An organisation does not need leaders who simply feel more confident. It needs leaders who are more able to step into difficult conversations, make decisions with incomplete information, influence across boundaries and communicate clearly when the pressure is on.
So the useful question is not... Will people leave feeling more confident?
It is... What will they be more confident doing?
"Our leaders need more confidence" sounds like a reasonable brief. However It usually needs a bit more work.
Imagine two leaders.
One is newly promoted and keeps stepping in to solve problems because they do not yet trust themselves to coach other people through them.
Another is technically brilliant but rarely challenges senior colleagues, even when they can see that a decision is heading in the wrong direction.
Both might describe themselves as lacking confidence. However clearly, they need very different types of development.
Before comparing leadership confidence training, get specific about where confidence currently breaks down. What are leaders avoiding? Which conversations are being delayed? Where are people waiting for too much certainty or approval? What would they be doing differently if confidence was no longer getting in the way?
Excel's own five-phase approach starts with Discover, understanding the organisation, its people and its context before moving through Design, Deliver, Evaluate and Embed. Excel Communications 2026 Creds…
That order matters. If the behaviour is vague, the training probably will be too, and that achieves a whole load of nothing other that wasting time, energy and resources.
This is probably the biggest thing I would compare between providers. Confidence is difficult to build through information alone.
You can explain a model for giving difficult feedback perfectly. You can show somebody what a confident conversation looks like. You can even give them a very attractive workbook.
Eventually, though, somebody has to have the conversation for real.
A 2026 paper in Academy of Management Learning & Education argues that leadership development often struggles to produce demonstrable changes in on-the-job behaviour because programmes do not always give enough attention to how leadership skills are actually practised. The authors specifically examine skill-building under stressful conditions and the importance of practice design.
That feels particularly relevant to confidence. If the behaviour only works when the room is friendly, everybody agrees and there is plenty of time to think, it has not been tested very hard.
So when comparing leadership confidence training, ask how much time leaders actually spend practising. Do they work on realistic situations? Do they receive useful feedback? Can they try again? Does the programme gradually introduce some of the pressure or ambiguity that makes the real situation difficult?
If most of the learning is listening, I would ask questions.
Enterprise buyers hear the word "bespoke" quite a lot. Sometimes it means the programme has genuinely been designed around the organisation. Sometimes though it is that your logo has found its way on a couple slides so it looks like a poor version of your own branding.
What matters is what actually changes.
Good leadership confidence training should reflect the situations leaders in your organisation really face. That might mean influencing in a matrix organisation, speaking up in senior meetings, giving feedback in a high-accountability culture or stepping into leadership after being promoted for technical expertise.
The core principles do not necessarily have to be reinvented every time. The context definitely does.
A 2025 systematic umbrella review of 86 reviews of healthcare leadership development found that experiential learning, coaching or mentoring, longitudinal approaches, goal-setting and 360-degree feedback were among the methods associated with positive outcomes. It also found that programmes tailored to participant needs and organisational contexts tended to report better outcomes. The authors are careful to note significant weaknesses in the wider evidence base, including heavy reliance on self-reported measures and limited evidence of long-term organisational impact.
The setting is healthcare, so I would not turn that into a universal recipe for every enterprise programme. But it reinforces a useful principle.
Leadership development should feel connected to the environment in which leadership actually happens.
Excel's approach is to tailor learning around the client's people, goals and culture rather than simply delivering the same programme everywhere. Excel Communications 2026 Creds…
So instead of asking a provider whether the programme is bespoke, ask: What are you customising, and how will that make the learning more useful?
There is no single best format for leadership confidence training. In-person learning can give people space for discussion, experimentation and interpersonal practice. Virtual learning can connect distributed populations and make shorter development sessions easier to fit around work. Coaching can create more individual reflection and challenge. Blended programmes can combine those approaches over time.
The format should follow the behaviour. If leaders need confidence handling difficult conversations, they probably need opportunities to practise difficult conversations. If the challenge is operating at a more strategic level, coaching, peer discussion and live business issues may be more valuable. And if the organisation is global, consistency, accessibility and operational support become part of the decision too.
Excel supports blended, virtual, in-person and on-demand learning alongside global delivery and Learning Operations support.
The point is not to offer every format simply because you can. It is to use the format that gives the behaviour the best chance of changing.
A strong workshop can create confidence very quickly. Keeping it alive when normal work returns is much harder.
Meetings come back, deadlines reappear, the difficult colleague is still difficult. The new behaviour suddenly has consequences.
Recent leadership development research has started looking more closely at the environment surrounding the programme. A 2026 paper in Organizational Dynamics proposes four elements that can support learning transfer: developmental diagnosis, feedback infrastructure, opportunities to apply learning and shared ownership of development. The authors explicitly describe their survey evidence as exploratory rather than causal, so it should be treated as a framework rather than a proven formula.
For HR and L&D, the practical question is straightforward: What happens after the training?
Are leaders expected to try the behaviour in real situations? Do managers or peers provide feedback? Is there follow-up practice or coaching? Can participants bring live challenges back into the programme?
If somebody learns how to challenge constructively but their manager shuts down every challenge, the development problem is no longer confined to the training room.
Embedding should not be the final box on the project plan, it should instead influence the design from the beginning.
Once you have defined the behaviour you want to change, comparing providers becomes much easier.
Look at how thoroughly they diagnose the need, how much genuine practice the programme contains, how closely the learning reflects your organisation, what happens after the formal sessions and whether the provider can deliver consistently at the scale you need.
Then ask how success will be evaluated.
Confidence can certainly be measured through self-report, but it does not have to stop there. Depending on the programme, you might also use behavioural observations, manager feedback, 360-degree feedback, evidence of workplace application or relevant business measures.
A 2026 study of 686 executives who had completed coaching found that leaders most commonly reported improvements in team leadership, communication, people development and executive presence. Their accounts of feedback received from colleagues showed similar themes, although the study did not independently survey those colleagues.
That distinction matters. There is a big difference between measuring whether somebody feels more confident and looking for evidence that something about their leadership has become visible to other people.
You do not need an enormous evaluation system wrapped around every programme, but you should know what evidence would convince you that it worked.
A few things would make me cautious.
A provider recommending a standard solution before properly understanding the problem. Confidence being treated as a personality trait rather than something connected to specific leadership behaviours. Very little opportunity to practise. "Customisation" that appears mostly cosmetic. A programme that ends when the workshop does. No convincing answer to what leaders should be doing differently afterwards.
If you spot any of these during your conversations with a provider, it is worth asking about them or potentially looking elsewhere.
At enterprise level, I would also want to understand how quality and consistency will be maintained across cohorts, facilitators and locations. None of these automatically means the programme is poor, but they are useful places to push.
There is something slightly strange about getting leadership confidence right. Eventually, you stop talking about confidence.
You'll see it, you'll see the confident behaviours.
And that is probably the best test of any enterprise leadership confidence programme. Not whether people feel more confident in the training room. Whether they behave differently when the difficult bit arrives.
Thanks
Alex & The Excel Team