Many companies are spending a fortune on leadership development, and some of it isn't working.
What I am finding is that organisations are finally being asked to prove that the investment is worth it. Boards want measurable outcomes. HR teams are tracking retention, succession metrics, and engagement scores. U.S. companies alone spent around $98 billion on training in 2024; and the pressure to justify every dollar has never been higher.
But here's the uncomfortable truth: a lot of leadership development is aimed at the wrong objective.
Companies load leaders up with frameworks, models, and content, send them on programmes, give them 360 feedback and hope something sticks. They rarely go deep enough on the thing that actually drives performance: the leader themselves; their self-awareness, their self-mastery, their patterns under pressure, the behaviours they repeat without ever questioning why.
Without self-mastery, nothing else lands.
And the price? It's showing up in ways that don't always make it onto a dashboard:
Your best people are leaving, and they're not telling you why. They're not leaving the company, they're leaving the dynamic. the unspoken tension, the leader who's technically brilliant but hasn't grown in years, the environment where playing it safe has become the unwritten rule.
Your teams are compliant, but never truly committed. They deliver. they hit the targets. But you're not getting their best thinking, their boldest ideas, or their genuine buy-in. You're getting performance without passion. And at the senior level, that gap is enormously expensive.
These aren't HR problems, they're leadership behaviour problems, and no amount of content, frameworks, or off-sites will fix them without real, sustained work on self-mastery and behavioural change.
That's exactly where real coaching lives. Not in inspiration, tot in content delivery. In the honest, specific, sometimes uncomfortable work of examining who you're actually being, and doing the hard work of changing it.
So before your next performance review, ask yourself:
What kind of leader are you becoming, and what evidence do you actually have that it's working?
Where are you getting compliance from your team when what you actually need is commitment, delivery and changes in behaviour?
