Organisations globally invest billions each year in leadership development, and rightly so.
Leadership programmes, coaching, mentoring and executive education all play an important role in strengthening capability, supporting succession and preparing organisations for future challenges.
Though, while businesses are becoming more disciplined in evaluating the impact of this spend, many struggle to build a consistent view of leadership capability.
And, without that baseline, it’s difficult to target investment where it will deliver the greatest strategic impact.
A leadership programme is launched with genuine enthusiasm. Senior leaders make time to attend. The feedback is positive, participants leave with new ideas and perspectives, and the organisation feels it has made an important investment in its future leaders.
But a year later, the underlying organisational concerns haven’t been entirely alleviated.
When development initiatives don’t deliver the impact organisations hoped for, organisations often assume the solution is to change the vendor, tweak the curriculum, or launch a more modern version of the programme. But the issue is rarely a lack of effort, intent, or budget. More often, the challenge lies in understanding which capabilities the organisation needs to strengthen in the first place and ensuring that learning is embedded beyond the programme itself, translating into changed behaviours, stronger decision-making and measurable impact in real-world leadership situations. The greatest impact tends to come when development activity is closely aligned to clearly defined capability priorities and reinforced through the day-to-day realities of the role.
Key Takeaways:
Leadership development alone does not guarantee capability
Leadership transitions create the greatest development leverage
Experience accelerates executive growth
Bench marking and assessment improves leadership ROI
Behavioural outcomes should be measured, not just participation
How Organisations Get More Value From Leadership Development
Leadership capability is ultimately developed through a combination of learning and experience. While formal development provides important foundations, organisations also need to create opportunities for leaders to apply new insights in the reality of their day-to-day roles.
Executives often leave programmes with fresh perspectives and practical ideas, but sustaining behavioural change requires those ideas to be reinforced through experience, accountability and ongoing development.
True leadership capability is forged when foundational content meets real-world experience.
Many organisations now place greater emphasis on behavioural outcomes, succession readiness and leadership effectiveness. The question is increasingly whether organisations have sufficient visibility of capability to know where development should be focused in the first place.
When development is aligned to clearly defined capability priorities, organisations are better able to target investment where it will have the greatest impact. Combining structured learning with stretch assignments, leadership transitions and real-world accountability helps turn development activity into lasting capability growth.
Why Leadership Transitions Are the Highest-Leverage Development Moments
Leadership transitions often represent one of the most significant opportunities for capability development, yet they don’t always receive the same level of structured support as formal development programmes.
Development spend is often focused heavily on broad leadership programmes and organisation-wide initiatives. However, the moments of maximum leverage, and maximum risk, occur at moments of transition.
Moving from a functional leadership role into an enterprise-wide executive position requires a cognitive and behavioural shift. The skills that drove their career success – deep functional expertise, operational execution, and direct control – can become limiting at executive level.
In an executive position, the leader must navigate systemic ambiguity, influence peers over whom they have no direct authority, and manage a degree of stakeholder complexity they have never previously encountered.
The same challenge applies during moments of rapid organisational transformation. A leadership team that is highly effective at running a steady-state business may falter when asked to lead a digital pivot, a major post-merger integration, or a cultural turnaround.
Without deliberate support at these moments, organisations can find that strong performers are asked to succeed in roles that require fundamentally different leadership capabilities.
How Leadership Assessment Strengthens Development Decisions
Organisations are investing more thoughtfully than ever before, but making the right development decisions depends on understanding where capability is strongest, where it needs strengthening, and which interventions are most likely to make a meaningful difference.
Traditionally, assessment has proven highly effective at the front end of the talent pipeline, whether that is derisking a critical external executive hire, accurately identifying future high-potential talent, or diagnosing specific capability gaps before a development initiative begins. These insights are highly strategic and remain foundational to robust talent management.
Building on this foundation, organisations are increasingly finding that assessment can deliver additional value when applied at other distinct stages of a leader’s journey. Rather than being a one-time diagnostic, it can also be used sequentially to help track how capability is evolving over time.
Overall, assessment provides CEOs and CHROs with the objective data needed to answer critical talent questions at various intervals:
At selection and promotion: Does this leader possess the core attributes required to step up today?
Pre-development: What specific, contextual gaps must this leadership cohort bridge to execute our three-year strategy?
Post-intervention and transitions: How has an executive’s capacity to handle complexity or strategic ambiguity matured after a year in a challenging stretch role?
By utilising independent, data-rich assessment methodologies at multiple touchpoints, organisations can bring a sophisticated level of visibility to their talent pipeline. It allows organisations to take a more evidence-based approach to leadership development, helping them understand where capability is strengthening, where further investment may be needed, and how leadership readiness is evolving over time.
Building Leadership Capability More Effectively
The organisations that build leadership capability most effectively are often those with the clearest understanding of their strengths, gaps and future leadership requirements. Building capability is rarely the result of a single programme or intervention. It comes from combining targeted development, meaningful leadership experiences and objective insight into capability and readiness.
This allows development investment to be focused where it will have the greatest impact, while giving leaders the opportunities and support needed to grow.
At Redgrave, we work with CEOs, CHROs, boards and investors to assess leadership capability, identify development priorities, and support more informed decisions around succession and leadership growth.
Through our DRIVER model, we combine behavioural insight, psychometric evaluation, and leadership expertise to give organisations a clearer view of capability, potential, and development needs across the leadership population.
About the Author
Adrian Bassett is a Chartered Business Psychologist and Head of Executive Assessment at Redgrave. He works with CEOs, boards, and investors to assess leadership capability, inform succession decisions, and support leadership teams through periods of growth and transformation. His work combines psychometric insight with real-world leadership evaluation to provide a clear, evidence-based view of performance, potential, and risk.
