This is a pretty bold claim, but the evidence is beginning to be unanswerable. While surveys by Gartner and Together show that L&D teams have leadership development as their top priority, this shows no change on previous years.
In survey after survey Leadership Development is top priority and attracts the biggest investment per head. 90% of organisations offer supervisory/management training and 69% offer Executive Development. (I think this involves better biscuits!).
Despite this flurry of activity, UK workers report higher levels of workplace stress and significantly less engagement (the lowest in Europe, except Ireland and Spain) according to Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workforce report. The drop is in part explained by manager’s showing significantly lower levels of engagement than in preceding surveys.
But perhaps the most significant statistic is in a report from Ipsos Karian Box showing that more than one third of employees think they would do a better job than their line manager, whereas as only 18% think they would perform worse or much worse given the same constraints and resources.
These figures are more markedly different between men and women. 40% of men think they would do a better job than their boss. The confidence that male respondents have in their leadership ability, may be one factor in why men are still more likely to be promoted than their female colleagues – in my opinion, much to the detriment of their organisations.
One last piece of evidence before this becomes just a stat-fest – latest figures on UK productivity per hour worked shows an increase of 1.1% - versus a historical annual average of 2%. Individual employee productivity remains stubbornly below its pre-pandemic level (source: Office for National Statistics to Q3 2025).
Now, if you’ve read anything about trends in L&D over the last year, you will have seen an appropriate focus being placed on the importance of tying learning activities to business strategy. Specifically – delivering benefits in terms of productivity, engagement and talent retention. I think it is sensible to infer that the resource devoted to leadership and supervisory training should be the ones which most significantly shift the dial in these areas. Hence my assertion that leadership training isn’t working.
If we’re doing so much of it and devoting significant budget, it would seem reasonable to assume this would be reflected by higher team and individual contributor performance and the factors which contribute to that higher performance. The evidence says not.
I acknowledge that all these depressing statistics should not be laid at the door of leadership and leadership training, exclusively. However, if leadership development is not having a discernible positive impact, then why?
I think – and the research bears this out – that there are three main reasons:
Managers – especially team leaders – frequently report being overloaded. The demands of the job are not conducive to change, learning or experimentation. 71% of leaders report significantly increased stress since taking a leadership role and 40% are considering moving out of people management entirely (Source: DDI Global Leadership Focus 2025). Gartner reports that improving job manageability has a five-fold greater impact on leader effectiveness than leadership development programmes.
It is the old L&D conundrum – organisations see a performance need and immediately turn to L&D with the instruction to “Fix it!” but however good the resulting learning intervention, it ain’t gonna work if no one has the time or space to implement what they may have learned.
BTW: This impacts other learning initiatives. When we ask for leader support for other development programmes, we rarely take anything away. We just add something else for the overloaded leader’s to do list. It’s at the bottom. It drops off the bottom of the list and never happens. Surprised? No, didn’t think so.
Who gets promoted to team leader and what support do they get? If this is an internal process, we generally promote the longest serving employee with an acceptable track record as a contributor. Essentially, they’ve been good at one set of skills, so we expect them to be terrific in a completely different arena. What’s more, on average, newly promoted leaders wait 9-months before they get access to any kind of training for their new role.
What do they do – apart from continue to fulfil their old role alongside all these new responsibilities? They fall back on their previous experience of managers they have worked for – whether good or bad. Once these habits are practiced for a number of months, how likely are they to change as a result of two-days in a hotel meeting room? Not very!
The traditional leadership programme – informed by management schools – talks about leadership styles or models. It might focus on the responsibilities of a leader. It might touch on coaching, motivation or delegation, finance, resource management or building a team/company vision.
The underlying assumption is that if they can string three words together, they can communicate effectively and appropriately. If they experience an afternoon of team building in a forest somewhere, we have equipped them with the wherewithal to build a cohesive team that achieves results and solve problems. Popular with participants? Unquestionably. Memorable? Definitely, Effective? Hmm.
If leadership behaviours are mentioned at all, it is rarely objective or based on evidence of how successful leaders behave. There is a well-established science of leadership communication centred on verbal behaviours which can be changed, practiced and implemented in real situations.
But this crucial behavioural repertoire is frequently squeezed out by conceptual models about transactional, authentic, situational or servant leadership (among others) – none of which are wrong. They just don’t work without the high-level communications skills to apply them and – in any case, a leader cannot just use one leadership model. They need a repertoire of leadership approaches to provide the flexibility demanded when responsible for team of people.
So, leadership training doesn’t work. That’s not always the fault of those who design and deliver these interventions – though there is significant room for improvement. The failure of the budget and resources applied to leadership development to have the positive impact anticipated is because L&D teams have been set up to fail.
But we should remember it is our choice to continue trying to fight our way up a waterfall, when there may be other ways of traveling upstream.
This article was originally published on TrainingZone.