Droste Group

Before I ever sat on the vendor side of leadership development, I spent years on the buyer side deciding which vendors would even get in the room.

At Verizon, a serious vendor search could take me about three days. I might start with a web search of hundreds of potential providers, narrow them to 100, then 25, then 10 I thought had the potential to be among the very best at what they did. From there, I asked for their materials and brought five finalists in. Half of their allotted time was to actually facilitate part of the training/coaching; the other half was to make the sales presentation.

What surprised me was how often very polished vendors could tell us a great deal about their methodology but very little about the impact they had actually produced. In my experience, more than 80% came without credible case studies or measurement showing what had changed on the job. And even when the product itself was very good, weak customer service, scheduling, flexibility or follow-through could make the partnership much harder than it needed to be.

That experience still affects how I think about outside partners today. A good product is only part of the equation. I want to know whether the partner can understand the business quickly, bring judgment along with capacity, show evidence that the work produces change, and make life easier for an internal team that is probably already stretched.

Long before I was selling these services myself, the buyer side taught me something I still believe: if the client has to constantly chase you, translate for you or prove your value for you, you are adding work rather than reducing it.

The best partners make the work easier to accomplish and easier to defend because the impact is there.

Nike announced a major transformation last week. Think about what happens next for its managers.

An employee wants to know whether their job is going away. Another wants to know if the team's priorities have changed. Someone else wants to know what decisions they can now make locally. And the manager may not know all the answers yet. Nike's new Pace operating model will reorganize the company, move more ownership closer to local markets and ultimately reduce the number of roles. Most of the coverage I've seen has understandably focused on the strategy, economics and jobs that may be affected. For me, what's also interesting is what happens in all those manager conversations afterward.

I saw this firsthand inside a telecom giant going through major change. The corporate direction was clear, but by the time it reached individual teams, some managers treated it as though everything had changed, others largely continued as before, and others added the new priorities without really taking the old ones away. Same company, same change, but very different employee experiences.

That's one reason in our work with clients we've increasingly focused not just on developing leaders, but on helping companies identify the few leadership behaviors most critical to executing the change and then building the reinforcement and accountability around them. Managers need to know what they're expected to communicate, what their people actually need to do differently, what priorities should stop and what decisions they can make. And then those expectations need to be reinforced through the meetings, 1:1s and operating reviews already happening until the new way of working becomes the normal way of working.

That's particularly interesting with Nike because part of the strategy is moving more ownership closer to local markets. Giving managers more ownership can absolutely help, but only if they have enough clarity and support to execute it consistently.

Employees don't experience a corporate strategy through the announcement. They experience it through what their manager says and does afterward.

15 major changes in one year.

That’s what caught my attention when I read Deloitte's 2026 Global Human Capital Trends research. Another number I thought was equally important, 60% reported increased workload as a result of the continuing pace of change.

For me, the big question is what an HR leader should do with that. Managers are being asked to implement AI, retain good people, lead through org change, manage tighter resources, improve performance, etc., and often all at the same time. And from what I'm seeing first-hand with our clients, we are continuing to add expectations for what good managers should do without always looking closely enough at the environment in which we're asking them to do it.

We can train a manager to do all of that. But knowing what to do and consistently doing it are two very different things. If priorities compete, managers don't have enough capacity, incentives point somewhere else, senior leaders don't reinforce the behaviors, or nobody follows up afterward, even very good leadership development can struggle to produce the performance we expect.

For me, that's part of the Leadership Ex*****on Gap™. So if I were discussing this latest research with an HR leadership team, the question I'd want on the table is, “Are we continuing to add expectations for our managers faster than we're improving the environment that allows them to actually execute them?”

Leadership capability matters. But so does what happens when the manager goes back to work Monday morning.

Earlier in my career, I probably gave the leadership program too much credit. If the content was strong, the facilitator was good and people left saying the program was valuable, I felt like we had done our job.

Over time, I watched too many leaders leave very good development experiences, return to work, and gradually fall back into the same habits. Not because they hadn’t learned anything. In many cases, they understood exactly what they were supposed to do. But the business got busy, their manager never reinforced it, another priority took over, and the new behavior slowly disappeared. That changed what I pay attention to.

I still care a great deal about the quality of the facilitator, the design, and the material. But today I spend much more time thinking about what happens after the leader goes back to work: what their manager reinforces, where they practice the behavior, and whether anyone notices if the behavior actually changes.

After more than 30 years around leadership development, I’ve come to believe that some of the most important work begins after the program ends. A great learning experience can create capability. The environment the leader returns to determines whether that capability becomes consistent performance.

There is one question I ask when a senior leadership team reviews its investment in leadership development:

“What are our leaders doing differently now?”

Attendance, completion rates and participant evaluations all tell us something important. But from my experience, the more important test comes later. Are people actually using what they learned and has it changed how they lead?

One of the best examples I've seen came from a leadership development initiative we measured. 89% of the participants improved their overall performance. And when we analyzed the business results and isolated the impact attributable specifically to the leadership program, it produced a 14% improvement in productivity, 12% increase in revenue, 14% improvement in customer experience and 6% reduction in costs. That's what I want to know when we talk about whether leadership development worked.

If we taught managers to coach, are they actually coaching differently? If we focused on accountability, are performance issues getting addressed sooner? If we developed decision-making, are better decisions actually being made? And then, what are we doing to make sure those new behaviors stick?

From my experience, that's the part that's missed most often. And the research supports it. Without the right reinforcement and accountability, 80% of training and coaching fails to deliver the desired performance.

That's the reason we developed our Leadership Ex*****on System™. Identify the few behaviors that matter most, reinforce them in the real work, coach where needed and hold people accountable for using them. With those elements in place, our research and data show success can approach 100%.

Training builds the capability. But ultimately, the question I'd still come back to is pretty simple:

“What are our leaders doing differently now?”

Earlier in my career, I probably put too much responsibility on the leadership program itself.

If leaders were not changing, my instinct was to look at the content, the facilitator or the design. Those things matter, but decades of working inside and with organizations have made me much more aware of everything surrounding the learning.

I’ve seen leaders who understood feedback, coaching and accountability very well but still did those things inconsistently. In some cases, workload was the problem. In others, their own manager was not reinforcing the behavior, or the organization was rewarding results while quietly tolerating poor leadership practices.

I remember seeing this firsthand when I was a national curriculum buyer for Verizon Wireless. We had managers who understood how to coach, give feedback and hold people accountable, and many of them could demonstrate those skills very well in training. But once they got back into the business, hitting the number became the immediate priority, their managers weren’t consistently reinforcing the leadership behaviors, and the old habits returned. The issue wasn’t that they didn’t know what to do. The environment made it much easier to go back to what they had always done.

I think we’re seeing a version of the same issue with AI today. Organizations can train managers on AI tools and responsible use, but that doesn’t mean the new behavior will consistently show up in the work. If managers aren’t reinforcing it, workflows haven’t changed, or employees are getting different guidance depending on who they report to, the organization can have very good AI training and still have an ex*****on problem.

That has changed the question I ask. Instead of automatically asking what we should teach next, I want to know what is making the desired behavior difficult to execute today. That question usually tells us a lot more.

Years ago, when I was leading elearning at a Bear Stearns subsidiary, the VP of Legal came to me with what sounded like a straightforward request: more FDCPA training for a 2,000-person call center. On any given day, roughly 70% of the calls were out of compliance, so the potential financial exposure was enormous. A few high-level questions made it clear that the problem wasn’t a lack of training. The callers were being rewarded for getting the money in fast, so once we changed what the system was motivating them to do, the out-of-compliance rate dropped to less than 1%.

That kind of conversation is one reason I rarely start by discussing courses when someone tells me they need leadership training.

I first want to know what is happening in the business. Maybe managers are avoiding accountability conversations, maybe newly promoted leaders are struggling, or perhaps leadership expectations vary dramatically between locations. Once we understand what people are actually experiencing, the right solution becomes much easier to determine.

Sometimes the answer really is training. Other situations call for coaching, assessment, team work or changes in the environment surrounding the leader.

One of the more useful things an outside partner can do is tell a client when the solution they originally asked for probably is not the solution I would recommend.

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I’ve become a lot less impressed by great initial training evaluations than I was earlier in my career. They still matter, but a strong initial evaluation tells us very little about what is happening 30, 60 or 90 days later. Today, I’m much more interested in what leaders are actually doing differently and whether those changes are showing up in the business.

We recently had an enterprise client where managers had received the same AI training, yet employees were getting very different guidance depending on who they reported to. The training had created awareness, but the organization still had an ex*****on problem because the new behavior wasn’t being reinforced consistently. The training was delivered. The ex*****on wasn’t consistent. That is where I see the Leadership Ex*****on Gap.

Research across the industry has repeatedly shown that roughly 80% of training and coaching initiatives fail to produce the sustained performance improvement they were intended to create. The issue usually isn’t learning. It is what happens when people return to work.

That is why we developed the Leadership Ex*****on System™. It connects development to reinforcement, manager accountability, coaching, real-work application and measurement. Across the engagements represented in our case studies, we have seen nearly 100% success against the defined behavior and performance objectives.

For me, that is the real standard: Did leaders change what they do, did the change stick, and did the business get a measurable result?

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