The global market for leadership development is enormous: estimated at over £350 billion annually. The evidence on the effectiveness of much of this spend is considerably less impressive. A 2019 Deloitte report found that only 9% of HR leaders believe their leadership development programmes have clear business impact. McKinsey research found that most leadership development programmes fail to achieve meaningful behaviour change because they get the design fundamentals wrong.
This is not primarily a content problem. The challenge is design: understanding how adults actually develop as leaders, and building programmes that are consistent with this understanding rather than optimised for comfort, logistics, or the appearance of learning.
How Leaders Actually Develop
The most influential research on leadership development comes from the Centre for Creative Leadership's 70-20-10 framework, which emerged from studies of successful senior executives across multiple industries. The research found that leadership development, for the executives studied, came approximately 70% from challenging on-the-job experiences, 20% from developmental relationships (coaching, mentoring, peer learning), and 10% from formal training.
The implications of this framework are significant. If challenging experience is the primary driver of leadership development, then the most important design question is not "what content should we include?" but "what experiences should we create, and how do we maximise learning from them?" Formal training, however well-designed, is a small part of the answer.
What makes an experience developmental is a specific combination of factors. It must stretch the leader beyond their current capability — requiring them to do something they haven't done before, with genuine uncertainty about whether they can do it. It must have real consequences — stakes that make the performance matter. And it must be accompanied by reflection and feedback — without which experience simply reinforces existing patterns rather than developing new ones.
The Design Mistakes That Undermine Impact
Several design choices consistently undermine leadership development effectiveness.
Classroom-heavy design. A programme that is predominantly classroom-based with minimal on-the-job application will produce knowledge but is unlikely to change behaviour. The classroom is the weakest lever for behaviour change. Its appropriate role is building shared frameworks, creating psychological safety for honest conversation, and providing tools for reflection — not as the primary vehicle of development.
No individual accountability. Programmes that treat development as a group experience, without individual accountability for applying specific learning, consistently show lower behaviour change than those that build in individual commitments, follow-up, and consequences. People develop as individuals in the context of group experience, not as groups.
Episodic rather than sustained. A two-day workshop is an event. Leadership development requires a journey: repeated exposure, practice, feedback, and reflection over a sustained period. The neuroscience of habit change makes this clear: new neural patterns require repeated activation to become stable. Short, intensive experiences can spark insight. Sustained, spaced programmes build capability.
Missing the manager's manager. Research consistently finds that the single biggest predictor of whether leadership development transfers back to the workplace is the behaviour of the participant's own manager. If their manager doesn't model the behaviours being developed, doesn't create conditions for their direct reports to practice new approaches, and doesn't acknowledge and reinforce development, the programme will have minimal lasting impact. This makes including the manager's manager a design imperative, not an optional enhancement.
Evaluation as afterthought. The Kirkpatrick model of evaluation distinguishes four levels: reaction (did participants enjoy it?), learning (did they acquire knowledge?), behaviour (did they change their behaviour?), and results (did it deliver business impact?). Most organisations measure level one only, which tells them almost nothing about development effectiveness. Designing for levels three and four — behaviour change and business results — requires building measurement into the programme design from the beginning, not retrofitting evaluation at the end.
A Better Design Framework
Effective leadership development programmes share several design characteristics.
Start with a capability model. What specific leadership capabilities matter most for your organisation's strategy and context? These should be specific and behavioural — not "strategic thinking" as an abstract concept, but the specific observable behaviours that strategic thinking produces in your context. The programme should be designed to develop these specific capabilities, not generic leadership competencies.
Build in stretch assignments. Real developmental experiences — not activities designed for learning but actual work that matters to the organisation and stretches the leader's capability — should be the central vehicle of development. Formal learning sessions should serve these experiences: providing frameworks for sense-making, tools for reflection, and skill practice.
Design for spaced learning. Rather than intensive two or three-day programmes, consider a modular design that returns participants to their work between learning events. This creates the conditions for immediate application and allows learning to be tested in reality before the next session.
Include coaching. One-to-one coaching, either internal or external, dramatically increases the impact of leadership development by providing the personalised feedback and accountability that group programmes cannot deliver. Even a small number of coaching conversations integrated into a programme (three to six hours over the programme duration) significantly improves behaviour change outcomes.
Measure behaviour, not just satisfaction. Design the evaluation before the programme begins. What behaviour change do you expect to see? How will you measure it? Ideally, include a 360-degree assessment before and after the programme to capture change, and follow up six months after completion to assess sustainability.
Try This
Before commissioning or designing your next leadership development programme, answer three questions: What specific leadership behaviours, observable and measurable, do we need to see more of in our organisation? What conditions in the workplace currently prevent or discourage those behaviours? What evidence will we accept that the programme has worked? The answers to these three questions should shape every design decision that follows.
References
Centre for Creative Leadership (2023) The 70-20-10 Framework for Leadership Development. Greensboro, NC: CCL.
Deloitte (2019) Global Human Capital Trends 2019. London: Deloitte Insights.
Kirkpatrick, D.L. and Kirkpatrick, J.D. (2006) Evaluating Training Programmes: The Four Levels, 3rd edn. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.
McCall, M.W., Lombardo, M.M. and Morrison, A.M. (1988) The Lessons of Experience. New York: Lexington Books.
McKinsey & Company (2020) Why leadership development programs fail. McKinsey Quarterly, January.