Ask a room of people and HR leaders what’s on their plate when it comes to their manager and leadership population and you’ll hear versions of the same handful of problems. Leaders are expected to carry more than they did three years ago. Budgets that don’t stretch as far as they need to. Pressure to prove that chosen development actually did something. And the persistent, awkward one – the leadership training happened, everyone said it was useful, and six months later very little has changed.
Most organisations have a sense from anecdotal feedback and a handful of appraisals, that their managers and leaders need to be more effective – to both drive performance and keep employees engaged.
However, few organisations know exactly which behaviours are and are not happening across their different levels of leaders, and, crucially, why that is.
What tends to happen is that leadership development investment often goes into generic leadership skills training solutions that miss the actual root problem. What exists instead is usually a handful of 360s from two years ago and a senior stakeholder’s view that the middle layer isn’t performing. That’s useful insight, but it isn’t enough empirical evidence to direct real investment at – especially when the performance and employee engagement data shows that something needs to change.
So the money gets spread, often thinly. A programme for the whole management population, because making it targeted would require knowing what the actual root problem is. And a broad programme aimed at an assumed problem really only ever half-works at best. Some participants find it useful, yet nothing actually changes. And, what’s more, HR struggles to point to why nothing changed. The next time development comes up the appetite is a little thinner than it was.
Follow that through and the other problems start to make sense. Take measurement. Proving that development worked means knowing what it was like before, and if nobody established that with any precision, the conversation about impact is lost before it starts – which is how organisations end up reporting attendance and completion rates, not because anyone thinks those are meaningful, but because they’re the only numbers anyone can produce. The same gap explains why L&D so often stays in a reactive, order-taking position. Responding to requests is the only real option available when you can’t independently diagnose what the business actually needs.
Behaviour doesn’t shift either, because it only shifts when development is aimed at whatever is genuinely holding someone back. A manager who avoids difficult conversations because they’re worried about getting it wrong doesn’t need a course on how to structure feedback – they already know how to structure feedback. What’s stopping them is something else entirely, and no amount of well-designed content will touch it if that isn’t what’s being addressed.
None of this is a delivery problem. It’s a targeting problem, and the real cost rarely shows up on any budget line. It’s the credibility spent making an internal case you couldn’t fully evidence, and how much harder the next one becomes.
The alternative is evidence: knowing where leadership effectiveness is genuinely limiting performance and employee engagement, across each leader level, and understanding what sits behind it before deciding what to do about it. It changes the nature of every conversation that follows, because a budget request with a case behind it is a different conversation from one built on conviction.
It also changes what development needs to be. Once you know that a group of experienced managers are capable but avoidant, the answer isn’t more content. It’s work on the mindset and behaviour underneath, explored properly and applied to the situations they’re actually dealing with. That’s not a one-off course anyone can deliver once and move on from. It’s a targeted response to a specific, evidenced gap.
Upwrd’s Leadership Effectiveness Diagnostic identifies where leadership is limiting performance and engagement across every leader level, and the organisational conditions behind it. If you want to see what it surfaces for your leadership population, get in touch for a walkthrough.
