Advice
Why Most Leadership Training is Complete Rubbish and What Actually Works
Other Blogs of Interest:
The corporate training room smells like stale coffee and broken dreams. Twenty-three middle managers sit in a circle, pretending to be engaged while some overpaid consultant explains why they need to "shift paradigms" and "leverage synergies."
I've been delivering workplace training for seventeen years, and here's what nobody wants to admit: 78% of leadership development programs are about as useful as a chocolate teapot. Companies throw millions at glossy programs that promise to transform their people into visionary leaders, then wonder why nothing changes.
But here's the thing - and this might ruffle some feathers - most participants don't actually want to be leaders. They want the salary bump and the corner office, sure. But the responsibility? The difficult conversations? The sleepless nights worrying about whether you made the right call on that restructure?
Yeah, nah.
The Theater of Leadership Development
I remember sitting through a three-day intensive at a Gold Coast resort (lovely prawns at lunch, terrible content). The facilitator - let's call him Brad because he definitely looked like a Brad - spent ninety minutes explaining emotional intelligence using a PowerPoint that looked like it was designed in 2003.
"Leaders need to show vulnerability," Brad declared, adjusting his $400 tie.
Right. Because nothing says authentic vulnerability like a scripted workshop exercise where Karen from Accounts pretends to share her deepest fears with Steve from IT.
The real kicker? These programs cost between $3,000 to $15,000 per participant. That's serious money for what essentially amounts to expensive team-building with fancier catering.
What Actually Creates Leaders (Spoiler: It's Not Pretty)
Here's what I've observed after watching hundreds of people either rise to leadership or spectacularly flame out:
Real leaders are forged in crisis, not conference rooms.
The best leaders I know learned their skills during:
- Budget cuts that required impossible decisions
- Team members having mental health crises
- Projects going sideways at 11 PM on a Friday
- Having to fire someone they genuinely liked
- Navigating workplace politics without losing their integrity
None of these scenarios can be replicated in a sanitised training environment. You can't PowerPoint your way through genuine human complexity.
I worked with a client - major mining company, household name - who'd spent $2.3 million on leadership development over three years. Their engagement scores? Unchanged. Their turnover in management positions? Actually increased by 12%.
Know what worked? Pairing inexperienced managers with battle-hardened supervisors for six months of real-world mentoring. Cost? Practically nothing. Results? Transformational.
The Authenticity Paradox
Everyone bangs on about authentic leadership these days. Be yourself! Show your true colours! Lead with heart!
But authenticity can't be taught in a workshop. Either you're genuine or you're performing genuineness, and people can smell the difference from three cubicles away.
I've seen naturally introverted accountants try to become charismatic visionaries because some consultant told them that's what leaders look like. It's painful to watch. Like seeing your dad try to use TikTok.
The most effective leader I ever worked with was a softly-spoken woman who ran a logistics team in Melbourne. She never raised her voice, rarely spoke in meetings unless she had something valuable to add, and could motivate her team through pure competence and genuine care. According to most leadership models, she shouldn't have worked. Her team would've walked through fire for her.
The Competency Trap
Modern leadership training is obsessed with competency frameworks. We need leaders who can "think strategically" and "communicate effectively" and "manage change."
Here's my controversial take: competency is overrated.
The best leaders I know are competent enough, but what sets them apart is character. And character development happens over years, through life experiences that can't be compressed into a two-day workshop.
You want to know who makes great leaders? People who've:
- Worked minimum wage jobs and remember what it feels like
- Made significant mistakes and owned them completely
- Had to care for aging parents or sick children
- Built something from nothing (even if it later failed)
- Stood up for someone who couldn't stand up for themselves
These experiences create empathy, resilience, and perspective. You can't simulate that with role-playing exercises.
The Follow-Up Fantasy
Here's something that makes me laugh: the follow-up plans.
Every leadership program promises ongoing support, regular check-ins, and reinforcement activities. In practice? You get one email three months later asking how you're implementing your learnings, which gets filed somewhere between "Reply Later" and "Never Gonna Happen."
I tracked participants from a $8,000 leadership intensive. Six months later, 73% couldn't remember the key concepts without prompting. Twelve months later? Most couldn't even remember attending.
But the companies tick the "professional development" box on their annual reviews, so everyone's happy. Except for the shareholders, who just funded an expensive feel-good exercise that changed nothing.
What Actually Works (The Boring Truth)
Real leadership development happens through:
Meaningful responsibility. Give people actual decisions to make and consequences to live with. Start small, but make it real.
Quality mentoring. Not buddy systems or peer coaching circles. Real mentoring from someone who's been there, made the mistakes, and learned the lessons.
Brutal feedback. Not the sanitised 360-degree reviews that tell everyone they're "developing well." Honest, specific, actionable feedback from people who care enough about your growth to risk your feelings.
Failure experience. Controlled failure where the stakes are meaningful but not catastrophic. Let people screw up and learn from it.
Cross-functional exposure. Most leaders are too narrow. Accountants should spend time with sales. Engineers should work with customer service. Marketing should sit with operations.
The companies doing this well - think Atlassian, REA Group, or Canva - focus less on formal programs and more on creating environments where leadership naturally develops.
The Real Cost of Bad Leadership Training
Beyond the obvious waste of money, ineffective leadership training creates something worse: cynicism.
When you put someone through a program that promises transformation and delivers platitudes, you've just taught them that professional development is performative nonsense. They become harder to reach with genuinely useful development opportunities.
I've met managers who've been through five different leadership programs and learned to say all the right words while remaining fundamentally unchanged. They're vaccination-proof against real growth because they've been inoculated with low-quality training that immunised them against the real thing.
Moving Forward (Without the Buzzwords)
If you're responsible for developing leaders in your organisation, here's my unsolicited advice:
Stop buying programs. Start creating experiences.
Instead of sending people to leadership workshops, give them leadership challenges. Instead of teaching them about difficult conversations, create situations where they need to have them (with proper support and coaching).
Instead of teaching emotional intelligence through exercises, put them in roles where emotional intelligence is required for success.
Yes, it's messier. Yes, it's harder to measure. Yes, some people will fail.
But the ones who succeed will be genuine leaders, not just people who can recite leadership principles while making the same old mistakes.
That's what seventeen years in this business has taught me. And despite what Brad at the Gold Coast resort might tell you, some lessons can only be learned the hard way.
The coffee in those training rooms will always be terrible, but at least we can make the content worth staying awake for.