Designing Results-Oriented Leadership Development Programmes

In business, one would typically not make a large investment without an idea of how to gauge its results. This does not happen with leadership development programmes (LDPs), which lack the typical business analysis of return on investment and the impact of the programmes. Our research is focussed on addressing this gap by identifying and explaining two often-overlooked elements that have a significant impact on both individual leaders and organisations.

According to the Corporate Learning Factbook (2014), spending on corporate training grew by more than $130 Billion worldwide in 2013. This report mentions that 60 percent of all companies indicate that the leadership gap is their top business challenge, and, therefore, they invest 35% of their entire training budget (35 cents of every training dollar) on LDPs. Also, a recent survey by Deloitte (2016) reports that 89 percent of executives rated organisational leadership as an important priority, and more than half of the respondents mentioned that their organisations are not ready to meet leadership needs.

Many LDPs graduates do go on to become successful senior leaders.