By Harrie Ellaway
For L&D leaders, programme designers, executive coaches and the leaders who fund them.
Two years ago, a CEO told me politely and accurately that I had answered the wrong question.
The programme I was presenting had taken months to build. The brief had travelled through layers of HR and L&D before it reached us, and somewhere in that relay it had quietly become a different brief from the one in the CEO’s head.
We rebuilt the programme. It was signed off. The content was strong. The facilitators were experienced. The teams it was designed for engaged with it the way people often engage with imposed development: professionally, politely, and without ownership.
Two months later, in the final board session, somebody finally said out loud that this might not have been the work the organisation had actually needed.
By the time many leadership programmes begin, the critical mistake has already happened. The development has been aimed at the leader. The constraint usually sits inside the team.
I have been doing this work for fifteen years, and that story is not an outlier. It is what happens when leadership development is built on the only thing the system reliably gives you — a brief — and the brief almost never reaches the team.
Those teams have established habits, political dynamics, communication patterns and behavioural constraints that were never examined before the work began.
“Precision at the delivery stage cannot compensate for ambiguity at the diagnostic stage.”
The numbers behind the room
I have sat in versions of that Monday-morning conversation. The data behind it is, depressingly, consistent.
Leadership development is a vast global industry. Only 11% of executives strongly agree that their leadership development achieves the results they want — McKinsey, 500+ executives globally. One of the most revealing numbers in the field.
The transfer-of-learning literature has tracked a similar pattern for decades: only 10–20% of training content translates into sustained behaviour change on the job. Beer, Finnström and Schrader called it “the great training robbery” in the Harvard Business Review nearly a decade ago.
This is not a story about lazy programme design. Reputable providers invest serious time in curriculum, faculty and learner experience. The failure usually happens earlier: the development is decoupled from the system it is meant to change.
The brief is built on three unreliable inputs
Every brief that lands on a designer’s desk has travelled through filters. In the story above, mine had passed through three of them—CEO, HRD, L&D Manager—before it reached me. By then, it was no longer quite the same brief. That is structural, not accidental. There are three reasons this happens so often.
- The sponsor’s own self-perception may be inflated. Only 10–15% of people are genuinely self-aware (Eurich, HBR). The brief that comes from a leader’s reading of the problem may, statistically, be the wrong reading.
- The feedback reaching senior leaders has already been softened. Eurich calls this “CEO’s disease”: the more senior you are, the less candid the feedback you receive. The CEO in my opening story wasn’t being given dishonest information. She was being given carefully edited information, and writing the brief on top of it.
- There isn’t agreement even on what the team is for. Across 124 organisations, only 28% of executives and managers responsible for executing strategy could name three of their company’s strategic priorities (Sull, MIT Sloan). Twenty-eight percent. Of the people whose job it is to make the strategy real.
The curriculum may be excellent. The facilitators may be exceptional. But if the target is wrong, those who participate feel it acutely.
The gap is concrete. Listen to enough stakeholders privately and the same pattern surfaces. It can sound like this.
| WHAT THE SPONSOR BRIEFS “We need stronger strategic alignment.” | WHAT THE TEAM IS ACTUALLY SEEING “Nobody is willing to challenge the CEO in the room.” |
| WHAT THE SPONSOR BRIEFS “We want our leaders to be more decisive.” | WHAT THE TEAM IS ACTUALLY SEEING “Decisions get reopened every week because ownership is unclear.” |
| WHAT THE SPONSOR BRIEFS “Improve cross-functional collaboration.” | WHAT THE TEAM IS ACTUALLY SEEING “Priorities change so often that nothing stabilises.” |
Executive teams often describe themselves as aligned because conflict is absent in meetings. The organisation experiences something else: disagreement has simply moved offline. Calm meetings are often mistaken for healthy teams.
The IKEA effect: why imposed development quietly dies
There’s a well-known psychological pattern from Harvard Business School researchers Norton, Mochon and Ariely: people place higher value on things they have helped to build, even when their contribution was small and the result was no better than someone else’s. They called it the IKEA effect. The labour creates attachment.
“Programmes built entirely from a sponsor’s brief miss this mechanism almost completely.”
The most sophisticated buyers have already worked this out. When the Premier League engaged me on coach development, the brief was anchored around four non-negotiables: the work had to be co-created with the cohort, immersive, role-relevant, and designed to challenge thinking rather than confirm it. Three of those four are the IKEA effect written into the brief.
This is why diagnostic-first development tends to outperform brief-first development. When the team contributes its own evidence—when members and stakeholders see the data before anything is designed—the work already carries their fingerprints. The leader returns to a team that helped form the conclusion, not one that has been handed a conclusion.
Where the constraint actually lives
There is one more reason brief-first development misses: the brief is usually written about a leader, while the constraint is living in the team.
Meta Team’s research, drawing on more than 150,000 data points across thousands of teams over a decade, suggests that a large share of team performance is explained by how the team operates as a system — its shared behaviours, habits and dynamics — not by individual talent alone. Developing teams tends to have greater performance impact than developing the same number of leaders individually.
“A large share of team performance is explained by how the team operates as a system. The leader is rarely the only unit of change.”
The result is rarely dramatic failure. Most organisations are too resilient for that. The result is drift — slower decisions, diluted accountability, fragmented execution, teams quietly compensating for problems the system has stopped noticing.
The industry is not broken. The sequence is.
There is a temptation to read this as evidence that workshops, coaching or facilitation simply don’t work. They do. The best executive coaches change lives. The best facilitators move teams in ways no programme alone could. The point is not that the industry has failed.
The point is that we have got the sequence wrong. By the time the provider enters, the organisation has already decided which problem it is solving. We refine the solution before we have validated the problem, then judge the result on satisfaction scores.
“No serious strategist would operate this way in another domain. A company would not redesign its operating model before understanding the operational constraint. It would not invest millions in product expansion before validating customer behaviour. Yet leadership development routinely proceeds exactly like this.”
What does shift the odds is well evidenced. McKinsey found that successful programmes were far more likely to be anchored on the specific behaviours executives identified as critical drivers of business performance, the team’s actual context, not a generic curriculum. The diagnostic in front of the curriculum is what makes the curriculum land.
That is the core problem.
Leadership development should not begin with a generic programme. It should begin by understanding the team the leader is returning to its habits, dynamics, constraints, and the behaviours the wider organisation has already adapted around.
Because before an organisation decides what development a leader needs, it should answer a more important question first:
Do we actually understand what is limiting the team they are supposed to be leading? Until we can, we are spending billions teaching leaders to lead teams we have never properly understood, and quietly wondering why so little of what we teach takes hold.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Harrie Ellaway is a passionate coach and facilitator and a former Corporal in the Royal Engineers. Over fifteen years he has designed and delivered immersive leadership programmes across the military, corporate and elite sport sectors.
ABOUT META TEAM
Meta Team is a behavioural diagnostic platform used by leadership teams to identify the interaction patterns constraining performance — particularly around candour, coordination, decision quality and execution. Its short-form stakeholder diagnostic is used alongside leadership development, coaching and organisational-change work to help teams identify the real constraint before interventions are designed.
SOURCES
• Eurich, T. — “What Self-Awareness Really Is (and How to Cultivate It),” Harvard Business Review, January 2018. https://hbr.org/2018/01/what-self-awareness-really-is-and-how-to-cultivate-it
• Sull, Turconi, Sull & Yoder — “No One Knows Your Strategy — Not Even Your Top Leaders,” MIT Sloan Management Review, 2018. https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/no-one-knows-your-strategy-not-even-your-top-leaders/
• Norton, Mochon & Ariely — “The IKEA Effect: When Labor Leads to Love,” Journal of Consumer Psychology, 2012. https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=41121
• McKinsey & Company — “What’s Missing in Leadership Development?” 2017. https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/leadership/whats-missing-in-leadership-development
• Beer, Finnström & Schrader — “Why Leadership Training Fails — and What to Do About It,” Harvard Business Review, October 2016. https://hbr.org/2016/10/why-leadership-training-fails-and-what-to-do-about-it
• SNS Insider — Leadership Development Program Market, 2024. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/leadership-development-program-market-reach-140000488.html
• Center for Creative Leadership — Make Learning Stick (transfer-of-learning research). https://www.ccl.org/articles/leading-effectively-articles/learning-transfer-leadership-development/
• Meta Team — Diagnostic dataset, 150,000+ data points across thousands of teams, 2014–2024. https://www.metateam.co.uk
• Premier League — “The Immersive Military Experience Transforming Coach Development Across the Premier League,” January 2026. https://www.premierleague.com/en/news/4535343/the-military-experience-transforming-coach-development-across-the-premier-league