Rethinking Leadership Development: The Need for Scalable Solutions
Traditional leadership development programs have long been constrained by two main factors: cost and time. How many employees can your company realistically afford to send to conferences or classes without disrupting daily operations? Often, the quick fix has been self-paced virtual training. However, time management challenges make it difficult for these programs to truly drive meaningful development.
Providing employees with a set of online resources is simply not enough. For leadership development programs to be effective, they require structure, consistency, and a focus on fostering growth. The stakes are too high for organizations to overlook the need for impactful and scalable leadership development solutions.
Where Leadership Development Falls Short
In 2020, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations globally spent an estimated $357 billion on corporate training. Of this, approximately 25% was allocated to leadership development. Yet, a mere 11% of executives report that their leadership development programs are successful. This staggering disparity highlights a glaring issue: the traditional approach isn’t working.
Developing leaders cannot be a one-size-fits-all solution. Currently, leadership development programs fall short by neglecting the equally essential aspects of team and organizational growth. While cultivating individual skills is important, true leadership is about more than personal skill — it’s about inspiring, motivating, and leading others. Programs that fail to address this broader scope risk producing leaders who excel on paper but struggle within a team or organizational context.
The Importance of Leadership Development Programs at Scale
The data speaks for itself: leadership training can lead to a 28% increase in key leadership skills, a 25% boost in learning techniques, and a 20% improvement in job performance. The benefits of robust leadership programs extend beyond individual growth — they ripple through teams and entire organizations.
Scalable leadership development programs allow companies to move from training just a few individuals to empowering groups across the organization. This approach fosters collaboration while also addressing the common challenge of disengagement. Research shows that organizations with higher employee engagement levels experience 21% higher profitability and 17% higher productivity compared to those with disengaged workforces.
Making Scalable Leadership Development Affordable and Effective
While broadening access to leadership development programs can improve productivity and pay for itself, it can sometimes be hard for companies to find the budget required. Traditional programs that rely upon in-person meetings, often offsite, may cost too much and require too much time away from day-to-day work to extend to more than a small group of people.
Programs that are conducted fully virtually change this dynamic. Travel and total required time can be significantly less. Some of the instruction can be self-paced to fit into busy schedules. However, it is important not to lose the power and mutual accountability of live, interactive learning. The most effective programs gain the cost and time savings of being conducted virtually but combine self-learning with live, interactive curriculum-based sessions.
Building Belonging and Community
One of the keys to a successful leadership development strategy is offering training in cohorts rather than isolating individuals. Cohort-based learning fosters a sense of belonging and shared growth, which not only enhances retention but also strengthens the overall leadership pipeline. The internal networks people build across the organization endure long after the leadership development program itself has concluded.
Our leadership development program offers these key components, delivered together by a seasoned executive, to ensure companies are developing strong leaders:
- One-on-one coaching
- Team meetups
- A curriculum crafted by industry experts
- Peer learning opportunities
- Online learning tools such as our 10-minute Career Workouts
As research from Harvard shows, organizations that provide growth opportunities for their workforce are more likely to retain their top talent and develop leaders who are equipped to handle the challenges of the modern workplace. Leadership development isn’t just about training — it’s about building a stronger, more resilient workforce that can tackle the future with confidence.
By scaling leadership development and incorporating innovative solutions, companies can unlock their teams’ potential, foster long-term growth, and ensure their talent matches the changing faces of leadership to create a more innovative future. This reduces turnover and builds stronger leaders from within, creating a cycle of lasting success.