Thinking About Hiring a Leadership Trainer? Read This First

Is your company considering investing in leadership training? You‘re not alone. Spending on leadership training has soared in recent years, with the industry now worth over $350 billion globally.

However, before you write that big check to a leadership training firm, there‘s something you should know: Most leadership trainers actually hurt leaders more than they help them. It‘s a bold claim, but keep reading to see the evidence behind it.

After years of working with hundreds of companies on leadership development, I‘ve seen firsthand how most training programs fail to move the needle on leadership effectiveness – and in many cases, even set leaders back. Here are the 5 biggest reasons why:

Reason 1: Trainers Push an Unrealistic "Authentic" Leadership Style

"Just be yourself!" "Let the real you shine through!" Spend a day in a typical leadership seminar and you‘ll hear countless variations of this "be authentic" advice.

The idea sounds great – after all, authenticity is an admirable quality, right? But the reality is, simply being your unfiltered, "authentic" self is not a recipe for effective leadership.

I‘ve worked with many executives who take the authenticity idea too far. They think that being an authentic leader means always speaking their mind, never holding back their opinions, and letting their true feelings show. In reality, this approach often alienates and de-motivates their teams.

As Stanford professor Jeffrey Pfeffer argues in his book Leadership BS, the most effective leaders know how to manage their image and adapt to the situation. Sometimes that means turning up the charm and charisma to rally the troops. Other times it means being more restrained and measured in their words and emotions. Sticking dogmatically to one "authentic" style limits a leader‘s impact.

Great leaders, like great actors, have a broad repertoire and can read the audience to apply the right approach for the moment. So ignore your trainer‘s advice to "just be you" – the best leaders know how to selectively be different versions of themselves to suit the context.

Reason 2: Cookie-Cutter Training Content Doesn‘t Drive Real Change

When was the last time you got really excited about sitting through generic training content? Never? I don‘t blame you. But that‘s exactly what most corporate leadership training entails.

According to research by McKinsey, the learning and development content that most companies invest in is far too broad and generic to meaningfully impact leadership skills. By trying to be everything to everyone, the content fails to address any group‘s actual needs and challenges.

Consider this statistic: a survey by Harvard Business Publishing found that 75% of managers feel generic leadership training content is not relevant to the specific skills they need in their roles. So all those off-the-shelf leadership training modules your company buys may make HR feel like they‘re checking a box, but they won‘t do much to help your leaders perform better.

Even within the same company, a training program that lumps together leaders with very different roles is destined to disappoint. The development needs of a CFO are worlds apart from a sales director, yet most programs subject them to the same tired content.

The harsh truth is, there is no one-size-fits-all formula for leadership effectiveness. Truly moving the needle requires deeply understanding each leader‘s unique context and goals, and building a customized development plan around that. Which brings me to the next point…

Reason 3: No Focus on Embedding Learning into the Job

Pop quiz: after a leader attends a training workshop, what percentage of the content do they actually apply back on the job? The depressing answer: only about 10-20%, according to research by Robert Brinkerhoff, an expert in learning effectiveness.

That means 80-90% of the leadership concepts and techniques from the training never get put into practice in the real world. So in one ear and out the other – along with the company‘s training investment.

Why such poor results? Because most corporate leadership training takes place in a vacuum, disconnected from the leader‘s day-to-day reality. Sure, the content may sound good in a classroom or virtual seminar, but it fails to stick once the leader is back at their desk facing a barrage of emails, meetings, and crises.

If you want leadership training to create lasting behavior change, it needs to be embedded into the fabric of the leader‘s regular workflow. That means tying development to real on-the-job projects and challenges, and providing continuous coaching and practice over time.

Companies that do this well find ways to make leadership growth a daily habit, not a twice-a-year training event. For example, one tech firm I worked with had all their new managers join a 6-month "leadership gym" program. This involved weekly practice sessions where managers worked through real scenarios and got in-the-moment feedback from coaches. The key was marrying skill-building with actual work challenges in real-time.

The lesson: if you want to get real ROI from leadership development, don‘t settle for detached training workshops. Insist that your program helps leaders learn through real experience and application, early and often.

Reason 4: Too Much Focus on Superstar Leader "Myths"

Quick, picture what a great leader looks like in your mind. Chances are, a familiar image sprang to mind: the charismatic visionary with an outsized personality, unshakable confidence, and the bold ideas to change the world. Someone like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, or Jeff Bezos, right?

The mythical "great man" theory of leadership is alive and well in the corporate training world. Open any leadership textbook and you‘ll find reverent case studies of these legendary leaders and their larger-than-life accomplishments. The implication is that we should all aspire to be the next Jobs or Musk.

But by deifying these famous leaders, most training programs promote unrealistic standards that are impossible for most mere mortals to live up to. Not everyone can be as intense as Jobs, as daring as Musk, or as driven as Bezos. Nor do they need to be.

The truth is, the vast majority of effective leaders in the real world look nothing like these celebrity CEOs. They aren‘t gracing magazine covers or delivering grand keynote speeches. They‘re simply doing the unglamorous daily work of guiding their teams, making decisions, and executing – often without much fanfare.

Holding up famous leaders as the gold standard in training does a disservice to the "normal" managers trying to figure out how to succeed in their unique situations. It sets them up to feel inadequate when they can‘t magically transform into superstar leaders.

Instead of fixating on leadership myths, truly helpful training would examine what works for typical managers in common circumstances. Mining these everyday leader case studies would yield far more relevant and useful insights than profiling the Musks and Bezoses of the world.

Reason 5: Addressing Behaviors, Not Beliefs

Here‘s a scenario I encounter all the time: a company sends a group of leaders to training because they‘ve been exhibiting problematic behaviors. Maybe they‘re poor listeners, or they‘re not delegating, or they avoid difficult conversations. The leaders attend sessions to learn new skills like active listening, delegation techniques, and delivering feedback.

Fast forward a few months and – surprise! – most of the leaders haven‘t really changed their ways. Despite the new skills they supposedly learned, they‘re still not listening well, delegating enough, or stepping up to tough talks. What gives?

The problem is, this training focused on shifting surface-level behaviors without addressing the underlying mindsets that drive those behaviors. But our actions as leaders stem directly from our deep-rooted beliefs, assumptions, and mental models.

Take a leader who tends to micromanage and not delegate. You can teach this leader better delegation skills all day long, but if she fundamentally believes that her way is the only right way, or that her team can‘t be trusted to deliver quality work, she will keep micromanaging. Her behaviors flow from her beliefs.

That‘s why I find that the most effective leadership development zooms out from teaching narrow skills to focus on building the leader‘s overall self-awareness and examining their core thought patterns.

Upgrading a leader‘s internal operating system is much harder than tweaking a few behaviors – it requires deep introspection, openness to change, and lots of patience and practice. But the payoff in leadership growth is exponentially higher.

After all, when a leader‘s mindset shifts, it naturally rewires all of their behaviors as a result. New skills and habits become much easier to sustain when they‘re rooted in this foundation of transformed beliefs.

So if your leadership training only skims the surface without diving into the deeper drivers of performance, don‘t be shocked when it fails to create meaningful, lasting change. Insist on development that works from the inside-out for the highest impact.

A New Paradigm for Cultivating Effective Leaders

Let‘s recap the issues with most of today‘s corporate leadership training:

1. It promotes an overly simplistic view of "authentic" leadership that limits flexibility.
2. It relies on generic, irrelevant content that doesn‘t drive real skill development.
3. It fails to embed learning into the day-to-day reality of a leader‘s work.
4. It focuses too much on mythical "superstar" leaders vs. practical everyday leadership.
5. It addresses superficial behaviors instead of transforming ingrained mindsets.

Add it all up and it‘s no wonder so many companies aren‘t seeing the ROI they want from their hefty investments in leadership training. Something has to change.

If we want to build truly effective leaders equipped for today‘s volatile, complex world, we need a completely new approach to leadership development – one grounded in the real-world challenges and needs of actual managers, not in tired case studies and canned content.

Here‘s what I believe the future of high-impact leadership cultivation looks like:

• Embed learning in the flow of work. Make leadership growth a daily habit through ongoing feedback, coaching, and practice tied to the leader‘s actual job.
• Customize for each leader. Scrap one-size-fits-all content. Assess each leader‘s specific development goals and craft individualized learning journeys to build the skills that matter most for them.
• Make it a two-way conversation. Ditch the sage-on-the-stage lectures. Engage leaders in candid peer discussions where they can share challenges and co-create solutions together.
• Measure the real-world impact. Go beyond "smiley sheet" reaction surveys. Rigorously track how programs are (or aren‘t) improving key outcomes like employee engagement, retention, and business performance. Show tangible ROI.
• Upgrade mindsets, not just behaviors. Help leaders examine their underlying thought patterns and beliefs to evolve their core leadership operating system. Real change happens from the inside out.

Is this new model of leadership development a heavier lift than throwing money at an off-the-shelf training seminar? Absolutely. But if the events of the past year have taught us anything, it‘s that investing in our leaders‘ growth has never been more urgent.

In a time of profound uncertainty and disruption, we need to cultivate change-ready leaders who can nimbly steer their organizations to innovate, adapt, and thrive. The companies that commit to reimagining leadership development for the future will gain a major edge in the post-pandemic world. Will yours be one of them?

It‘s time to demand more from your leadership training investments. Use this article as a litmus test to critically evaluate any program you‘re considering. And if you need help charting a new path to leadership effectiveness, let‘s talk. Together we can build the high-impact leaders your company needs to succeed.