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I’ve had a number of conversations lately where leadership development is deprioritised as it is “fluffy” and there is just too much work to do. “Leaders are just too busy,” I’m told.
Well, suffice to say I totally disagree. The busiest leaders with no time to effectively develop grow and lead, are the ones who need it most! But I’d agree - not the fluffy kind! The kind that has real impact and makes not just a personal difference, but difference to the whole business!
So I have taken pen to paper, lifted myself up onto my high horse, to share some truth bombs around what we see happening right now.
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Why Leadership Development Feels Useless (But Is Quietly Saving Your Organisation)
Let’s be real: if you've worked in a company for more than 10 minutes, you've probably experienced leadership development in one of its more questionable forms.
Maybe it was a 3-day virtual summit with breakout rooms named after mountain ranges. Maybe you sat through an e-learning module called “Leading with Authenticity” that felt like it was written by a chatbot on a sugar high. Or maybe you just received a PDF called “The 7 Habits of a Leader Who Smiles More.”
Whatever the format, many leadership development efforts in organisations feel like corporate kale - presented as essential, but hard to chew, occasionally bitter, and rarely something people actually want.
But here's the truth: leadership development might be the most undervalued competitive advantage in your organisation. When it’s bad, it’s forgettable, it’s costly and leaders who adopt bad behaviours because their training was out of date or simply wrong can lead to poor performance of leaders, their teams and the business as a whole.
When it’s good, you may hardly notice it - because everything just works better; leaders feel valued, they're being invested in, they are growing and developing in new ways.
Leadership teams collaborate in different and often better ways. Everyone has a shared experience, language and knowledge = they're singing from the same hymn sheet (but also in their own voice - no cookie cutter approach). As a result, teams perform better, as does the business!
So let’s dig into why leadership development gets a bad rap and why. Underneath the jargon and offsites, it’s absolutely critical to scaling a high-performing, healthy organisation.
In business, there’s a persistent but rarely proven hypothesis: We’ll solve our leadership gaps by hiring from the outside.
This may sound reasonable. Until you realise that bringing in a shiny external leader without internal development is like installing a gourmet kitchen in a house with no plumbing. Looks good until nothing flows. It may feel faster, but speed isn’t everything; velocity is!
External hires often struggle with culture, context, and influence. Meanwhile, your internal talent (people who understand your systems, customers, and politics) are stuck in career purgatory, wondering what it’ll take to move up (spoiler: it’s not another motivational webinar).
Leadership development isn’t about turning every manager into a visionary guru. It’s about systematically growing people who can navigate complexity, lead change, and build trust from within your own walls.
We know that 82%* of leaders are deemed 'accidental'. We also know that 77%* of businesses report leadership gaps. Therefore, it’s not shocking, but also it isn’t right, how often companies promote people into leadership roles with the confidence of someone handing the keys to a forklift to a toddler and saying, “You’ll figure it out.”
Great ICs become team leads. Reliable operators become department heads. And they’re left to fend for themselves with the occasional “How to Have a Difficult Conversation” slide deck.
It’s not that they’re unqualified, it’s that they’ve never been taught how to lead, nor given the chance to learn and develop their leadership style and behaviours. And leadership isn’t intuitive. It’s a behaviour set: giving feedback, coaching performance, aligning stakeholders, managing conflict, holding accountability without creating fear.
And no, these skills don’t magically emerge during onboarding. They require intentional development, not just an inspirational memo from “HR” and a leadership quote over stock photos.
*2025 WorkLife Digital Report, Chartered Management Institute, eLearning Industry
Leaders are 'multipliers' of culture, performance, behaviours, skills - all of it!
You’ve likely seen company values printed on walls, screensavers, and mugs. But culture doesn’t live in print. It lives in the behaviours leaders model every day. Especially in management.
If your senior leaders say “We value transparency” but your managers avoid tough conversations like they’re going to get an electric shock, guess what? Your culture isn’t transparent.
In larger organisations, culture spreads through leadership like electricity through a circuit. Every team leader, project manager, and VP reinforces (or contradicts) the cultural current. Without a consistent development approach, you end up with pockets of excellence surrounded by organisational entropy.
Leadership development gives people the behavioural tools to live the culture you keep branding. It helps align values with actions and stops culture from being something that only exists in onboarding decks and earnings calls.
If the executive team is the brain, then middle managers are the nervous system. They connect strategy to action, feedback to improvement, and change to actual adoption.
So why are they often the least supported population?
Middle managers are regularly caught in the crossfire of shifting priorities, resource constraints, and the delicate art of "managing up." They're often expected to lead transformation, deliver KPIs, run performance cycles, manage wellbeing, and oh—also hit quarterly targets.
But without development, they’re expected to do all of this by instinct. That’s not a strategy; that’s a stress test.
The best organisations don’t just support middle managers with process, they develop them with practical skills and shared language, so they can navigate ambiguity and lead with clarity.
Let’s not kid ourselves: PowerPoint doesn’t transform an organisation. Leaders do.
Your strategy can be brilliant. Your change plan can be airtight. But if your directors and managers don’t know how to engage teams, challenge resistance, or communicate with confidence, your strategy dies in the middle layers.
According to behavioural psychology, people resist change not because they’re lazy or negative, it’s because uncertainty triggers threat responses. A well-trained leader knows how to reduce that threat, create psychological safety, and shift teams from skepticism to action.
Leadership development isn’t a distraction from the business. It is the business. It’s how vision turns into movement, and movement turns into results.
Because, too often, leadership development in large organisations lacks four things (conveniently for my love of alliteration they all start with C):
When leadership development works, it’s because it’s real, relevant, and reinforced. Not theory, not jargon—just human skills, practised in context, with accountability over time.
In organisations, you wouldn’t launch a new product without funding the engineering. Or start a global expansion without investing in operations. So why try to scale a company without developing the people actually leading it?
Leadership development may never be the flashiest initiative. But when done right, it’s what enables resilience in uncertainty, alignment in complexity, and performance at scale.
Because the real ROI of leadership development isn’t the smiley-face feedback form.
Your managers and leaders are the number one lever for performance. Don’t let them or your business down. Invest in supercharging leaders to perform at their best so that the company can too.
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