This is a pretty bold claim, but the evidence is beginning to be unanswerable. Surveys by Gartner and Together show that L&D teams have leadership development as their top priority. However, this shows no change on previous years.
In survey after survey, leadership development is top priority and attracts the biggest investment per head. 90 per cent of organisations offer supervisory/management training and 69 per cent offer executive development. (I think this involves better biscuits!).
Despite this flurry of activity, UK workers report higher levels of workplace stress and significantly less engagement (the lowest in Europe except Ireland and Spain) according to Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workforce report.
Misplaced confidence?
The drop is in part explained by managers showing significantly lower levels of engagement than in preceding surveys.
But perhaps the most significant statistic is in a report from Ipsos Karian Box. It shows that more than one-third of employees think they would do a better job than their line manager. Only 18 per cent think they would perform worse or much worse given the same constraints and resources.
These figures are more markedly different between men and women, with 40 per cent of men stating they would do a better job than their boss.
The confidence that male respondents have in their leadership ability may be one factor in why men are still more likely to be promoted than their female colleagues. Much to the detriment of their organisations, in my opinion.
One last piece of evidence before this becomes just a stat-fest is the latest figures on UK productivity per hour worked. These show an increase of 1.1 per cent, versus a historical annual average of two per cent. Individual employee productivity remains stubbornly below its pre-pandemic level.
The right resources
Now, if you’ve read anything about trends in L&D over the last year, you will have seen an appropriate focus being placed on the importance of tying learning activities to business strategy.
Specifically, delivering benefits in terms of productivity, engagement and talent retention. I think it is sensible to infer that the resources devoted to leadership and supervisory training should be the ones which most significantly shift the dial in these areas.
Hence my assertion that leadership training isn’t working. If we’re doing so much of it and devoting a significant budget, it would seem reasonable to assume this would be reflected by higher team and individual contributor performance and the factors which contribute to that higher performance. The evidence says not.
If leadership development is not having a discernible positive impact, then why?
What’s going on?
I acknowledge that all these depressing statistics should not be laid at the door of leadership and leadership training, exclusively.
However, if leadership development is not having a discernible positive impact, then why?
I think – and the research bears this out – that there are three main reasons:
1. Job design
Managers, especially team leaders, frequently report being overloaded.
The demands of the job are not conducive to change, learning or experimentation. According to DDI’s Global Leadership Forecast 2025, 71 per cent of leaders report significantly increased stress since taking a leadership role and 40 per cent are considering moving out of people management entirely.
Gartner reports that improving job manageability has a five-fold greater impact on leader effectiveness than leadership development programmes.
It is the old L&D conundrum – organisations see a performance need and immediately turn to L&D with the instruction to “Fix it!”. But however good the resulting learning intervention, it isn’t going to work if no one has the time or space to implement what they may have learned.
This impacts other learning initiatives. When we ask for leader support for other development programmes, we rarely take anything away. We just add something else for the overloaded leader’s to do list. It’s at the bottom. It drops off the bottom of the list and never happens. Surprised? No, didn’t think so.
Organisations see a performance need and immediately turn to L&D with the instruction to “Fix it!”
2. Selection, succession and initial training
Who gets promoted to team leader and what support do they get?
If this is an internal process, we generally promote the longest serving employee with an acceptable track record as a contributor.
Essentially, they’ve been good at one set of skills so we expect them to be terrific in a completely different arena.
What’s more, research shows that 82 per cent of people entering a management role have no formal management and leadership training.
What do they do – apart from continuing to fulfil their old role alongside all these new responsibilities? They fall back on their previous experience of managers they have worked for – whether good or bad.
Once these habits are practiced for a number of months, how likely are they to change as a result of two-days in a hotel meeting room? Not very!
3. We focus on what, not how
The traditional leadership programme informed by management schools talks about leadership styles or models.
It might focus on the responsibilities of a leader. It might touch on coaching or motivation or delegation, finance, resource management or building a team/company vision.
The underlying assumption is that if they can string three words together, they can communicate effectively and appropriately.
If they experience an afternoon of team building in a forest somewhere, we have equipped them with the wherewithal to build a cohesive team that achieves results and solves problems. Popular with participants? Unquestionably. Memorable? Definitely. Effective? Hmm.
If leadership behaviours are mentioned at all, it is rarely objective or based on evidence of how successful leaders behave. There is a well-established science of leadership communication centred on verbal behaviours which can be changed, practiced and implemented in real situations.
But this crucial behavioural repertoire is frequently squeezed out by conceptual models about transactional, authentic, situational or servant leadership (among others) – none of which are wrong.
They just don’t work without the high level communications skills to apply them. And, in any case, a leader cannot just use one leadership model. They need a repertoire of leadership approaches to provide the flexibility demanded when responsible for a team of people.
Time to go upstream
So, leadership training doesn’t work. That’s not always the fault of those who design and deliver these interventions – though there is significant room for improvement.
The failure of the budget and resources applied to leadership development to have the positive impact anticipated is because L&D teams have been set up to fail.
But we should remember it is our choice to continue trying to fight our way up a waterfall, when there may be other ways of travelling upstream.
