Leadership Development Programme: Build Leaders Who Deliver Results

Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace report finds that global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, its lowest level since 2020, from a peak of 23% in 2022. Gallup estimates that low engagement cost the world economy approximately $10 trillion in lost productivity, or 9% of GDP. Engagement is an imperfect proxy for leadership quality, but it is the most widely tracked, and the direction since 2022 is unambiguous: the experience of work is getting worse for many people.

The deterioration is steepest among managers. Gallup reports that global manager engagement fell from 30% to 27% between 2023 and 2024, and then declined by five points from 27% to 22% in 2025. These are the people who translate strategy into daily work, so a weaker manager layer is a direct threat to execution. Gallup also reports that European workers' engagement has been lower than in any other world region for the fifth year in a row.

Deloitte's 2025 Global Human Capital Trends points to the same strain from the organisational side. It reports that 73% of organisations recognise the importance of reinventing the role of the manager, but just 7% are making great progress. Recognition is nearly universal; change is rare. For a chief executive, this means the problem is unlikely to be solved by a further statement of intent or a new competency framework. It needs a different mechanism of development.

The quality of the experience on offer also varies by organisation. Gallup notes that within best-practice organisations, 79% of managers were engaged at work, almost four times the global average of 22%. The gap shows that manager engagement is not a fixed feature of the role. It reflects the way the organisation selects, supports and develops its managers, and that is within a CEO's control.

The pattern differs by market, which matters for multinational groups. Gallup's regional data put Europe at the bottom of the engagement table, and comparisons across regions rest on different norms in how people answer surveys, so we would not over-read them. The practical point is that a single global programme with identical content is unlikely to land equally everywhere. Local leaders should adapt assignments to local conditions, customers and employment norms.

What to do: ask your people team for three numbers by function: manager engagement, regretted manager attrition and the proportion of manager vacancies filled internally. Compare them with your own history, not with a global figure. If they are weakening, treat that as an operating risk on a par with a key customer loss, and make the development of managers a standing agenda item for the executive team.

The Chartered Management Institute surveyed 4,500 workers and managers in the UK and found, as reported by Fortune in 2023, that 82% of bosses are 'accidental managers' who moved into management without formal training. Whatever the local figure elsewhere, the pattern is familiar to most mid-sized companies: the best technician or salesperson is promoted, given a team and told to get on with it, with development arriving late if at all.

The consequences are measurable in teams. The CMI research found that staff who described their manager as ineffective were far less satisfied in their job (27% versus 74%), and less valued (15% versus 72%) and motivated (34% versus 77%). Half of the workers who rated their manager as ineffective said they planned to resign. The cost to the business is not abstract: it appears in recruitment spend, lost knowledge and slower delivery.

Gallup's older analysis, published in 2015, concluded that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units. The figure is dated and should be treated with care, but it is consistent with the newer evidence that the manager is the largest single influence on the day-to-day working experience. Deloitte adds that 36% of managers say they are insufficiently prepared to be people managers.

Time is part of the problem. Deloitte reports that managers spend nearly 40% of their time on solving problems for today and administrative tasks, with only 13% of their time spent developing the people who work for them. A programme that ignores this reality, by adding training days on top of an overloaded role, will produce frustration. Development has to be designed into the work, and part of the job is to remove low-value tasks.

Managers are also the transmission mechanism for every other change a company attempts. An AI roll-out, a restructuring or a new pricing approach reaches the front line through managers, who explain, adapt or quietly resist it. A weak manager layer therefore reduces the return on every initiative, not only on people programmes. This is the strongest commercial argument for treating manager development as a core operating investment, and for giving it a place in the same planning cycle as capital and technology decisions.

What to do: identify the managers in your business who were promoted without any formal preparation, and the teams that depend on them. Start with the ten to fifteen managers whose teams matter most to revenue or delivery. Give them a development assignment and support in the next quarter, rather than waiting for the next cohort of a course. Early action on the highest-risk teams yields the quickest visible return.

McKinsey's well-known article on why leadership development programmes fail, published in 2014 and therefore dated, observed that adults typically retain just 10 percent of what they hear in classroom lectures, versus nearly two-thirds when they learn by doing. The proportions are rules of thumb, but the underlying point is widely accepted in learning research: application and feedback anchor skills more strongly than exposition does.

Current data suggest practice has not caught up. DDI's Global Leadership Forecast 2025, a vendor study of 10,796 leaders, finds that instructor-led training is offered by 73% of organisations. Leaders themselves say they most value coaching from outside the organisation (47%) and development assignments (46%). The mismatch is not absolute, since classroom sessions can be efficient for knowledge transfer, but it suggests that the offer is organised around what is easy to deliver rather than what leaders value.

The outcome shows up in confidence in the pipeline. DDI reports that the share of HR professionals confident in their leadership bench fell from 18% in 2011 to 11% in 2020 and was 20% in 2024. In the UK, the CIPD's Learning at Work survey found only 59% of learning and development professionals confident in their ability to respond to the changing skills needs of their organisations, down from 69% in 2021. Neither suggests that the current model is working.

None of this means that courses have no place. Short, focused teaching is useful before and during an assignment, for example on financial literacy, negotiation or managing performance. The mistake is to make it the centrepiece. A well-designed programme starts with the work the company needs done and then identifies what leaders must know in order to do it, rather than starting with a catalogue and asking who should attend which module.

What to do: audit your current leadership spend by category: courses, coaching, assignments, external events and internal facilitation. Calculate the share that is spent on instructor-led delivery and the share that is spent on real assignments with feedback. Then set a target for the next budget cycle that moves a defined proportion from the former to the latter. Do not announce it as a cut; present it as a move toward applied development.

An effective development assignment has five properties. It carries a real commercial or operational target that matters to the business. It is large enough to stretch the leader and small enough to be completed in six to twelve months. It gives the leader real decision rights and budget. It involves people from other functions, so influence is tested as well as authority. And it has a senior sponsor who is committed to the outcome and willing to remove obstacles.

Examples in a mid-sized company are straightforward. Lead the launch of a product into a new region, with a revenue target and a cross-functional team. Take over a loss-making customer segment and return it to margin. Run the integration of a small acquisition. Redesign the order-to-cash process and cut days of working capital. Each of these produces a business result and develops capabilities that no classroom can teach, such as negotiating scarce resources and leading people who do not report to you.

The evidence for pairing training with real work is encouraging. Gallup reports that teams led by managers who took management training saw engagement rise by up to 18%. McKinsey's 2014 article describes a bank whose productivity rose by 15 percent when managers focused on changing the systems and working approaches rather than attending sessions in the abstract. Both findings are context-specific, but they point in the same direction: development is effective when it is linked to the team's actual work.

The selection of assignments is as important as the selection of leaders. Choose work that the business needs done anyway, not work created for development. Make sure that failure is survivable and that the sponsor has agreed in advance what support will be given. Avoid assigning only the highest-profile projects to the same few people, because that concentrates development and builds resentment. Use assignments to widen the pool of leaders who are tested, including those who are less visible.

Assignments also give the CEO better information about people. Watching how a leader frames the problem, negotiates for resources, handles conflict and responds to setbacks provides richer evidence for promotion than a nine-box rating or an assessment-centre score. It exposes the difference between leaders who are good at presenting and those who are good at delivering. Over several cycles, the company builds a record of demonstrated performance in demanding conditions, which makes succession decisions less political and more defensible to the board.

What to do: build a list of ten to fifteen business priorities for the next twelve months that could each be led by a developing leader. For every one, write a one-page assignment brief covering the target, the budget, the decision rights, the sponsor and the date of review. Match leaders to briefs by capability gap, not by seniority. Present the list to the executive team as the leadership programme itself, with courses as supporting material.

Stretch without support can damage people. DDI reports that 71% of leaders say their stress has increased significantly since stepping into their current role, and that 40% have considered leaving leadership roles entirely. Development assignments add pressure by design, so the programme must include protection. This is not softness; it is risk management for the company's most valuable people, and for the credibility of the programme itself.

The sponsor is an executive who owns the outcome, meets the leader regularly, clears blockages and gives candid feedback. Sponsors should be briefed on their role and held to it, since the most common failure is a sponsor who delegates and disappears. The coach, preferably external to the reporting line, helps the leader reflect, plan and handle the interpersonal demands of the assignment. DDI's finding that leaders most value outside coaching supports this design.

Feedback is the third support. A structured baseline at the start, such as a 360-degree review or a set of observed behaviours, followed by checks at the midpoint and the end, gives the leader and sponsor a shared view of progress. Feedback should address both the result and the way it was achieved. A leader who hits the target by exhausting a team or bypassing colleagues has not yet developed the capability the business needs.

Coaching at scale is expensive, and not every leader needs a professional coach. A tiered approach works: external coaches for the most critical assignments, trained internal coaches or experienced peers for others, and structured peer groups for the rest. Peer groups meeting monthly to discuss live problems, under a simple protocol, provide a low-cost way to share learning and to build the cross-functional relationships that execution depends on.

What to do: before launching, brief the sponsors in a short session covering expectations, time commitment and how to give feedback. Agree the coaching model and the budget. Set a rule that no assignment starts without a named sponsor and a baseline. Review wellbeing indicators, such as workload and attrition intent, at the midpoint, and adjust scope if the assignment is endangering either the leader or the business.

Completion rates and satisfaction scores are easy to collect and say little about whether leaders deliver. A better scorecard has four groups of measures. Assignment outcomes: did the commercial or operational target move, and by how much? Leader capability: what do repeat 360 reviews and sponsor assessments show after six to twelve months? Team results: engagement, retention and delivery in the teams led by participants. Pipeline: promotions, internal fills of senior roles and readiness of successors.

McKinsey's 2014 article recommended following participants over time, with a baseline 360 review at the start and another after six to twelve months, and asking how many were appointed to more senior roles one to two years after the programme. These are simple, inexpensive tests that few companies run. They can be performed by the people team with the data they already hold, and they give the CEO evidence to decide whether to expand, change or stop the programme.

Benchmarks help contextualise results. Gallup finds that within best-practice organisations, 79% of managers were engaged at work, and DDI reports that only 20% of HR professionals are confident in their leadership bench. A mid-sized company can set its own targets against these anchors, for example by aiming for a measurable improvement in manager engagement in participants' teams and for more roles filled internally. The targets should be set locally and reviewed annually.

Attribution will never be perfect. Teams change, markets move and some leaders are lucky. Do not try to build a precise return-on-investment model. Use a clear logic chain, from assignment outcome to team results to pipeline, and collect enough data to show whether the pattern is improving. Where results are poor, ask whether the cause lies in selection, assignment design, sponsorship or the participant, rather than defaulting to dropping or defending the programme.

Fairness and inclusion need attention in cohort design. If assignments go to those already visible to the executive team, the programme will reproduce existing patterns of advancement and may conflict with the company's own commitments on equal opportunity. Publish the criteria, ask line managers to nominate on evidence, use a panel to review nominations, and monitor the mix of participants by function, location and background. A broad and credible cohort also strengthens the programme's reputation, which helps to attract strong sponsors and candidates.

What to do: agree the scorecard before the first assignment begins and appoint one person to own the data. Present results to the executive team twice a year, with named examples of what leaders delivered. Link the scorecard to talent decisions, so that promotion and succession reviews draw on assignment evidence. If the CEO uses the evidence in decisions, the organisation will take the programme seriously.

Start with a small cohort. For a business of a few hundred to a few thousand people, twelve to twenty leaders is usually manageable: enough to build a peer community, small enough for sponsors to give real attention. Select them by a combination of potential and business need, including some managers whose teams matter most to current priorities. Make the selection criteria visible, to avoid the programme being seen as favouritism.

In the first quarter, define assignments, brief sponsors, set baselines and appoint coaches. In the second and third quarters, assignments run, with monthly peer sessions, midpoint reviews and short teaching modules tied to the problems being faced. In the fourth quarter, assignments conclude, results are assessed against the scorecard, and decisions are made on promotion, further development and the next cohort. The cycle is short enough to learn from quickly and long enough to achieve results.

Funding is usually the easy part, because the money exists in training budgets already. Redirect spending from low-use courses and external events toward coaching, sponsor preparation and the modest cost of running peer groups. The largest cost is leaders' time, and that is a deliberate investment because the assignments are real work. In fast-growing markets, including the Gulf, where leadership pipelines must be built quickly, this approach often suits the pace better than long off-site programmes.

The main risks are predictable. Sponsors disengage, so hold them accountable. Assignments are too small or too large, so test them against the five properties. Participants are overloaded, so protect their time and remove tasks. The programme becomes a talent show, so involve a broad group in selection and report results transparently. And leaders return to their old environment unchanged, so connect the programme to real promotions and responsibilities.

What to do: set a date for the first cohort within the next quarter and name an executive owner for the programme, ideally a member of the leadership team rather than an HR delegate. Draft the assignment briefs, sponsors and scorecard within a month. Use the six-step cycle in the exhibit below as the design backbone, and review the results with the board at the end of the first year before extending the programme.

Karter McKinley's Strategy & Transformation work helps CEOs identify the priorities that suit development assignments, design the briefs, sponsor model and scorecard, and run the first cohort alongside the leadership team. We use your own business targets rather than a standard curriculum.