Every people director I work with has had some version of this conversation. The engagement survey comes back and the weak lines are the same as last time: my manager gives me useful feedback, I understand how my work contributes to the strategy, I feel able to raise concerns. The senior team reads it and concludes that the managers aren’t stepping up. The managers, asked quietly, say nobody has told them what stepping up looks like here.
Both are right, and the reason is usually structural rather than personal.
The layer that gets missed
In most organisations of a few hundred to a few thousand people, leadership development goes to the top. The executive team has had coaching. The directors have been on a programme. The thirty, forty or seventy people underneath them, the heads of department, the operational leads, the first-line managers, have had whatever their predecessor handed over and a day’s course in 2019. They were promoted because they were good at the job, and the organisation assumed the leading would follow.
The evidence says it doesn’t. The Chartered Management Institute’s 2023 survey of 4,500 UK workers and managers found that 82% of people who become managers have had no formal management or leadership training at all. Half of the employees who rated their manager as ineffective were planning to leave within a year, against a fifth of those with an effective one. Gallup’s long-running work across 2.5 million teams puts the manager’s share of the variation in team engagement at around 70%. You can argue with the precision of either figure, but not with the direction: the survey results the senior team is worrying about are being produced, one team at a time, by the layer the development budget skipped.
Why a course doesn’t fix it
The usual response is to buy some training. A supplier runs a management essentials programme, the feedback forms are good, and nine months later the engagement scores haven’t moved.
Two things are going on. The first is that leadership is learned by doing it differently and noticing what happens, not by hearing about it. The largest review of leadership training to date, a 2017 analysis of 335 studies covering 26,000 participants, found that development does work, and works best when it is spread over time in several sessions, uses practice as well as content, and gives people individual feedback. A single day, however good, is the format the evidence rates lowest.
The second is older and harder. Beer, Finnström and Schrader argued in Harvard Business Review in 2016 that most leadership training fails because people go back into a system that hasn’t changed: unclear strategy, a senior team that isn’t aligned, roles and processes that reward the old behaviour. Individuals learn something and the organisation teaches it back out of them within a quarter. That matches what I see. A manager who has learned to delegate goes back to a director who still wants to see everything. A head of department who has learned to give feedback goes back to a performance system that doesn’t ask for any.
What the ones that work have in common
I’ve run programmes for a dozen directors in an accountancy group, for sixty senior leaders in a national charity, and for small groups of new leaders in founder-led businesses. The shapes were different. The things that made them work were the same.
They start with conversations, not content. Before anything is designed, I talk to each participant one to one and write up the themes for the sponsor. That synthesis usually shortens the brief, and it tells the senior team something about itself it didn’t expect to hear. It’s also the point at which the second problem above gets named: if the senior team’s own habits are what the programme is up against, better to know now, and sometimes the honest answer is that the senior team needs the work first.
They run in cohorts, over months. People learn with peers from other parts of the organisation, make commitments in front of them, and come back a month later to say what happened. The cohort does more of the work than the facilitator. In the charity, the people director’s own observation at the end was that the leadership group had started taking decisions without asking the senior team’s permission first, which is the thing the survey had been measuring all along.
They are built on the organisation’s own framework. Every organisation has, somewhere, a statement of what it expects from its leaders. The programme is written against it, not against a model from a textbook, so what people learn is what their own organisation will recognise and reward.
They are measured and reported back to the sponsor. Surveys at the start and through the programme, feedback after every session, a 360 at either end where the group is senior enough. Not to prove a return, which is harder than suppliers admit, but so the people director can see what is shifting and what isn’t, and change the programme accordingly.
And they ask something of the senior team. A sponsor who stays close to it. A senior team that takes part in its own development rather than commissioning it for everyone else. Without that, the programme becomes optional, and optional programmes change nothing.
The question to ask first
If the survey says leadership and the senior team says the managers aren’t stepping up, the question isn’t which course to buy. It’s whether the layer beneath the senior team has ever been developed as a layer, with the senior team’s habits in view, over long enough to stick. Most haven’t. That’s the work, and it’s described in more detail on the leadership development page.