We May Be Organizing Leadership Development Around the Wrong Question

Most leadership development starts by picking the tools. More workshops. More coaching. Peer learning groups. AI assistants. Microlearning. Reinforcement.

Those are all valuable. The problem is that choosing the tools is the second question, not the first.

Before deciding what to provide, we should ask something more fundamental.

How do people actually become better at leading?

Once you answer that, the tools start to make more sense.

Expertise is built through repeated performance combined with meaningful feedback. Much of development supports that process.

Across almost every performance domain, the pattern is the same. Someone is introduced to a concept. They attempt to apply it. They receive feedback. They adjust. Then they repeat the process hundreds or thousands of times.

Whether you are learning surgery, sales, engineering, music, or leadership, capability grows through that cycle. Training introduces the skill. Practice builds it.

The 70-20-10 model suggests that roughly 70 percent of development comes from on the job experience, 20 percent from working with and learning from others, and 10 percent from formal training. That is probably true. What the model does not say is what makes experience developmental. The difference is feedback.

You can learn to do a job well and then spend the next twenty years doing it the same way. As long as the process works, nothing forces you to update. The experience accumulates. The capability does not. Or you can spend twenty years noticing what works, what does not, and why, and updating how you operate as a result. Same job. Without that habit, time passes but capability does not grow.

Feedback does not have to be formal. It can come from a coach, a colleague, or the outcome itself. It can be a conversation or a quiet moment where you notice what happened and ask yourself what you would do differently. Feedback only becomes developmental when you learn something from it.

The barrier is rarely the availability of feedback. Most people receive signals about their performance constantly. The harder question is whether they have developed the habit of paying attention to those signals and doing something with them. Time pressure makes reflection feel optional.

One of the simplest ways to see this is to watch a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu class.

The instructor demonstrates a technique for a few minutes. Students practice. The instructor walks around making small corrections. Students practice again. Then they spar against resisting partners.

The majority of the class is not spent listening. It is spent performing.

No one would expect to become a better grappler by attending more lectures. Yet leadership development often assumes that another workshop is the answer?

In one organization I worked in, stretch assignments were typically two years. Long enough to make an impact. Not long enough to see what that impact actually produced.

I worked with a director from R&D who came to the plant for one of these assignments. Bright, driven, and fully aware that this was a stepping stone. What I noticed immediately was that they were focused on making a big splash. They had goals to hit and a next role to earn. The longer term consequences of their decisions were someone else’s problem.

They moved on. The wake they left took months to surface.

That is the problem with assignments that are treated as performance opportunities rather than development opportunities. The feedback loop depends on seeing what your decisions actually produced. When the consequences show up after you have already moved on, you never receive the feedback that would have made the assignment developmental. You learned that you could execute. You did not learn whether what you executed was actually right.

The higher you go, the longer it takes for the impact of your decisions to become visible. A two year assignment at the plant level teaches you something. A two year assignment at the executive level may not show you its real results for five years. If the development window is shorter than the impact horizon, the experience accumulates but the learning does not.

People do not improve because something was difficult. They improve because they learn while doing something difficult.

Training never disappears. It evolves.

Early in a career, training focuses on techniques. How to interview. How to delegate. How to conduct a performance conversation. Those are learnable skills that can be taught, practiced, and refined.

Later, the focus shifts toward something harder to teach directly. Judgment. Timing. Decision quality. Systems thinking. Executive presence.

These are not additional tools. They are force multipliers. Improving one of them influences dozens of leadership behaviors simultaneously. A leader with better judgment makes better decisions across every context they enter, not just the one the training covered.

Developing judgment looks different than developing a technique. Judgment is not developed in a workshop alone. It develops through making real decisions, receiving honest feedback on the quality of your reasoning, reflecting on what you missed, and then making more decisions. The mechanism is the same: repeated performance with meaningful feedback. The feedback has to address the quality of thinking, not just the outcome.

Coaching, in this sense, is not correcting technique. It is improving the quality of reasoning. That is a more demanding kind of coaching. It is also the kind that actually changes how someone leads.

This is where I think leadership development often goes off course.

The question is not which tools to use. It is how someone actually becomes better at leading. Once you answer that, the tools find their place.

Training introduces capability. Performance practice builds it. Feedback improves the quality of thinking during practice. Peer learning helps people make sense of their experiences.

The goal is not to accumulate more learning activities. The goal is to help people become more capable. Those are not always the same thing.

Development should produce increased capability. What can this person now do better that they couldn’t do before? If we cannot answer that question, the fact that development activities occurred does not mean as much.