Most leadership training does not produce leaders. Here is what does
October 17, 2026 · 4 min read
Leadership is learned the way surgery is learned — by doing it under supervision, with feedback, over time. Most training skips every part of that.
Ask anyone who has attended a leadership workshop what they remember from it. Most will name the venue before they name an idea.
This is not because the content was poor or the facilitator weak. It is because of a mistake built into how leadership development is usually designed: the assumption that leadership is a body of knowledge, and that transferring the knowledge produces the leader.
It does not. Leadership is a practice. And practices are not learned by being told about them.
The gap between knowing and doing
Everyone who has sat through a session on delegation can explain delegation. Far fewer delegate well. The same person can describe how to give difficult feedback and then avoid giving it for six months.
The gap between those two states is not a knowledge gap. It is the difference between understanding something and being able to do it while under pressure, tired, and uncertain whether you are right.
Nobody expects a surgeon to operate after a lecture on surgery. We expect years of supervised practice, with someone more experienced watching, and consequences that are real but survivable. We accept that this takes time and that there is no shortcut.
Then we run a three-day workshop and expect a leader.
What actually develops people
Four things, in our experience and in most of the credible research on the subject.
Real responsibility, early. People develop when they are accountable for an outcome that matters and that could genuinely go wrong. Not a case study — a decision with their name on it. Responsibility held slightly before someone feels ready is where most growth happens. Held long after they are ready, it produces frustration and nothing else.
Feedback that is specific and close in time. “You did well” teaches nothing. “You let that meeting run twenty minutes past the point of decision, and two people stopped contributing” teaches something, provided it arrives while the meeting is still fresh. Most organisations save feedback for an annual review, by which time it is a historical document rather than a tool.
Someone to think out loud with. Not an instructor — someone a few steps ahead who has made the same mistakes and can say so. This is why mentorship and leadership development belong together rather than sitting in separate programmes.
Time. Judgement is the slowest thing to develop and the hardest to teach. It comes from having been wrong, having noticed, and having adjusted — repeatedly. There is no version of this that fits into a quarter.
Why the workshop persists
If this is known, why does event-based training remain the default?
Because it is easy to organise, easy to count, and easy to report. A workshop has a date, an attendance list and photographs. A funder can be shown a number. The participant gets a certificate.
Supervised practice over eighteen months has none of those qualities. It is difficult to schedule, difficult to photograph, and difficult to summarise in a report. It is also the thing that works.
This is a measurement problem masquerading as a design choice. We count what is easy to count, and then design the programme that produces the numbers.
Ethics is not a module
One more thing that resists the workshop format.
Ethical leadership is usually taught as a session — a set of principles, perhaps a code of conduct, often near the end of the day. It is treated as an addition to technical competence rather than as the thing that determines whether technical competence is used well.
But nobody fails an ethical test because they did not know the principle. They fail because the right thing was expensive, or unpopular, or would have embarrassed someone senior. The gap is not knowledge. It is the willingness to pay a cost.
That willingness is built the same way as everything else: by having been in a smaller version of the situation, having chosen correctly, and having survived it. Which means it has to be practised too, in situations where the stakes are real but not ruinous.
A programme that develops competence without developing this produces capable people who are not yet trustworthy. That is a worse outcome than developing neither.
What this means in practice
If you are designing a leadership programme, three tests are worth applying.
Does a participant hold real responsibility during it? If the programme consists entirely of learning and no doing, it will produce people who can discuss leadership.
Does feedback arrive within days, from someone who saw the thing happen? If feedback is quarterly and generalised, it is not feedback.
Does it run long enough for someone to be wrong and recover? A programme shorter than a few months cannot contain a full cycle of attempt, failure, adjustment and second attempt. That cycle is the unit of development.
And if you are considering a programme as a participant, ask what you will be responsible for, who will tell you how you did, and how long it runs. The answers will tell you more than the syllabus.
The Stephen Asom Foundation develops leaders through programmes built around practice rather than lectures. See our programmes.