programmes do address identity, they still fail if the system doesn’t support them. You can do everything right in the training room and still set people up to fail the moment they return to work.
Five ways you’re helping your leadership programme to fail
No follow-up support
The programme ends on Friday. On Monday, participants are back in back-to-back meetings with no space to reflect, experiment or consolidate new approaches. There’s no meaningful accountability, no peer review, no feedback loops, no structure to support continued development.
No protected time to practise.
You’ve taught someone a new way to run one-to-ones or delegate. When, exactly, are they meant to practise this? Between the crisis meeting and the budget review? Without real opportunities to apply new approaches in context, nothing sticks.
The same environment that created the problems.
If senior leaders still micromanage, still reward firefighting over development, still model the behaviours you’re trying to change, what do you think is going to win?
Unrealistic expectations about timelines.
Leadership development isn’t an event. It’s a shift in how someone shows up every day. Expecting it to be embedded in a fortnight is fantasy.
Rewarding presentation over reflection.
Many programmes prioritise how well participants can articulate leadership concepts, not whether they’ve examined their own patterns. Teaching what good leadership looks like, without talking honestly about bad leadership, creates performance, not transformation.
The role of senior leadership in killing their own programmes
Senior leadership often actively undermines the development they’ve commissioned. They send people on programmes about empowerment, then override decisions in front of teams. They invest in work-life balance, then email at 11pm expecting instant replies. They commission training on feedback and difficult conversations, then avoid both themselves.
When the programme “doesn’t work,” they blame the provider. Or decide leadership development is a waste of money. Or conclude their people “just aren’t leadership material.”
The problem isn’t the people. The problem is the system. Senior leaders say they want to move in one direction and then walk in the other. It kills innovation and stagnates careers.
What actually makes development stick
Real leadership development doesn’t happen in isolation. It happens when:
● Learning is reinforced in the daily environment, not just discussed once in a workshop
● Leaders have protected time and space to practise new approaches in their real work
● There are ongoing accountability structures — peer review, feedback loops, coaching
● Senior leadership models the behaviours they expect others to develop
● The focus shifts from performing leadership to examining and reshaping leadership identity
● Organisations stop treating development as an event and start treating it as a practice
This isn’t about finding a better facilitator. It’s about fundamentally rethinking how you approach leadership development.
Over the coming months, I’ll be unpacking what this looks like in practice, from why one-day workshops fail, to what development looks like outside the training room, to how you get genuine buy-in from senior leaders.
The foundation is simple: stop blaming the training. Start examining your systems.
If this sounds familiar
If you’re recognising your organisation in every paragraph, you’re not alone. And you’re not stuck with this pattern forever. When you’re part of the 89% of organisations whose leadership development isn’t achieving desired outcomes, it’s time to look at how you’re setting development up, not just what you’re buying.
Because doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results isn't a strategy. And right now, organisations are contributing to a $366 billion global industry while watching the investment evaporate within weeks.
“But our problems are bigger than leadership development”
You might be thinking “our issues run deeper than a training programme can solve” Toxic culture. Dysfunctional senior leadership. Impossible workloads. What’s the point of developing leaders in a broken system?
Fair question. And you’re right, no leadership programme fixes systemic problems on its own.
But you can do both.
While you work on structural change, senior leadership behaviour, culture, workload, your managers are still leading teams. Still making decisions. Still reinforcing the problems or becoming part of the solution.
It’s not a choice between fixing leaders or fixing the system. The answer is developing leaders in a way that supports systemic change, not pretending the system is fine.
If you send people on programmes about empowerment while senior leaders continue to micromanage, you’re wasting money. But if you develop leaders with an honest acknowledgment of the reality they’re operating in and equip them to navigate it while contributing to change, that’s different.
That’s leadership development that serves the organisation you’re trying to become, not just the one you are today.
So what now?
The next time you commission a leadership programme, ask yourself: are we setting this up to succeed, or are we just spending money to say we did something?
If you’re ready to develop leaders in a way that reflects the messy reality of your organisation and supports genuine transformation rather than performative improvement, let’s talk.