Leadership Development Should Start with the Problem, Not the Programme
Updated: Sep 27
Leadership development often starts with a shopping list.
"We need a leadership programme."
"Our managers need an AI course."
"We should run a strategy day."
"We need coaching for the senior team."
Any of these could be useful. The difficulty is that each statement has already jumped to a solution. Thus, there is a more useful question to ask first:
What actually needs to change in the organisation?
That is not only a leadership-development question. It is a strategy, people and performance question. The answer may point towards development, but it may also expose problems in priorities, decision-making, accountability, coordination or the way work itself is organised.
That question should come before programme design.
Start with the organisational problem
Leadership capability is prominent in employers' skills priorities. The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that 63% of employers see skills gaps in the labour market as a major barrier to organisational transformation. Leadership and social influence were identified as core skills by 61% of employers surveyed.
But "leadership development" can describe very different organisational needs. A company struggling to execute its strategy may appear to have a leadership problem. Yet the underlying issue could be unclear priorities, slow decisions, poor coordination between functions, weak accountability, difficult conversations that are being avoided, or simply too much work concentrated in too few places.
Some of these are capability issues. Others concern processes, structures, incentives, relationships or workload.
A leadership programme cannot be expected to solve all of them.
Diagnosis should come before design
This is why diagnosis is so important. A 2026 article by Joerg Hruby and Carlos Canfield in Organizational Dynamics draws on learning-transfer research and descriptive survey data from 238 senior HRD professionals in multinational organisations in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. The authors identify developmental diagnosis as one of four conditions associated with whether leadership learning translates into organisational capability. The other three are feedback infrastructure, application pathways, and shared ownership.
Applied more broadly, that changes the starting question.
Instead of asking:
Which programme should we run?
ask:
What is happening today that needs to be different?
Only then should the organisation decide what kind of response is required.
That may lead to coaching, executive education, team development, action learning, changes to decision processes, or a combination of several approaches.
It may also reveal that another programme is not the answer.
Context changes what leaders need
This principle is also consistent with a chapter Kerstin and I published in the Research Handbook on Buyer-Supplier Relationships. In "Sustainable Synergies: Taking Leadership in the Future of Buyer-Supplier Relationships", we examine how shifts in technology, sustainability, regulation and global business conditions are changing organisational relationships and the leadership demands associated with them.
Leadership is exercised in context.
A leader integrating an acquisition needs different capabilities from one trying to improve customer retention. A founder-led company introducing broader management responsibility faces different challenges from an organisation introducing AI into established workflows.
Calling all of these "leadership development" does not make them the same problem.
AI provides a useful example
An organisation might decide that its managers need an AI course.
Possibly.
But MBIE research involving 500 New Zealand SMEs found that 94% were already aware of at least one AI tool. The barriers included confidence, capability, uncertainty about where to begin, difficulty identifying useful applications, and concerns about accuracy, privacy, security and trust. So the apparent training need could actually be something else.
One organisation may need AI literacy.
Another may need better decisions about where AI should be used.
Another may need clearer governance.
Another may need managers to redesign work.
Another may have a trust and communication problem.
The response should follow the diagnosis.
Five questions before commissioning leadership development
Before deciding on a programme, I would ask:
What organisational outcome is not happening reliably today?
What would leaders need to do differently?
Which part of the gap concerns capability or behaviour?
Which part comes from systems, structures, incentives or resources?
What evidence would show, six months later, that something had changed?
These questions do not prescribe the intervention. That is their value.
Give development a clear job to do
This is not an argument against leadership programmes, executive education or coaching. It is an argument for giving them a clearly defined purpose.
If an organisation understands what needs to change, which leadership behaviours contribute to that change, and how progress will be assessed, the response can be designed around a real organisational requirement.
The programme should not be the starting point.
Understanding what the organisation needs to do differently should be.
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