Insights
The content is fine. The model is the problem.
I ran a leadership program once — facilitators were outstanding, the content was tight, evaluations came back 4.8 out of 5. Three months later I pulled the engagement data and basically nothing had changed. Same leadership behaviors. Same team dynamics. Same problems. Four-point-eight.
That one stung because I'd built the thing. But it also taught me something I keep coming back to: the workshop isn't the product. The behavior change is the product. And we keep confusing the two.
Here's what happens. You get budget for a leadership development initiative. You design a great two-day experience. You fly people in, they love it, they fly home. Monday morning they walk back into the same team, the same boss, the same incentive structure that was there before the workshop. And the half-life of everything they learned is about eleven days.
I know this because I've measured it. Not scientifically — I'm not publishing a paper here — but I've tracked post-program behavior shifts across enough cohorts to know: the event doesn't do it. The six months after the event does it. The problem is that nobody wants to fund six months of reinforcement. They want to fund a workshop, take a photo, and call it leadership development.
The real work is boring. It's the manager having a ten-minute conversation the week after the program: "What did you take away? What are you going to try?" It's a peer cohort that meets monthly — not because someone scheduled it but because they actually want to. It's a platform that serves up a three-minute refresher when someone's about to have the exact conversation the workshop prepared them for.
The other thing. I've deployed the same leadership program to a manufacturing plant in Puerto Rico and a commercial office in Ireland in the same quarter. Same slides. The plant supervisors needed tactical tools for shift handoffs and difficult conversations on the floor. The commercial team needed strategic influence skills for cross-functional negotiations. But the budget said one program, so one program is what they got.
Everyone was polite about it. The evaluations were fine. And almost nobody applied anything, because the content didn't map to their Tuesday.
Localization isn't "translate the slides." It's "redesign the application layer for the actual context." That costs more. It also works.
If I were starting from scratch — and in some ways, with Leland Blues, I am — I'd spend 30% of the budget on the event and 70% on what happens after. I'd make the manager a co-participant, not an approver who signed a form. I'd build the technology layer from day one so the program lives somewhere other than a binder.
Most leadership development fails because it's designed as content delivery. It should be designed as systems change. The content is the easy part. The system around it is where the actual work lives.
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