Most large organizations spend more on leadership development than they did five years ago and have less to show for it. McKinsey research has consistently found that the majority of executives say their leadership development programs are not effective at building capabilities that the business actually needs.
The programs look good on paper. The problem is structural.
Direct Answer
Conventional leadership development fails in large organizations because it treats leadership as an individual skill problem rather than a systemic one. Programs train people in isolation, ignore the organizational conditions that suppress what was learned, and measure inputs (hours, completions, satisfaction scores) instead of behavioral change. The result is capable people returning to unchanged environments where the old behaviors are still rewarded.
Key Takeaways
- Training people without changing the environment they return to is the single most common reason leadership programs produce no lasting behavior change.
- Organizations that measure completion rates instead of behavioral outcomes are tracking activity, not progress.
- The gap between “high-potential” and “promotable” is almost never about skill. It’s about visibility, sponsorship, and organizational positioning.
- Conventional programs treat leadership as a personal development problem; the structural approach treats it as an organizational design problem.
- The cost of weak leadership compounds quietly. Through attrition, slow decisions, and teams that stop bringing real problems to the surface.
Why Do Large Organizations Keep Running Programs That Don’t Work?
The honest answer: because the programs feel like they’re working.
Attendance is high. Feedback scores are positive. Participants leave energized. And then they walk back into the same reporting structures, the same performance incentives, and the same managers who model the behaviors the program just told them to stop doing.
This is what Steve Degnan, who spent 20 years as CHRO of a $13B company, calls the “re-entry problem.” The training event is real. The organizational conditions that trained people return to are also real. And they’re usually stronger. Culture doesn’t yield to a two-day workshop. It absorbs it.
The mechanism here is important. Behavior change requires reinforcement in the actual environment where the behavior needs to happen. When that environment hasn’t changed, the path of least resistance wins every time. It’s not a motivation problem. It’s a systems problem.
What’s the Real Structural Failure. Not the Surface Symptom?
There are four structural failures that show up repeatedly in large organizations. They’re not obvious from the inside, which is why they persist.
1. Leadership development is disconnected from business outcomes.
Programs are designed by HR and measured by HR metrics. Business unit leaders tolerate them. C-suite leaders sponsor them in name only. When leadership development isn’t tied to a specific business problem, a transformation, a capability gap that’s costing revenue, a succession risk, it becomes a benefit, not a strategy.
2. The wrong people are in the room.
High-potential programs often select participants based on performance ratings and manager nominations. Both are proxies for past performance, not future leadership capacity. The result is programs full of people who are already succeeding in the current system. The people who most need development aren’t nominated, and the people nominated least need the program.
3. Feedback loops are broken or absent.
Consider a typical case: a senior leader completes a 360-degree assessment, receives a development plan, and then has no structured accountability for acting on it. Their direct reports see no change. Twelve months later, the same leader scores similarly on the next 360. The organization has paid for data it didn’t use.
4. Promotability is treated as a mystery.
Most high-potential managers don’t know what “promotable” actually means in their organization. They’re told to “develop their executive presence” or “build their strategic thinking”. Phrases that sound meaningful and mean almost nothing without a concrete behavioral definition. The gap between performing well in your current role and being seen as ready for the next one is real, and most organizations don’t explain it.
If you’re working through how to close that gap for your own team, career accelerators seldom discussed in formal programs is worth reading.
The Contrarian Claim: More Training Is Often the Wrong Answer
Here it is, stated plainly: when leadership effectiveness is declining, adding more training programs is usually the wrong response.
The instinct to train is understandable. It’s visible, it’s budgetable, and it signals that the organization is doing something. But in most large organizations, the bottleneck isn’t knowledge. It’s the organizational conditions that prevent leaders from applying what they already know.
Managers already know they should give direct feedback. They don’t, because their own manager doesn’t model it, because HR has made the documentation process punishing, or because the culture treats candor as a career risk. Training them on “how to give feedback” doesn’t solve any of those problems.
The real intervention is upstream: change the conditions, change the incentives, change what gets modeled at the top. That’s organizational work, not training work.
The Promotability Paradox: Why High Performers Get Stuck
This is the second structural problem that most organizations misdiagnose.
High performers get stuck not because they lack skills, but because they lack positioning. They’re executing well in their current role. Which makes them valuable exactly where they are. Their manager has no incentive to develop them for a role elsewhere. Their visibility above their direct manager is limited. They’re doing everything “right” and going nowhere.
Steve Degnan’s forthcoming book on becoming “Promotable and Fireproof” addresses this directly. The core insight: promotability is a perception problem as much as a performance problem. You can be the best-performing person in your tier and still be invisible to the people who make promotion decisions.
The mechanism: promotion decisions in large organizations are made by people who don’t see your daily work. They see your reputation, your presence in senior conversations, and what your sponsor says about you when you’re not in the room. Developing those things requires a different kind of intentionality than developing technical skills.
What Does a Structural Approach Actually Look Like?
The Organizational Leadership Alignment Framework. Defined here as the practice of aligning leadership development interventions with specific business outcomes, environmental conditions, and accountability structures. Is the alternative to the conventional program model.
It has three components:
Diagnosis before design. Before any program is built, the question is: what specific leadership behavior is limiting this business outcome? Not “what competencies do we want leaders to have” but “what is the organization failing to do because of how leaders are currently behaving?”
Environment alongside training. Whatever is taught has to be reinforced by the systems leaders operate in. Performance management, meeting structures, how decisions get made, what the most senior leaders visibly reward. Change the environment or don’t bother with the training.
Measure behavior, not activity. Completion rates, satisfaction scores, and hours trained are not outcomes. The question is: what are leaders doing differently six months after the intervention, and is the business performing differently because of it?
A common scenario: a business unit undergoing transformation brings in a conventional leadership program to “build change management capability.” Twelve months later, the transformation is stalled. The leaders completed the program. But no one changed how decisions were escalated, how resistance was surfaced, or how senior leaders modeled the behaviors the program described. The training happened. The transformation didn’t.
Steve Degnan’s advisory work. Including agile re-engineering and business transformation consulting. Is built around exactly this kind of structural diagnosis, not program delivery.
Conventional vs. Structural Approach: What’s Actually Different?
| Dimension | Conventional Program Approach | Structural Leadership Approach |
| Starting question | What skills do leaders need? | What’s limiting this business outcome? |
| Design focus | Curriculum and content | Environment, incentives, and accountability |
| Who’s responsible | HR / L&D | C-suite and HR in partnership |
| What gets measured | Completion, satisfaction scores | Behavioral change, business indicators |
| Timeframe | Event-based (workshop, cohort) | Ongoing, embedded in operations |
| Risk of inaction | Low visibility in the short term | Compounding attrition and decision drag |
| Cost of wrong approach | Wasted budget, no behavior change | Lost transformation momentum, key talent exits |
The structural approach takes longer to design. It requires more senior commitment. And it produces results that actually stick. Because the environment is doing the work alongside the training.
Who This Approach Is Right For. And Where It Doesn’t Fit
This matters most when your organization is in one of these situations:
- A transformation is underway and leadership behavior is a known bottleneck
- Senior leadership is committed to real change, not just a program that looks good in the annual report
- You have a succession gap that’s 12-24 months from becoming a crisis
- Attrition in your high-potential population is signaling something the engagement survey isn’t capturing
This approach isn’t the right fit if your organization needs a one-time training event for compliance or onboarding purposes. It also won’t work if senior leaders aren’t willing to examine their own behaviors as part of the process. The structural approach requires the people at the top to be part of the change, not just sponsors of it.
The most expensive leadership development mistake isn’t running the wrong program. It’s running the right program in the wrong conditions and concluding that leadership development doesn’t work.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I know if our leadership development problem is structural or just a bad vendor? If you’ve changed vendors or programs multiple times and the results are similar, the problem is structural. A different vendor delivering the same program design into the same organizational conditions will produce the same outcome. The question to ask is whether your environment reinforces what you’re teaching. If it doesn’t, the vendor isn’t the issue.
What does “measuring behavioral change” actually look like in practice? It means defining specific observable behaviors before the intervention. What does “giving direct feedback” actually look like in a conversation, and how would we know if someone is doing it? Then checking in with direct reports and peers 90 and 180 days later. It’s harder than tracking completion rates, which is exactly why most organizations don’t do it.
How long does a structural leadership intervention take to show results? Honest answer: meaningful behavioral change in a leadership population takes six to eighteen months to show up in business indicators. You’ll see early signals, different conversations in meetings, different escalation patterns, within three to six months if the environmental conditions are right. Anyone promising faster results is measuring the wrong things.
Is this relevant for organizations that already have a strong HR function? Yes. Often more so. Strong HR functions have the infrastructure to run programs well. The structural gap is usually not in program quality but in the connection between HR’s work and the conditions that senior leaders control. The advisory value is in bridging that gap, not replacing what HR does.
What’s the difference between a high-potential program and actually developing promotable leaders? High-potential programs identify people. Developing promotable leaders changes how those people are positioned, sponsored, and seen by the decision-makers who control their advancement. Most HiPo programs do the first thing and assume the second follows. It usually doesn’t without deliberate sponsorship and visibility work.
Why do senior leaders keep approving programs they privately don’t believe in? Because the alternative, admitting that the problem is systemic and that they’re part of it, is harder. Approving a program signals action without requiring personal change. This is one of the most consistent patterns in large organizations, and it’s rarely said out loud.
How is working with an outside advisor different from using an internal OD team? Internal OD teams know the culture deeply and have existing relationships. That’s real value. An outside advisor can say things that internal teams can’t, challenge assumptions that have become invisible, and bring pattern recognition from across industries. The combination of both is usually stronger than either alone. The question isn’t internal vs. external; it’s whether the work is designed to change conditions or just deliver content.
If You’ve Read This Far, You Already Know What the Real Problem Is
You’re not looking for another program. You’re looking for someone who can tell you what’s actually broken and help you fix it. Without the consultant smoothness that makes every diagnosis sound like a sales pitch.
That’s the work Steve Degnan does. If your organization is heading into a transformation, dealing with a leadership gap that’s starting to cost you real talent, or running programs that produce good scores and no visible change, the right next step is a direct conversation about what’s actually happening. Not a proposal for another cohort.
Reach out through stevedegnan.com to start that conversation.
About the Author
Steve Degnan is an executive keynote speaker and organizational consultant with 32 years of corporate leadership experience, including 20 years as CHRO of a $13B food and pet food company. He works with Fortune 500 companies, business units in transformation, and senior leadership teams to build promotable, resilient leaders and drive real organizational performance. Not just program completion. His advisory work combines C-suite strategy with ground-floor candor, informed by a military background and decades of experience where the stakes were real.
