If You Want Stronger Leaders, Stop Buying Training and Start Designing Development
When clients come to me about leadership development, they usually arrive with a list of training topics they want their leaders to learn.
Feedback. Accountability. Delegation. Difficult conversations. Coaching skills.
It’s a reasonable place to start. Those topics reflect real challenges leaders are dealing with. Managers are avoiding conversations, decisions are getting escalated and accountability feels inconsistent. Wanting to invest in leadership training is the right instinct.
What matters most, though, is not whether the right topics are identified. It’s whether the development experience is designed in a way that actually changes how leaders show up once they’re back in the work.
Leadership development works when it is built to influence behaviour over time, not just deliver information in a moment.
Why Training Workshops So Often Fail
Workshops are appealing because they are contained. They have a clear beginning and end. They are easy to schedule, easy to explain internally, and easy to measure in the short term.
The challenge is that leadership does not operate in contained moments.
Leadership shows up in real time. In conversations that feel uncomfortable. In decisions made quickly. In patterns that repeat when things get busy or stressful. A single workshop can introduce ideas, but it rarely creates the conditions required for those ideas to translate into sustained behaviour change.
What I see most often is this: leaders leave a session with good intentions and increased awareness, then return to the same expectations, pressures, and habits that shaped their behaviour in the first place. Without reinforcement, the organization naturally pulls people back to what feels familiar.
This is why leadership development needs to be designed as more than a few training sessions. It needs to create the conditions for practice, reflection, and reinforcement.
What Actually Works
When leadership development is designed well, it doesn’t start with training. It starts with stepping back and looking at the whole system leaders are operating in.
To truly uplevel leaders, the design needs to account for how behaviour changes over time, how leaders learn under pressure, and what they return to once the sessions are over. When those pieces are considered together, leadership development becomes something leaders carry with them, not something they attend.
There are a few ingredients that consistently matter in that design. When they are present, training has somewhere to land. When they are missing, even strong content struggles to stick.
1. Behaviour Change
The first place to focus is behaviour.
Before any sessions are designed, there needs to be clarity on what leaders should actually do differently and why that change matters to the organization. Leadership development works best when it is tied to specific outcomes the business is trying to achieve.
That might mean improving retention on a team, reducing escalation, increasing accountability, or supporting leaders to make decisions more effectively. Those outcomes help define the behaviours that need to shift.
When behaviour is connected to organizational goals, leadership development becomes purposeful. It creates a clear line between the investment being made and the impact the organization is looking for, and it provides a way to notice whether progress is actually happening.
2. Learning Experience
Once the desired behaviour is clear, the learning experience needs to support leaders in actually practicing it.
This means designing development around real situations leaders are navigating, not abstract examples or generic case studies. Leaders work through conversations they are preparing for, decisions they are hesitating on, or team dynamics that are currently creating friction.
Learning is spaced over time so leaders can try things in their day-to-day work, reflect on what happened, and come back with questions or insights. This is where understanding turns into capability.
A well-designed learning experience keeps leadership development close to the work. It makes the training feel relevant, practical, and easier to apply long after the sessions are over.
3. Coaching
Coaching creates the space where learning turns into action.
As leaders begin trying new behaviours, questions and challenges surface quickly. Coaching provides a place to talk through what happened, what felt uncomfortable, and what got in the way. This might happen one-on-one with the facilitator between sessions, or in group coaching conversations woven into the learning design.
Both formats serve the same purpose. They slow things down enough for leaders to reflect, make sense of their experience, and decide how they want to approach similar situations next time.
Coaching supports leaders as they build confidence and consistency. It helps close the gap between knowing what to do and doing it well, especially when the change involves judgment, emotion, or unlearning old habits.
4. Cohort
Leadership development is stronger when leaders go through it together.
Learning alongside peers builds shared language and shared expectations. It normalizes challenges that leaders often think they are facing alone and creates accountability across the group.
Over time, this strengthens leadership as a collective capability, not just an individual one.
5. Systems
Leaders take their cues from what is recognized, discussed, and reinforced around them. When leadership expectations are clear and performance conversations reflect the behaviours being developed, leaders understand that this work matters.
This might show up through updated leadership expectations, changes to how performance is discussed, or more consistent feedback tied to the behaviours the organization is trying to strengthen. These signals help anchor the learning in day-to-day operations.
When leadership development is supported by the organization’s systems, behaviour change has somewhere to settle. Without that reinforcement, even strong training efforts can fade once the sessions end.
Why This Sequence Matters
Each of these elements matters on its own, but the real impact comes from how they work together.
When leadership development begins with clear behavioural goals, leaders understand what the organization is asking of them and why it matters.
When learning is grounded in real experience and supported through coaching, leaders have the opportunity to practice, reflect, and adjust in real time.
When leaders move through the work as a cohort, growth becomes shared rather than isolated.
And when the organization’s systems reinforce the behaviours being developed, change has somewhere to stick.
The Takeaway
Training has an important role to play.
But leadership development truly works when it moves beyond the training topic list and into how leaders actually behave day to day. If the goal is a stronger, more consistent leadership team, the strategic design matters.
👉 If you’re thinking about developing your leaders and want to explore an approach designed to create real change, book an intro call to start the conversation.