Leadership development is an extraordinary gateway for leaders who want to elevate their game. According to this Forbes article: “In 2023 more than ever, leaders need to be less strategy experts and more human experts.” However, without personal development coaching, leadership training programs fall short.

According to TrainingIndustry.com, leadership development is a $400 billion industry and rising. In a survey of more than 700 human resources leaders conducted by Forrester and HR Executive Magazine, 65% of companies say they are spending $2500 per employee on leadership development per year. The numbers are astounding. Yet the results… are not.

4 Flaws in Leadership Training

Although post-training feedback—on topics like management skills, conflict resolution, communication and feedback, team engagement, and business acumen—hits Net Promoter Score thresholds, long-term implementation and application are hardly meeting expectations. 

A McKinsey study calls out four factors of failing leadership training initiatives: 

1) Using a one size fits all approach

2) Lack of personal development coaching and reflection opportunities alongside of applied tactics 

3) Underestimation of leaders’ mindsets (and subsequent levels of confidence) during real life situations

4) Failing to quantify and measure results

Consider this scenario: A company hires a third-party training company to deliver a high-touch program on communication and coaching to 50 of its frontline managers. They go through a three-day training on hot topics like emotional intelligence, conflict management, possibly complimented by the Strengthsfinder assessment (all incredible tools by the way). Participants walk away with a ton of new information with a green light to apply it. Now what? 

A small percentage of employees may be able to apply what they’ve learned immediately. Others may not have the insights or confidence to use suggested tools in real-work situations. Even worse, the skills may not transfer to their actual job responsibilities. 

Just when leaders could use personalized guidance applying the knowledge—and any personal barriers they might face in their leadership abilities—they’re left on their own. Most don’t have the opportunity to speak 1-to-1 with a coach, mentor, or manager about specific situations or to get feedback on their efforts to integrate their leadership training. At best, they may use tools for a couple of weeks and then default to their old ways. 

The Cultural Disconnect Between Our Personal & Professional Selves 

The truth is that the current leadership training model isn’t cutting it. McKinsey hits it home in describing the extreme difficulty in providing both professional and personal development coaching in a leadership training: “It’s not easy to create opportunities that simultaneously address high-priority needs—say, accelerating a new-product launch, turning around a sales region, negotiating an external partnership, or developing a new digital-marketing strategy—and provide personal development opportunities for the participants.”  

I remember my first corporate leadership training experience, a workshop on emotional intelligence. No doubt, I learned a lot. I can still remember the EQ grid and the extrapolation from self-awareness and regulation to social awareness and relationship management. I walked away knowing all the key words and their definitions. But the next week, when one of our company’s patrons diminished me harshly at an event, I froze. A stress response, which I now know was from a past trauma, inhibited my competency, confidence, and awareness to do anything but freeze and retreat. 

Although I had learned in that leadership training how to improve my EQ, I couldn’t apply those learnings to the real-life situation with the patron. First, I had to get to the source of the inhibited response. Something bigger had to change for me to be the leader I wanted to be. I had to take my professional development into my own hands.

Personal Development Coaching to Unlock Leadership Skills

That relatively short trainings, no matter how in depth, so often fail to create real leadership change shouldn’t come as any surprise. After all, people don’t transform overnight. Research suggests that it takes 268 days (not the typical 21 you hear in the media) to change a habit. Our habits are conditioned over decades—how to feel, think, and act in certain situations, especially during conflict or heightened emotions. Years of repeated patterns don’t go away with one leadership training. 

The reality is that we need several layers of training and support to make lasting change. 

I grew up in a loving and supportive, yet fairly noncommunicative, household. We didn’t talk about feelings. To no fault of my parents – they did the best they could with what they knew. I hadn’t yet recognized the extraordinary impact the Great Depression had on the psyche of my grandparents as they were raising my mother and father and the subsequent stress responses that trickled down into the interpersonal dynamics of our family. And I certainly wasn’t yet aware of how those early patterns influenced my leadership style, which clearly needed to evolve.

While I loved learning and knew emotional intelligence in leadership was important, what I needed was something more personal—deeper exploration to heal trauma, to unwind childhood patterns that kept me trapped into adulthood. 

Bottom line: I could only transform unhealthy leadership habits when I was able to feel vulnerable, but work wasn’t a place I could feel that. I needed personal development coaching to complement my professional development. 

Leveling Up Leadership Means Being the Leader of our own Transformation 

It’s not that we leaders lack the desire to change. Leaders want to succeed, to level up not only for themselves but for their teams. Unfortunately, the one-size-fits-all approach to leadership development leaves us in a precarious position, falling short of those goals. 

Leaders can, instead, curate their own personal learning environment that allows them to be vulnerable and enables them to apply tools and wisdom in a personalized way. 

1. Understand your innate design

Identify your elemental archetype as a baseline for transformational work. Take the quiz here: What is Your Achiever Type? Then, consider other assessments, namely your astrology natal chart, the Enneagram and Human Design. These have more recently become popular in helping individuals understand their innate design—how they think, stay motivated, and relate to others. These tools can serve as a foundation for understanding how you, personally, navigate leadership.

2. Look for personalized coaching

We are complex beings who need specialized tools. Look for a personal development coach who can 1) help you unpack what hinders your growth and, 2) show you how to transform those blocks into what lights you up, and 3) guide you through a process that applies to both your personal and professional life. Executive coaches are great for business advice. Life coaches are great for behavior change advice. Finding a coach who can do both is the ultimate win-win. 

3. Do the work

Once you’ve selected a coach, you’ll need to commit to learning and acting on your insights to see lasting change. Improving your leadership competencies is one thing. Improving yourself as a human is, ultimately, the more important goal. It takes considerably more energy and commitment than it does to memorize an EQ chart, but it is well worth the effort. 

It takes courage, curiosity, self-awareness, integrity, and strength to invest in yourself and forge a new paradigm of leadership. Take charge of your own development and invest in yourself as a human first, leader second. All the tools in the world won’t change your patterns. You will. I can assure you, from personal experience, the benefits are far reaching. 

Ready to elevate your leadership skills to unparalleled heights? Explore our services for actionable insights, or discover personal development coaching options that can revolutionize the way you lead. Unlock your full innate potential now.