A company spends $80,000 on a two-day leadership offsite. Everyone has a good time. The facilitator is engaging. The workbooks look glossy. People go back to their desks on Monday, and within three weeks, nothing has changed.
Not because the people didn’t want to change. Not because the content was bad. Because the model was wrong.
This happens constantly in Australian organisations, and the data backs it up. McKinsey research found 75% of senior executives rate their organisation’s L&D programs as ineffective at improving performance. Billions of dollars, collectively, producing very little that sticks.
The reason is not a content problem. It is a structural one.
The Problem with Awareness-Based Training
Most leadership development is built around a single assumption: that if you help someone understand something, they will do it differently.
It’s a reasonable hypothesis. It’s also largely wrong.
Attending a one-day session on emotional intelligence does not make you more emotionally intelligent. Sitting in a coaching conversations program does not make you a better coach. Knowing that you should prioritise sleep and recovery does not mean you will. Understanding is not behaviour. Awareness is not change.
Corporate leadership development runs on a small set of formats: the one-off event, the two-day offsite, the 30-module e-learning platform. All are built around the same assumption. Exposure leads to insight leads to behaviour change.
The research on behaviour change doesn’t support this. Habits are formed through repetition, environmental design, feedback loops, and reinforcement, not through one-time exposure to ideas. If a leadership program doesn’t build in those mechanisms, the awareness it generates will decay within weeks. And in most organisations, it does.
What the Research Actually Shows
The science of behaviour change is not ambiguous on this point.
Most Leadership Training Doesn’t Work
Research from University College London found new habits take an average of 66 days to form, with significant variation depending on the complexity of the behaviour and the consistency of the cue-response loop.
A two-day corporate offsite produces none of those conditions. Pfeffer and Sutton’s work at Harvard Business School pinpoints the same structural gap from a different angle: organisations consistently struggle with the translation of knowledge into action, not with the knowledge acquisition, in what they call the knowing-doing gap. The culprit, in most cases, is an absence of coached practice in real conditions.
The transfer of training literature is consistent on this: behaviour change is most successful when learners receive personalised feedback on specific gaps, practise new behaviours with coaching support, and are held accountable by their direct manager. One-off programs typically satisfy none of these conditions.
The organisations that see genuine, lasting leadership development do something different. They start with data. They build personalised programs around specific capability gaps rather than generic curricula. And they put a reinforcement structure, specifically manager-led coaching, between the program and the workplace.
This is what we’ve built at Performance Intelligence. Not because it’s clever, but because it’s what works.
A Different Model
When working with an organisation on leadership development, we don’t start with a program. We start with a diagnostic and helping establish exactly where the team is right now.
The PQ Index provides a science-based objective measure of individual and team performance capacity across four domains: Energy Management, Mental Agility, Strategic Recovery, and Biological Age. The Leadership Capacity Index maps specific leadership behaviours against the business context the team is operating in.
Before anyone sits in a room together, we know where the genuine gaps are. We know which leaders are in the Surviving tier and which are in Striving. We know whether the team’s challenge is primarily psychological flexibility under pressure or strategic recovery between intense periods. The program is built around that data, not around a generic model of what good leaders should know.
The delivery structure is then designed to create the conditions for behaviour change. Not just content transfer.
This means shorter, more targeted interventions rather than long, event-based programs. It means practise, application, and feedback built into the design, not as an afterthought. And it means what we call Leader-Led Coaching as the sustainment mechanism.
Why Leader-Led Coaching is the Differentiator
The biggest single change in how we structure leadership development is this: we train managers to coach their own people.
Most organisations outsource coaching. They bring in external coaches for the senior team, run a program for the next layer, and then wonder why nothing changes at the team level. The external coach doesn’t sit with the team in the daily work. The direct manager does.
Leader-Led Coaching changes the mechanism. We equip managers with the conversation frameworks, the diagnostic data, and the operating rhythm structure to conduct short, regular coaching conversations with their direct reports. This is not a new meeting. It is a new quality of conversation inside meetings that already exist.
The impact is disproportionate because it changes the environment. When a leader consistently asks the right questions about performance, and their team knows the right questions will be asked, behaviour starts to shift. Not because of a two-day offsite. Because the daily work environment is reinforcing the new behaviour.
Measurement Closes the Loop
The last piece is measurement.
We re-run the PQ Index after every program. We look at where the scores have shifted, which domains have improved, and where the gaps remain. This matters for two reasons.
First, it tells us whether the program worked. Not anecdotally; objectively. An organisation should know whether it is getting a return on its leadership development investment, and that requires data before and after.
Second, it sustains accountability. When leaders know their performance capacity will be measured again in six months, they engage differently with the program. The measurement creates a feedback loop that awareness-based training never provides.
What This Looks Like in Practice
I’ve run this model with large ASX-listed companies, government agencies, and elite sport organisations. The pattern is consistent.
Organisations that have been through traditional leadership programs often arrive with a useful starting point: their people have heard the concepts. They know what psychological safety means. They understand the theory of emotional intelligence. But knowing and doing are different things, and nothing in their previous program created the conditions for doing.
When we add the diagnostic layer, the targeted program, the coaching reinforcement structure, and the measurement, the conversation changes. Leaders move from knowing what they should do to building the habits that mean they actually do it.
That is the only outcome worth paying for.
Where to Start
If you’ve run leadership development programs that haven’t stuck, the first honest question to ask is: what was the theory of change?
If the answer is “we exposed our leaders to good content and hoped they’d apply it”, the structure is the problem. Content is not enough. Awareness is not change.
The organisations doing this well are the ones who treat leadership capacity as a measurable, buildable thing, not a quality some people have and others don’t. They start with data, build around specific gaps, reinforce through coaching, and measure the result.
If you want to understand how this works in practice, start by learning more about the PQ Index.
Learn more about the Leadership Programs
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrew May is the Founder and CEO of Performance Intelligence and one of Australia’s leading experts in human performance. He has spent more than 25 years working with elite athletes, military personnel, and senior corporate leaders on the science of sustainable high performance. Andrew is a bestselling author, sought-after keynote speaker, and host of the Performance Intelligence Podcast.
REFERENCES
- Gurdjian, P., Halbeisen, T., & Lane, K. (2014). Why leadership-development programs fail. McKinsey Quarterly. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/why-leadership-development-programs-fail
- Blume, B.D., Ford, J.K., Baldwin, T.T., & Huang, J.L. (2010). Transfer of training: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Management, 36(4), 1065–1105.
- Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40, 998–1009.
- Pfeffer, J., & Sutton, R. I. (2000). The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action. Harvard Business School Press.
