Five signs your leadership programme is treating symptoms

Leadership development is expensive to get wrong, and the cost is rarely just financial. When people invest time and effort in a programme that misses the real issue, trust in future development erodes quietly — and the next initiative starts from a worse position than the last.

The most common failure is not poor delivery. It is a good programme aimed at a symptom. People leave the programme with serious commitments but then reality bites!

Here are five signs that is what is happening.

One: the same themes keep returning

Year after year, the feedback names the same three issues. Difficult conversations. Accountability. Silo working. The content changes, the facilitators change, the branding certainly changes, and the themes stay exactly where they were.

When a theme survives repeated intervention, it is usually being produced by something structural rather than by a skills gap. People are not failing to have difficult conversations because they have never been shown how. They are avoiding them because, in this organisation, having them has costs and avoiding them does not.

Two: the request arrived fully formed

"We need a two-day programme on resilience for our middle managers, starting in September."

A specified solution arriving before any diagnosis is a useful warning. It usually means someone has already interpreted the problem, often reasonably, and the interpretation has not been tested. Resilience training is a common example: sometimes people genuinely need better coping strategies, and sometimes they need a reduced workload, more clarity or a manager who makes decisions.

I recall a programme that I was asked to develop to make graduates more resilient. When I delved into when they needed to display resilience it included situations when a very successful fee earner threw staplers at people when he was annoyed.

Perhaps that was the issue that needed handling. I guess I could have helped to learn ducking, dodging and catching?

Often it is the politically easier option that is taken and that will tend not to challenge power (and often ignore the real underlying issue).

Three: the programme is disconnected from what gets rewarded

The workshop encourages collaboration; the bonus rewards individual delivery. The programme teaches coaching; the operating rhythm leaves no hour in which coaching could happen. Participants are asked to delegate more but get hammered if their delegation leads to a failure.

People are not being obstructive when they revert. They are reading the system accurately. Where development and incentives disagree, incentives win, and everyone learns something unhelpful about how seriously development is taken here.

Four: nobody can say what should be different

Ask what will be observably different in six months and listen to the answer. If it is expressed entirely as satisfaction scores, attendance or "a shared language", the programme has no target.

Useful answers are concrete and slightly uncomfortable: fewer decisions escalated to the executive; poor performance addressed within a month rather than a year; project handovers that do not require a rescue. These can be looked at afterwards, which is precisely why they are avoided.

Five: the senior team is not in it

A programme that develops layers three and four while the top team continues exactly as before will teach participants a great deal — most of it about the limits of their own influence.

This is the most reliable predictor we see. Where the senior team has done its own work, is visible in the programme and has been willing to hear what the diagnosis said about them, behaviour shifts.

What to do instead

None of this argues against leadership development. It argues for spending a small proportion of the budget on understanding the problem before committing the rest of it.

That work is not elaborate. Structured conversations across levels, some honest data, attention to what the organisation currently rewards, and a willingness to hear that the answer may not be a programme at all. It takes weeks rather than months, and it changes what gets designed.

The awkward finding is often that the development required is real, but narrower and more specific than the original request — and that some of what was framed as a capability problem was a clarity problem, or a structure problem, or a problem with one relationship at the top.

That is a less satisfying answer to present at a board meeting. It is usually the true one.

“The most common failure is not poor delivery. It is a good programme aimed at a symptom.”