Why Most Leadership Training Fails Its Leaders (& How To Fix It With Leadership Development Journeys & Programs That Work)

Most leaders have attended workshops, trainings, or retreats that felt inspiring in the moment but evaporated the minute real-time business challenges in the intense VUCA world reentered reality.

That’s because most leadership development doesn’t develop leadership capabilities that fit today and tomorrow. It fills heads with academic frameworks and concepts, often created decades ago and/or by people who are not on the frontlines of innovation and adaptation today, but skips the work of transforming how leaders feel, think, and act so they can win the future right now.

In today’s corporate world of rapid change, shifting roles, and relentless ambiguity, we don’t need more frameworks and classroom sessions. We need leaders who can think, act, and behave differently from how they were trained when they were made into efficient managers.

Smart management thinking, which is often used to control existing supply-side business models, gets in the way of the creative, customer-centric, and human-scale leadership required to drive significant change, rapid growth, breakthrough innovation, and digital transformation.

VUCA++ Complexity and Uncertainty Demands Transformational Leadership, Not Scientific Management

Linear, logical, and control-based management thinking, which works well in delivering efficient operations with established products and services, can rarely solve novel problems in a chaotic, fast-moving, and exponentially disrupted business world.

Yet many leadership programs cling to outdated educational approaches (experts, case studies, professors, classes) and outmoded management science (plans, spreadsheets, cost reductions, performance reviews), which are both rooted in efficiency and predictability.

While all leaders require such management skills to ensure the existing business model runs smoothly, the world that gave rise to Taylorist scientific management thinking is fast disappearing. Leaders need to have such skills to manage the delivery of predictable returns with the existing business model.

Yet they need to complement them with transformational leadership capabilities that are fit for purpose in the rapidly, ruthlessly, and relentlessly changing VUCA++ world. This involves helping teams envision and execute breakthrough innovations, shifting from conventional change management to change leadership, and guiding entire business units on their journey of digital transformation (for established corporates) and achieving fast and sustained growth (for scale-ups).

What to do instead: Introduce transformational leadership journeys, experiences, and tools that unlock and support sensemaking in complexity, constant personal transformation, product and process adaptability, and the building of emotional resilience and agility. Create learning-and-doing environments where leaders can experiment, reflect, and adjust their approach as they grapple with real-life scenarios and problems that require transformation and innovation to solve.

Management Training Does Not Develop Transformational Leaders

Most leadership programs confuse knowledge sharing within management “training” programs with the journey and experience of longer-term and sustained leadership “transformation”.

Telling someone how to manage efficiently a stable product line in a simple and unsaturated market with a set of formulae based on a world that has already disappeared isn’t the same as helping them embark on the long-term and challenging journey of becoming effective and transformational leaders that can deliver really hard innovation and transformation activities need to win in fast-changing, unstable, complex VUCA++ markets.

Smartness and past success in management often, according to the latest brain science, get in the way of building the empathic, inspirational, and creative transformational leaders that are needed today.

What to do instead: Focus on experiential leadership development journeys that seek to upgrade mindsets and consciousness, evolve character, and transform defensive habits that sabotage leadership aspirations and undermine culture into change-ready, innovation-friendly, and transformation-driving behaviors.

Real leadership development requires space and permission for authentic self-inquiry, deep reflection, and practicing new behaviors under pressure, not just consuming content. More than anything, it requires the holding of safe environments where leaders can release outdated and outmoded habits, established over a lifetime, to protect and defend against perceived threats like being told off or failing exams, because these habits are now sabotaging empathic, creative, and inspirational leadership.

Transformational & Adaptive Leadership Development Programs/Journeys We co-design and deliver highly experiential and exquisitely customized transformational leadership development programs that do not just educate and train but seek to upgrade and transform the mindsets and behaviors of your leaders. We strive to provide the most effective transformational leadership development programs on the planet—tailored to your unique culture, industry, strategy, and ambitions. DISCOVER MORE