The Usual Suspects
The standard explanations are familiar by now: the training isn't contextual enough, there's no follow-up, it's disconnected from actual business strategy, and nobody measures whether anything changed. McKinsey has cataloged these. So has every L&D consultant with a LinkedIn account.
And they're not wrong. Those are real problems. But they're not the root problem.
Here's the thing: most leadership training fails for the same reason most behavioral change efforts fail - it targets the behavior without understanding what's driving it (or stopping it).
The Real Problem No One's Talking About
Think about what a typical leadership development program actually does. It identifies a set of behaviors the organization wants to see more of, like better communication, stronger delegation, more decisive action, or courageous feedback, and then it educates people on those behaviors and trains them to perform.
On the surface, that makes perfect sense.
But after two decades of studying why smart, motivated people struggle to change, here is what I’ve learned: the troubling behaviors we most want leaders to change are almost never the actual problem. They're symptoms. And treating symptoms without diagnosing the cause is why the training doesn't stick.
The leader who avoids hard conversations isn't doing it because no one taught her how to give feedback. She's doing it because somewhere in her history, confrontation became associated with losing connection, or being unliked, or violence, and her nervous system learned to protect her from those at all costs. The micromanager who wants to be informed of every step, analysis, and model in the latest marketing campaign isn't micromanaging because he doesn’t know about delegation. He's doing it because his identity and sense of safety are tied to control, and letting go feels like free-falling off a cliff.
I call these hidden drivers hooks, the underlying emotional and psychological patterns that make a behavior persist even when the person knows it's not serving them. Every leader has them. Every persistent leadership dysfunction is anchored to one.
We've all seen it. The executive who nods along in the workshop, fills out the action plan, and three weeks later is right back where they started. That's not a failure of willpower or commitment. It’s a default return to their status quo version of “normal.”
Why This Keeps Happening
Most leadership training operates on a simple assumption: if people know what to do differently, and are motivated to do it, they’ll change their behavior. Give them the frameworks, the models, the role-plays, and behavior will follow.
But, at least for some behaviors, that assumption ignores everything we know about how the brain actually works. The behaviors that leadership programs often try to change - avoidance, over-control, conflict aversion, emotional reactivity - aren't rational choices. They're automated responses, wired through years of reinforcement, and they exist because they solved a problem at some point. The avoidance kept the peace. The control prevented disaster. The people-pleasing earned belonging.
The behavior made sense when it started. It just doesn't serve the leader, or their organization, anymore.
And no amount of classroom learning overrides a pattern that's running at the neurological level. You can teach someone the four steps of courageous feedback, but if giving that feedback triggers a deep-seated fear of rejection, the four steps don't stand a chance.
How many people know, with complete certainty, that exercising four days a week would contribute greatly to their health and wellbeing, and yet still struggle with staying consistent for two full weeks? Behavior change is hard for reasons that have nothing to do with knowledge and everything to do with hidden internal blockers that must be released.
Think about it. If a leader's nervous system has been trained for 30 years that directness equals danger, a two-day workshop on candid communication isn't going to rewire that, no matter how good the facilitator is.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t change.
What Actually Works
The fix isn't to abandon leadership training. It's to go deeper than the behavior.
Start with the hook, not the behavior. Before you teach someone how to have difficult conversations, help them understand why they've been avoiding them. What is the avoidance protecting? What belief or fear is running underneath? When you surface the hidden driver, the behavioral change becomes dramatically easier because you're no longer fighting the person's own defense system.
And this is where many executive programs fall short. They assume leaders can compartmentalize. That the patterns driving their behavior at home, in relationships, and under stress somehow don’t follow them into the conference room. They always do.
Make it personal, not generic. The leader who avoids conflict and the leader who micromanages are not dealing with the same issue, even if both look like "leadership deficits" on a 360 review. Cookie-cutter programs treat different hooks with the same intervention. That's why they fail at scale.
Build self-awareness before skills. The most effective leadership development I've seen, in my own speaking, offsite workshops, coaching practice and in the research, begins with the leader understanding their own patterns - where they came from, what they're protecting, and what they're costing. Skills training layered on top of that self-awareness has somewhere to land. Skills training without it is like planting seeds on concrete.
And that means the culture-setting leaders in an organization have to go first. They have to make it safe for others to do the deep internal reflection that sets the stage for real change. Culture isn't dictated, it's created through action and modeling.
Replace, don't just remove. You can't just tell someone to stop micromanaging. You have to help them find a replacement that meets the same underlying need - a sense of security, a feeling of contribution, a way to manage anxiety - without the cost. We're bad at getting people to stop doing things. We're much better at getting them to do something else instead.
The Opportunity
Here's the good news: when leadership development addresses the actual drivers, not just the surface behaviors, the results are transformative. Not incrementally better. Transformative.
Leaders who understand their own hooks don't just perform better at work. They build teams that trust them more, cultures that adapt instinctively, and organizations where people actually want to stay and give their all. And they sustain those changes, because the change isn't propped up by a framework they memorized, it's rooted in genuine self-understanding. I've watched it happen in rooms of 50 and rooms of 1,500 - the shift is the same.
The $100 billion question isn't whether leadership training works. It's whether we're willing to go deep enough for it to matter.
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Dr. Adi Jaffe is a behavioral psychologist, executive coach, and author of Unhooked. His keynotes and workshops on leadership, behavior change, and high performance have been delivered to tens of thousands over the last decade. He helps leaders identify the hidden drivers behind their most persistent challenges, and build the self-awareness to actually change and sustain cultural excellence.
References
Gurdjian, P., Halbeisen, T., & Lane, K. (2014). Why leadership-development programs fail. McKinsey Quarterly. https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/leadership/why-leadership development-programs-fail
Feser, C., Mayol, F., & Srinivasan, R. (2017). What's missing in leadership development? McKinsey Quarterly. https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/leadership/whats-missing-in leadership-development
Brandon Hall Group. (2013). Leadership development benchmarking study. As cited in Training Magazine. https://trainingmag.com/survey-leadership-programs-lack-effectiveness/
Mordor Intelligence. (2025). Executive coaching and leadership development market report. https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/executive-coaching-and-leadership development-market
