Source: forbes.com
Many organizations offer one or more leadership development training opportunities to their leaders—workshops, certificate programs, mentorship initiatives and retreats.
The investment is real, so is the intention.
But attending leadership development is one thing. Acting on it is another. In my work, I’ve seen the same pattern again and again: Leaders return from a meaningful development experience and step right back into the same workloads, meeting cultures, pressures, norms and systems. That environment pulls them back into their old habits.
Successful leadership development requires more than training. It also requires a workplace built to support what leaders are learning.
Leader Development Is Not Leadership Development
First, it’s necessary to get the distinction right between leader development and leadership development.
Organizational psychologist David Day, in his research paper about leadership development, noted that leader development is individual and intrapersonal, whereas leadership development is relational and interpersonal, among other differences.
In my experience, many executives conflate the two, and the cost of doing so is real. An executive team can, for instance, invest in one-on-one executive coaching, personality assessments and individual skill-building for 15 managers, with the goal of strengthening the organization’s leadership system as a whole. But often, the result is 15 better individuals, not a more capable leadership system. And without a workplace that supports those individual gains, even those rarely translate into sustained organizational change.
The Components Of An Intentional Organizational Architecture
The right organizational architecture—the structures, systems and routines that shape how work gets done—is what allows new behaviors to take hold. Organizational architecture consists of visible and invisible elements.
The visible elements are the ones that executives can change first. For instance:
• Meeting practices: Instead of defaulting to top-down updates, executives can implement peer learning groups, leaders’ circles and cross-functional forums.
• Team configurations: Executives can move from rigid departmental silos toward more collaborative, cross-functional ones.
• Decision-making processes: Executives can gather input using surveys, listening sessions and town halls, rather than making decisions in isolation. Equally important is what happens after—how executives translate the input into informed, visible decisions. Gathering employee feedback without acting on it signals that their voice doesn’t count.
These are the levers most organizations have, but in my experience, many rarely intentionally pull them.
The invisible elements are the ones that I believe matter most—and that I’ve observed quietly defeat training programs time and time again. They include how feedback flows (or doesn’t), what gets rewarded versus ignored, the language leaders use for difficult topics and the unspoken rules of who shares information with whom. In many workplaces, feedback only travels downward. Rushing gets rewarded, while taking time to be thoughtful goes unnoticed. The real conversation happens after the meeting in hallways, side chats and direct messages—not in the room where it could actually change a decision. Leaders notice what gets shared, how, by whom and who is left out. Much of this is unintentional. The impact on leaders, however, is not.
At the core, a strong organizational architecture is one that offers people psychological safety and creates room for ongoing connection, reflection and growth. With these elements in place, team members have space to try new things alongside their peers, evaluate what went well and what didn’t and learn something for next time. In her research paper “Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams,” Amy Edmondson’s foundational research on team learning showed why this matters: When people in a group feel psychologically safe, they are more willing to take interpersonal risks, such as asking for help and admitting that they don’t know something. Without psychological safety, leadership development becomes performance. With it, leadership development becomes practice.
How Executives Can Build Intentional Organizational Architectures
Building intentional organizational architectures requires significant time and energy that many executives may feel they rarely have. That means being deliberate not just about what to prioritize but also about what to deprioritize. There are a few key steps executives can take to build strong organizational architectures.
First, executives should treat learning as an ongoing process rather than as a series of one-time events. Leaders need the chance to return to ideas over time, reflect on them and apply them gradually.
Second, it’s important for executives to look beyond lectures. This is where adult learning science matters. In research published in 2022, Scott J. Allen, David M. Rosch and Ronald E. Riggio examined business school leader development programs and noted “that there is an overreliance on cognitive training (e.g., lecture) as the primary form of education used in preparing future business leaders, neglecting other relevant learning orientations,” such as constructivist learning built through practice and social cognitive learning built through modeling and engagement with peers. At my company, this is the foundation of how we design every learning experience. We’ve found that going beyond lectures is the difference between a leader who can describe psychological safety and one who can actually build it; the other relevant learning orientations the study’s authors pointed to help drive behavior change.
Third, it’s vital for executives to build peer learning into the architecture of their organizations. Behavior change in isolation is often an uphill battle. Leaders who try something new alone tend to do it once, get an awkward result and quietly retreat. Leaders practicing alongside a small group of peers tend to keep going. They have a place to bring the awkward result and a sharper question for next time. As Edmondson noted in the research paper I referenced earlier, “For a team to discover gaps in its plans and make changes accordingly, team members must test assumptions and discuss differences of opinion openly rather than privately or outside the group.”
Fourth, executives should align what is taught with what is rewarded, and align words with actions. Michael Beer, Magnus Finnström and Derek Schrader argued in the Harvard Business Review (paywalled): “Systems for selecting, evaluating, developing, and promoting talent [should be] adjusted to reflect and sustain the changes in organizational behavior.” Otherwise, the old systems keep teaching the old patterns—louder than any program ever could.
Finally, I advise executives to model the behaviors they want to see. My experience over the years has shown me that what executives do sets the standard.
Leadership Development Is Organizational Capacity Building
Leaders don’t need more training. They need consistency between what they are taught and what their workplaces actually support. When the system does not change, individual change is set up to fail. When executives treat leadership development as organizational capacity building, leaders gain the conditions they need to flourish.