{"id":1938,"date":"2026-06-15T16:08:02","date_gmt":"2026-06-15T16:08:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.metateam.co.uk\/news\/?p=1938"},"modified":"2026-06-15T16:09:04","modified_gmt":"2026-06-15T16:09:04","slug":"ive-designed-hundreds-of-leadership-programmes-too-many-were-compromised-before-they-began","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.metateam.co.uk\/news\/ive-designed-hundreds-of-leadership-programmes-too-many-were-compromised-before-they-began\/","title":{"rendered":"I’ve\u00a0designed hundreds of leadership programmes. Too many were compromised before they began.\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Harrie Ellaway<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For L&D leaders, programme designers, executive coaches and the leaders who fund them.<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two years ago, a CEO told me politely and accurately that I had answered the wrong question. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2014 a brief \u2014 and the brief almost never reaches the team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those teams have established habits, political dynamics, communication patterns and behavioural constraints that were never examined before the work began. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPrecision at the delivery stage cannot compensate for ambiguity at the diagnostic stage.\u201d<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The numbers behind the room<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have sat in versions of that Monday-morning conversation. The data behind it is, depressingly, consistent. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Leadership development is a vast global industry. Only 11% of executives strongly agree that their leadership development achieves the results they want<\/strong> \u2014 McKinsey, 500+ executives globally. One of the most revealing numbers in the field. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The transfer-of-learning literature has tracked a similar pattern for decades: only 10\u201320% of training content translates into sustained behaviour change on the job<\/strong>. Beer, Finnstr\u00f6m and Schrader called it “the great training robbery”<\/strong> in the Harvard Business Review nearly a decade ago. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The brief is built on three unreliable inputs<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every brief that lands on a designer’s desk has travelled through filters. In the story above, mine had passed through three of them\u2014CEO, HRD, L&D Manager\u2014before 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n