Why do leadership development programmes fail?

When research shows that exceptional leadership can double profits it’s no wonder that hundreds of billions are spent each year trying to develop exceptional leaders.

And yet, despite all this cost and effort, something obviously isn’t working. A search on Google for the phrase: “Why do leadership development programmes fail” yields 212m results!

A sample review of these results tells us that one of the biggest challenges is the conflation of “training” with “development”.

It is understandable that this confusion occurs in the minds of clients, but providers, who really should know better, make the same error.

So what is the difference?

Training is about improving or learning new skills: it is the “L” in “L&D”.

Any training we receive is filtered through the lens of our existing mental models.

So while it is possible that training might prompt an incremental change in our mental model relating to the subject being taught, mostly we just take in that which fits with our existing models.

To overcome this confirmation bias, development - the “D” in “L&D” - on the other hand is intended to target changes to our mental models, not just incrementally but transformationally.

Or to put it more succinctly, training will provide you with skills, and development will help you to apply those skills more effectively.

As a new leader at a former employer, I was invited to a leadership development course where I learned the importance of timely feedback, some preferred models for decision making, and how to align my personal values with those of the organisation.

What it did not do though, was develop my capacity to choose when and how to give feedback for best effect, to apply better thinking in the decision making models, or to be able to be intentional about my application of my, and the organisation’s, values.

OK, so now we’ve separated training from development, does that mean that only Learning badged as Development fails and that all is well in the world of correctly-defined development programmes?

Unfortunately not!

And the different sources broadly agree on some of the key reasons why:

1. Leadership development programmes are often events, but development takes time. It is not ‘one and done’.
2. Leadership development activities are often disconnected from the day-to-day work of the leader, but development needs to be context-dependent and grounded in real, meaningful, work
3. Without a before and after picture, it’s difficult to prove success, so perceived failure often results from an absence of measurement. This means that even though the participants are not failing, the perception creates their reality.
4. The environment is the biggest influencer of developmental level. Without a system that supports development and the changes in behaviour that this brings, people will revert to previous, ‘acceptable’, patterns of thinking and behaviour.

And of course, these are valid concerns.

But none of this really addresses the elephant in the training room.

Leadership development is frequently ineffective because the developmental approaches employed are themselves ineffective.

Many have little, if any, scientific validity, and those that do are typically based on now largely outdated, and often discredited, scientific understanding.

Even those with the highest level of scientific rigour behind them suffer from three key issues:

1. They use a scoring system to determine the developmental level of the client that relies on manual scoring. This leaves the determination open to the unconscious bias of the scorer.
2. They use a system of determining the developmental level of the client which is discursive rather than practical in nature. That is to say, they are measuring the client’s ‘talk’ rather than their ‘walk’.
3. Their models fail to identify what actually takes place when people move between developmental levels, which means that interventions can only be based on symptoms of thinking (the bridges and shells of stage transition - values, beliefs, target attributes, etc.) rather than concrete root causes

So does this mean that all leadership development efforts are doomed to be ineffective, and that we should all just give up?

Of course not.

Instead, we recommend the following.

1) Ensure that the programme is designed to actually Vertically Develop the participants. 

If the provider is talking about skills then understand that what they are selling is Learning not Development.

2) Ensure that appropriate measurement is carried out. 

At the IAD we measure the Vertical Development level of the leader on the Awareness Quotient (AQ) scale using a system free of human intervention (and thus bias). And by using questions focussed on exhibited behaviour, this measurement is based on practical intention, i.e., ‘the walk’ rather than ‘the talk’.

Measurement based on external measures can be used, but a couple of words of warning:

• Without a good, and consistent baseline, it can be impossible to differentiate the impacts of the development versus other factors
• Any subjective measures (such as 360 feedback) are open to the impact of human bias and, as such, may not be objectively useful.

3) Ensure that the approach being used targets an identifiable mechanism for development.

At the IAD we use Constructed Development Theory (Stevens, 2020). CDT demonstrates how human beings utilise shortcuts in their thinking to construct an Intention, Awareness, Choice and Response. The greater our awareness of our intention, the better we can respond at choice.

So our approach is to measure the level of awareness of our clients at the level of 50 Cognitive Intentions, combine that with an understanding of the impact that each of these CIs has on the effectiveness of a leader in context, and then target developmental interventions where they will have the greatest impact.

4) Ensure that developmental interventions are embedded in the day-to-day work of the leader.

Whilst exploring exemplar scenarios can be useful for creating understanding, at the IAD we ensure that we ground all development in the specific context of the leader, using real-world, active scenarios and situations.

We also advocate developmental facilitation with the aim of raising awareness of cognitive biases at play in real world interactions, at the moment of interaction.

5) Start at the top

The most effective leaders are coaches, but to coach someone effectively you have to be at least at the same developmental level. This means that the most senior leadership of the organisation must also be at the highest developmental level in order to support the growth of the those who report to them.

This same principal applies to those who are leading your development programme (the programme facilitators and coaches, what we call developmentalists) who must at least, be at the same developmental level as those they seek to develop.

At the IAD all our developmentalists have an MCO rating indicating their developmental level so that we can ensure we pair clients with developmentalists appropriately.



If you follow these five guidelines when embarking on a leadership development journey, then your chances of success will be significantly enhanced.