Your Leadership Program Isn't the Only Thing Teaching Your Leaders

The behaviors leaders learn in a program have to survive the environment they return to.

An organization sees that its leaders aren't taking enough risks. They aren't collaborating across boundaries. They aren't exercising enough independent judgment. They aren't challenging ideas as openly as senior leadership would like.

The conclusion can feel obvious:

We need to develop them.

Maybe.

But the absence of a behavior is an observation. It isn't yet a diagnosis.

Before concluding that leaders don't know how to demonstrate a behavior, organizations should ask another question:

Is the environment conducive to the behavior we're asking leaders to demonstrate?

That question can lead somewhere very different.

The organization is teaching, too

Imagine sending a group of executives through an excellent leadership-development experience.

They practice constructive challenge. They're encouraged to collaborate across boundaries, exercise judgment, empower their teams, and take thoughtful risks.

They leave ready to apply what they've learned.

Then Monday morning happens.

A leader makes a thoughtful decision independently—and gets second-guessed or overruled.

Another proposes an alternative to a senior leader's preferred approach—and quickly learns how disagreement is received.

Another takes a reasonable risk. The logic was sound, but the outcome wasn't. What happens next teaches everyone watching whether taking another risk is worth it.

The leadership program taught them something. But the organization is teaching them, too.

Decision rights teach. Incentives teach. Responses to failure teach. Promotion criteria teach. Senior leaders teach through what they model, reward, tolerate, question, and shut down.

And those lessons happen every day.

When they contradict what leaders learned in development, we shouldn't be surprised when the organizational lesson wins.

Intended leadership culture isn't always experienced leadership culture

An organization may genuinely intend to create a culture of empowerment while its leaders experience control.

It may intend to encourage candor while leaders experience disagreement as risky.

It may intend to encourage collaboration while people experience decision-making as hierarchical.

It may intend to encourage intelligent risk-taking while leaders experience reasonable failure as something that carries consequences.

There is the leadership culture an organization intends to create.

And there is the leadership culture people actually experience.

Leadership behavior occurs inside the second one.

The gap isn't necessarily deliberate. Senior leaders may not see the contradictions themselves.

But if leadership development is expected to translate into performance, those contradictions matter.

When the program isn't the problem

This is where organizations can make an expensive mistake.

Leaders return from development with stronger capability, but the environment continues to discourage its use. Behavior doesn't change as expected.

The conclusion?

The development didn't work.

So the organization develops them again.

Changes providers.

Redesigns the curriculum.

Adds coaching.

But what if capability isn't the remaining constraint?

Repeatedly teaching leaders one set of behaviors while the organization reinforces another can do more than waste an investment. It can create cynicism.

Leaders eventually learn which message is real.

And sometimes development gives them a clearer vocabulary for recognizing the contradiction.

Who gets included in the diagnosis?

This is why I think organizations should look carefully at how leadership-development needs are determined in the first place.

Five or ten stakeholder interviews with senior executives can provide valuable perspective.

But whose perspective have we captured?

If people at the top tell us what everyone below them needs to do differently, we've learned something important about senior leadership's view of the problem.

We haven't necessarily diagnosed the problem.

For a significant leadership investment, I would want to hear farther and deeper into the organization.

What do managers experience?

What happens when leaders exercise judgment?

What happens after a thoughtful risk fails?

Where do employees see disconnects between stated leadership expectations and everyday organizational behavior?

Who actually has authority to make which decisions?

And are the people sponsoring the intervention willing to hear evidence suggesting that the original diagnosis may be incomplete?

The sponsors of leadership development are part of the leadership system, too.

That doesn't make them “the problem.”

It means they shouldn't automatically sit outside the diagnosis.

This isn't an argument against leadership development

I believe deeply in development. I've spent much of my career around learning, education, executive development, and organizations investing in their people.

My argument is simpler:

Let's refine where leadership development is actually needed, and then address it.

If leaders genuinely lack capability, develop it.

If they possess the capability but organizational conditions make it difficult to use, address those conditions.

If both are true, address both.

A leadership program may be exactly the right investment.

But we should know what problem we're asking it to solve.

Before the next leadership investment

If an organization is preparing to make a significant investment in leadership development, I think the rigor of the diagnosis should be proportionate to the significance of the investment.

Before finalizing the intervention, ask:

What evidence tells us this is actually a capability problem?

Whose perspectives informed that conclusion?

Have we listened far enough into the organization?

What happens today when leaders demonstrate the behaviors we're asking for?

Is the environment conducive to those behaviors?

If those questions change our understanding of the problem, that's not a reason to regret asking them.

That's the point.

Before asking what leaders need to learn, understand what the organization is already teaching them.