Most companies have and use a budget for leadership development. The budget gets used up with a leadership workshop or a four-day training programme. The managers attend these sessions (some less enthusiastically than others) and then go back to their desks. Six months later, and nothing has changed.
The same managers are still micro-managing. The same conversations are still being avoided. Teams are not empowered any more than they were six months ago.
This scenario is common when leadership development is
treated like an event instead of a process.
I have learnt that to build a leadership development programme that
works a few things need to be considered.
Don’t assume where your leaders are. While they may sit at the same level in the organisation, new managers and experienced managers have different needs. The new managers need to build foundational habits such as how to give feedback, how to coach, how to hold a boundary and how to have the hard conversations instead of avoiding it. Experienced managers need to unlearn years of doing the technical work themselves and learn how to lead the people that are doing the technical work. Development programmes that don’t distinguish between these two groups end up being too basic for one group and too abstract for the other.
The training has to work at the level of behaviour, not just knowledge. Anyone can learn the theory of psychological safety or servant leadership in an afternoon. Very few people can walk out of that afternoon and behave differently, especially when they are under pressure. Managers need to be able to practice what they’ve learnt by repeating the new behaviours over months. This is why coaching is helpful. In practice, that might mean a manager rehearsing a difficult conversation before they have it, or unpacking with a coach why they reverted to micro-managing under a deadline instead of delegating. It's slow, unglamorous work, and it's exactly the part a four-day workshop can't do. While the training builds the concepts, the coaching helps the practice.
We have to be honest about the culture. You can’t focus your leadership development programme on servant leadership in a command-and-control culture. Managers will be unable to coach their team or to empower their team to make decisions if the systems around them still rewards control and punishes delegation. Development programmes that ignore the surrounding culture sets people up for failure the moment they come back to their desks. This doesn't mean development has to wait for the culture to change first. The programme itself has to work on both fronts at once, building the individual skill and helping shift the systems around it, or the two will keep undoing each other.
The systems need to support the behaviour change. Leadership development, coaching and the
underlying HR systems and practices are not separate areas in this
scenario. If they are aligned, the
environment can and will support the necessary behaviour change. Managers will feel safe to try new ways of
doing things and will have the space to practice the theory.
Done this way, the shift is visible. Managers stop reacting to every fire and start anticipating them. Feedback happens in the moment instead of building up into resentment. Teams report feeling trusted rather than watched, and that shows up in retention long before it shows up on an engagement survey.
Creating an impactful leadership development programme
requires honesty about where people currently are, patience for behaviour
change to actually take root, and a willingness to look at the whole system,
not just at the roles in one level of the organisational chart. Your managers will be armed with the correct
tools and knowledge and will be supported by the systems and practices to make
the behaviour changes.