Organizations invest significant time and money in leadership development. Leaders attend workshops, complete training programs, and may even report that they enjoyed the experience. But there is a more important question: Has anything actually changed?
If you can't demonstrate meaningful improvement in leadership behavior or business performance, it becomes difficult to know whether your investment is delivering a return.
Training Completion Isn't the Same as Leadership Improvement
Many organizations measure what is easiest to track:
- Participation rates
- Course completion
- Attendance
- Training evaluations
- Participant satisfaction
These metrics can tell you whether people participated in a program. They don't necessarily tell you whether leadership improved.
Leadership development should lead to changes that employees and organizations can actually experience:
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Managers communicate more effectively.
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Teams become more aligned.
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Employees become more engaged.
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Productivity improves.
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Turnover declines.
Those are the outcomes that matter. Because leadership development isn't the goal. Better business performance is.
Measure Leadership Before You Develop It
If you want to know whether leadership development is working, you need to establish a starting point. Before development begins, organizations should understand where their leaders and teams are today.
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What is working?
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Where are the gaps?
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Which leadership behaviors are creating challenges?
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Where is productivity being lost?
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What opportunities could have the greatest impact?
People analytics can help provide that baseline.
Rather than assuming a leadership program will address the right challenges, organizations can use data to identify where development is most needed and establish measurable areas for improvement.
Then, after development takes place, those same areas can be measured again. That's when leadership development becomes more than a training event. It becomes a measurable business initiative.
From Training to Measurable Change
Consider an organization that wanted to take a different approach to leadership development. Rather than simply investing in training and hoping performance would improve, the organization wanted to understand whether its investment was actually making a difference.
Before the program began, the effectiveness of its leaders and teams was assessed using people analytics. This provided insight into the organization's greatest opportunities for improvement.
Over the following two years, leaders participated in targeted development based on those insights. The results were significant.
One leader improved their effectiveness by 70%, reclaiming more than $100,000 in lost productivity.
The value wasn't simply that leaders completed a development program. The organization could demonstrate measurable improvement in leadership effectiveness and connect that improvement to business results.
That is a very different way of thinking about leadership development.
What Should You Measure?
There isn't one metric that tells you whether leadership development is working. The right measures depend on what you're trying to improve.
For example, organizations may look at:
Engagement: Are employees more engaged with their work and organization?
Retention: Are employees staying longer and is unwanted turnover declining?
Team effectiveness: Are teams working together more effectively?
Leadership effectiveness: Are leaders demonstrating stronger behaviors and capabilities?
Productivity: Is the organization reclaiming time and productivity that was previously lost?
Culture: Are the leadership behaviors employees experience changing?
The important thing is to establish a connection between the development effort and the outcomes the business cares about.
Leadership Development Should Continue Beyond the Training
Leadership development shouldn't end when the workshop does. Training can introduce new ideas and skills, but sustainable improvement requires leaders to apply those skills in their day-to-day work.
That means organizations need to create opportunities for leaders to practice new behaviors, receive feedback, reflect on their progress, and continue developing. And importantly, those changes should be measurable.
When organizations connect leadership development to outcomes such as engagement, retention, team effectiveness, productivity, and culture, leadership development stops being viewed simply as an expense. It becomes a strategic investment.
The Question Every Organization Should Be Able to Answer
Leadership development requires investment. If your executive team asked you to prove the return on that investment today, could you?
If the answer is no, it may be time to rethink how you're measuring leadership development. Instead of asking whether people liked the training or completed the program, ask:
What changed?
And more importantly:
Did that change make the organization better?
Download: The Hidden Cost of People Problems
If you want to understand the hidden business costs of turnover, disengagement, inefficiency, and other people challenges, download Vivo Team's The Hidden Cost of People Problems: A Business Leader's Guide to Measuring the ROI of Leadership.
Because when you invest in your people, the results follow.
Full Video Transcript
How do you know if your leadership development is actually working?
People attended the workshops, they completed the training, maybe they even enjoyed it, but has anything really changed?
I'm Renée Safrata.
Organizations invest millions of dollars every year in leadership development, but too often they struggle to answer one simple question.
Was it worth it?
If you can't demonstrate meaningful change, it's difficult to justify continued investment.
Many organizations measure participation.
Completion rates, course evaluations, but those metrics don't tell you whether leadership has improved or whether the business has benefited.
Leadership development should lead to measurable changes in behavior.
Managers communicate more effectively.
Teams become more aligned.
Employees are more engaged, productivity improves, turnover declines.
Those are the outcomes that actually matter.
Because leadership development isn't a goal.
Better business performance is the goal.
One organization wanted to take a different approach to leadership development, and they engaged Vivo team.
Rather than hoping their investment would improve performance, they wanted to measure whether it actually did.
Before the program began, we assessed the effectiveness of their leaders and their teams using people analytics to identify their greatest opportunities for improvement.
Over the next two years, leaders participated in targeted development based on those insights.
The results were significant.
One leader improved their effectiveness by 70%, reclaiming over $100,000 in lost productivity.
The value wasn't that leaders completed the training program.
It was that the organization could clearly demonstrate measurable improvements in leadership and the business results that followed.
Leadership development shouldn't end when training does.
It should continue until behaviors change, and those changes should be measurable.
When organizations connect leadership development to outcomes like engagement, retention, team effectiveness, productivity, and culture, leadership stops being viewed as an expense.
It becomes a strategic investment.
Because what gets measured gets improved.
Here's one final question for you to consider.
If your executive team asked you to prove the return on your leadership development investment today, could you?
If you'd like to explore that question further, download our free guide, The Hidden Cost of People Problems.
It explains how organization can connect leadership development to measurable business outcomes and build a stronger business case for investing in their people, because when you invest in people, the results will follow.