The conversation usually goes the same way.
A leadership programme wraps up and those feedback forms come in hot. Then, six months later, somebody senior asks the L&D team why nothing has actually changed, and several confused facial expressions are shared.
Clearly the training must have been the problem.
However… it almost never is.
If you have spent any time commissioning leadership development in a large organisation, you already know this in your bones. You have watched genuinely good programmes, run by genuinely good facilitators, with genuinely engaged leaders in the room, produce genuinely disappointing results.
And you have probably spent more time than you would like defending those programmes to people who were not there.
Here is the thing nobody wants to say out loud.
The room is rarely the problem.
You see it often in the instant feedback scores, people leave with a head full of inspiration and a skip in their step to put everything into action. So, the room and the content would appear to have instantly attached itself well to the participants.
Leadership training in large enterprises does not usually fail because of the content, the trainer, or the leaders. It fails because of decisions made before anyone walked into the room, and a vacuum of activity after they walked out, which makes it feel like their development happened in a different dimension, rather than as part of their actual professional journeys.
That is the diagnosis worth getting right. Because if you misdiagnose it, you spend the next budget cycle focusing funds to solve the wrong problem.
So, before this happens again, let’s get into it. Three failure points that have very little to do with the training itself, and everything to do with the conditions around it.
Failure Point One: The Brief Was A Wish, Not A Problem
Most leadership programmes are commissioned on the back of a wish.
"We want our leaders to be more strategic."
"We need stronger people managers."
"Our directors need executive presence."
These are wishes… They are not briefs.
A brief names a specific behaviour that is missing, in a specific context, with a specific cost attached to its absence.
"Our regional directors are not pushing back on commercial decisions in steering meetings, and we are losing margin because of it."
That is a brief. You can build a programme around it and crucially you can measure whether anything shifted.
A wish, by contrast, gives you a programme that is impossible to fail at and impossible to succeed at. The leaders learn things and the instant feedback is positive. Time passes though and nobody can point to what is different, because nobody could agree at the start what different should look like.
The training did not fail, the brief did.
Failure Point Two: The Leaders Went Back To The Same System That Produced Them
This is the one that catches everyone out.
You can run a brilliant five-day programme on coaching conversations, courageous feedback, and strategic delegation. The leaders will leave inspired.
Then they will return to a calendar with no time for coaching conversations, a culture that quietly punishes courageous feedback, and a senior team that models the exact opposite of strategic delegation.
It can be seen often in traditional business systems that are looking to develop the skills in their teams. They DNA is so hard coded in the business, that until they really look at how to adjust thinking amongst senior decision makers and align it with what they want to become, they will risk working against the skills being gained to guide the way somewhere new for the business.
People do not behave the way they have been trained… they behave the way the system around them rewards.
If the system has not shifted, the training is being asked to do something it was never designed to do. For instance, to change a whole culture by sending a few of its members on a course.
That is not a training failure but more of a physics failure. It is optimistic to believe that you can change the direction you are heading in starting with people who are not sat in the driver’s seat and cannot grab the wheel.
Failure Point Three: The Day After Was Nobody's Job
Ask most enterprise L&D teams who owns the embedding of a leadership programme, and you will get a polite and slightly awkward pause. Potentially even some tumbleweed depending on where you are having this conversation.
The trainer's job ended on the last day of delivery.
The line manager was not in the room and is not entirely sure what was covered.
HR is supportive but stretched.
The leaders themselves are back to reality and deep in the trenches of their inboxes, and motivation is famously a depreciating asset.
So the momentum that was supposed to fuel action has burned out before it could make a difference.
Not because anyone was too lazy to do anything with it, but because the day after was nobody's job.
This is the failure point that is most fixable, and most often left unfixed. Embedding does not happen by accident, and it does not happen because the content was good enough to stick on its own. It happens because somebody, somewhere, owns the months that follow with the same seriousness as the days that came before.
When that ownership is missing, the programme can be world-class and still produce very little.
So, What Does This Mean For The Next Programme You Commission?
It means the most important work is not the work most people think it is.
The brief matters more than the agenda, the system around the leaders matters more than the room they sit in, and the months after delivery matter more than the days during it.
If you get those three things right, almost any competent programme will produce results. If you get them wrong, no programme on earth will. And what a shame it is to share such unbelievable content, but not to give it any mileage to fuel long term change.
The next time a leadership programme underdelivers, the question worth asking is not "was the training any good?"
It is "what were we asking the training to do that it was never built to do on its own?"
That question changes everything that comes after it.
Thanks
Alex & The Excel Team
