Leadership Development That Sticks

Most leadership programs end the way they begin, with a binder and good intentions. A few weeks later the binder sits on a shelf, and the leader has drifted back to old habits. The content was not wrong. It simply did not transfer. After two decades building leaders and studying how people actually change, I have a hot take. Growth does not happen in the session. It happens in the days between them.

The transfer problem is real, and it is old

Researchers have understood this gap for a long time. In their landmark review of training transfer, Baldwin and Ford found that only a fraction of what people learn in training ever shows up in their day-to-day work (Baldwin and Ford, 1988). The failure is rarely the curriculum. It is the design around it. Beer and his colleagues call this the great training robbery, and their study of corporate programs found that leaders often return to systems and cultures that quietly pull them back toward old behavior (Beer, Finnström, and Schrader, 2016). The lesson is humbling. You cannot train your way to change if the environment resets the leader every Monday.

Growth is deliberate practice, not exposure

We tend to treat learning as absorption. Sit in the room, hear the ideas, and improvement will follow. The science says otherwise. Ericsson and his colleagues showed that expertise comes from deliberate practice, which means focused repetition on a specific skill, with feedback, at the edge of your ability (Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Römer, 1993). A workshop can spark an idea. Only practice turns it into a habit. That is why the strongest development gives leaders small and real reps between sessions, then a way to see how those reps actually went.

The mindset beneath the skill

Sometimes a leader knows exactly what to do and still does not do it. Kegan and Lahey call this an immunity to change, a set of hidden commitments that quietly protect the old way of working (Kegan and Lahey, 2009). A manager who avoids hard feedback may hold an unspoken belief that being liked is what keeps them safe. No amount of feedback training moves that leader until the underlying assumption is surfaced and tested. Real development works at that deeper level, not only at the level of technique.

Follow-up is the multiplier

If one practice separates programs that stick from programs that fade, it is follow-up. In a study of thousands of leaders, Goldsmith and Morgan found that those who followed up with their teams after training were seen as far more improved than those who did not, almost regardless of the program itself (Goldsmith and Morgan, 2004). Follow-up is not busywork. It is how a private commitment becomes visible, and how a leader stays accountable to the very people the change is meant to serve.

What to ask of any program

So before you invest in developing your leaders, ask a few plain questions. What will leaders practice between sessions, and who will give them feedback. What hidden beliefs might hold the old behavior in place, and does the program go there. How will follow-up be built into the work rather than bolted on afterward. And does the surrounding culture reward the new behavior or punish it. If a program cannot answer these, the binder will win.

Leadership development is not an event to attend. It is a practice to sustain. The organizations that understand this stop asking whether the training was good, and start asking whether the leader is different on an ordinary Tuesday. That is the only measure that matters.

Learn more about my work at annisstubbs.com, or reach me at annis@thepapyrusgroup.com.

References

Baldwin, T. T., and Ford, J. K. (1988). Transfer of Training: A Review and Directions for Future Research. Personnel Psychology, 41(1), 63 to 105.

Beer, M., Finnström, M., and Schrader, D. (2016). Why Leadership Training Fails and What to Do About It. Harvard Business Review, October 2016.

Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., and Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance. Psychological Review, 100(3), 363 to 406.

Goldsmith, M., and Morgan, H. (2004). Leadership Is a Contact Sport. Strategy and Business, 36.

Kegan, R., and Lahey, L. L. (2009). Immunity to Change. Harvard Business Press.