Leadership development programs: what works and how to choose one

By Dan Remon · Evidence checked October 2026

Most leadership programs get judged on the day they end. The feedback forms come back strong, the offsite runs to time, and a month later the leadership team runs the business the way it always has.

The research has a name for the missing piece: transfer. It means whether what leaders learned in the room shows up in the job. That’s what you’re paying for, so it’s what you should measure.

This is for the CEO, founder or HR lead choosing a leadership development program: what the research says works, how to design, choose and measure one, and the piece I’d put in every program, the leader’s own sleep, energy and stress.

What is a leadership development program?

A leadership development program is a structured plan to build the leadership skills, judgement and habits of the people who run a company, from first-time managers to the executive team. It usually mixes workshops, practice, feedback, coaching and work on live business problems, spread over weeks or months. Leadership training is the taught part. Executive development is the same work aimed at the top team, and many companies use it to prepare high-potential leaders for succession. Judge any program on 2 things: whether leaders behave differently in the job, and whether team and business results follow.

Does leadership training work?

Yes, when it’s built well. The authors of a 2017 meta-analysis in the Journal of Applied Psychology started from a gap most buyers will recognise: the estimates they cite put most training budget into leadership training, while only a small minority of organisations believe their leadership programs are highly effective.¹

They pooled data from 335 independent samples and found leadership training improved all 4 outcomes they measured: how participants rated it (reactions, δ = 0.63), what they learned (learning, δ = 0.73), whether they used it on the job (transfer, δ = 0.82) and what changed for the organisation (results, δ = 0.72). Their conclusion was that leadership training is substantially more effective than previously thought.¹

Transfer had the largest effect, which matters, because transfer is the point. These are averages, though. They show the method works. Whether your program works depends on design, delivery and implementation, and the size of the effect varied with all 3.

How to design a leadership development program

The 2017 meta-analysis tested 15 features of training design and delivery.¹ The ones it supported, plus one finding from the research on transfer, come down to 5 decisions you make before the first session.

1. Start with a needs analysis. Work out what your leaders and the business need before anyone chooses content. A catalogue course answers someone else’s problem.
2. Use several methods, practice above all, with feedback. The analysis supported multiple delivery methods, especially practice, and it supported feedback. Leaders should rehearse the hard conversation, the delegation brief and the decision, then hear how it landed.
3. Space the sessions out. The analysis supported spaced training sessions. Spread the program over weeks, so leaders try each piece at work between sessions and bring back what happened.
4. Run it face to face and on site. Face-to-face delivery that wasn’t self-administered was supported, and so was an on-site location. A login to a video library is the self-administered version.
5. Prepare the job they go back to. A 2010 meta-analysis of 89 studies on transfer of training found a supportive work environment was positively related to transfer. Predictors such as motivation and work environment had stronger links to transfer when the training was in open skills, such as leadership development, than in closed skills, such as computer software.² The leader’s own manager, the team and the calendar decide whether new behaviour survives the first busy week.

The 2017 analysis also found that content, attendance policy and duration influence how well a program works.¹ Ask any provider how they’ve set each one, and why.

Leadership coaching: where it fits

A group program gives a leadership team a shared language and a shared standard. Leadership coaching works on one leader’s situation: the founder handing over operations, the new CEO in the first 90 days, the high-potential leader being prepared for succession.

The cleanest evidence on coaching comes from a 2023 meta-analysis that used only randomised controlled trials: 37 trials of workplace and executive coaching, with 2,528 people in total. Coaching had a statistically significant effect across leadership and personal outcomes, with an overall effect size of g = 0.59, in the moderate range. The authors also found signs of publication bias, and larger effects on self-reported outcomes than on observed ones.³

Act on that last point: ask any coach how change gets measured beyond the client’s own view of it. I’m an ICF-certified coach, and the leaders I coach log a 60-second daily check-in on the Stealth Tracker, so we work from what happened each day instead of memory. More on how that runs in performance coaching.

Leader sleep, energy and stress

Skills are half of leadership. The other half is the state a leader is in when they use them: how they slept, what their energy is like at 16:00, how much stress they carry into the meeting.

A 2015 study in the Academy of Management Journal followed leaders and their teams across 10 workdays. A worse night’s sleep, in quality rather than hours, went with a more depleted leader the next day, more abusive behaviour towards the team, and lower engagement in that team.⁴ It’s an observational diary study, so it shows a daily pattern rather than proof of cause.

The link between leaders and their teams’ health runs wider than sleep. A 2008 systematic review and meta-analysis found moderate evidence that leadership is associated with employees’ wellbeing at work (risk ratio 1.40) and with sick leave (risk ratio 0.73), while the link with job performance remained unclear.⁵ Both are associations. Together they make the case for treating a leader’s own state as part of the leadership program instead of a private matter.

So put physiology into the curriculum. Give each leader a baseline on sleep, energy and stress at the start. Book the hardest decisions and conversations into the hours when that leader’s energy is highest, and protect the night before a board meeting like the meeting itself. Physiology before strategy.

The training side is in the corporate athlete. The work of running yourself before you run a team is in self-leadership.

The Decision + Delegation Grid for a leadership team

Decisions are where a leader’s energy and a team’s development meet. Every decision that stays at the top by default costs the leader energy and costs the team a chance to learn.

The Decision + Delegation Grid is W7, one of the 12 protocols in the Stealth OS. Its purpose is what the name says: it puts a leader’s decisions in one place and settles which ones that leader keeps, which get delegated, and to whom. Applied to a leadership team, it becomes a development plan and a succession map at the same time.

Run a version of it with your leadership team for one 28-day cycle:

1. List the decisions. Each leader writes down the recurring decisions they made in the last 2 weeks, pulled from the calendar, the inbox and the chat threads.
2. Keep or delegate. Each decision gets one owner. If the leader keeps it, they write down why only they can make it.
3. Write the brief. For each delegated decision: who owns it now, what they can decide alone, and when they report back.
4. Use it to develop people. Give the stretch decisions to the high-potential leaders you’re preparing for bigger roles, and debrief each one. That’s practice with feedback, the format the training research supports, inside the real job.
5. Review it weekly. Use the Friday Debrief, 15 minutes at the end of the week, to check which decisions came back up the line and why.

Any decision only one person can make is a succession risk. The grid shows you where those sit, in writing, before someone leaves. It also takes decision load off the leaders who are already short on sleep and energy.

How to choose a leadership development program

Put these 5 points to any provider, mine included:

1. What the needs analysis covers, and what it found about your leaders before any content was chosen.
2. How much of the time is practice with feedback, and how much is listening.
3. How the sessions are spaced, and what leaders do at work in between.
4. What supports the change back in the job: the leaders’ own managers, the team and the calendar.
5. Whether leaders’ sleep, energy and stress are measured and worked on inside the program.

If the evidence a provider shows you is satisfaction scores from past groups, you’re looking at reactions, the outcome that tells you least about the job. If your brief is company-wide health rather than leadership, read what the trials found on corporate wellness programs first.

How to measure leadership development

The 2017 meta-analysis used 4 criteria that trace back to Kirkpatrick in 1959.¹ They work as a measurement plan for any program.

1. Reactions. How leaders rated the program. Collect it, and don’t stop there.
2. Learning. Whether they can explain and demonstrate the skill at the end of a session.
3. Transfer. Whether they do it in the job: decisions delegated, feedback given, the hard conversation held on time.
4. Results. What the team and the business show: engagement, retention and the numbers the leadership team already reports on.

Set the baseline before the first session. The 1% Scorecard gives each leader a Compound Index, a score out of 100 across 6 pillars, in 2 minutes. Track transfer weekly, because behaviour moves before the business numbers do, and review all 4 levels at the end of each cycle.

How to start

Through Fitcorp Global I run corporate training and leadership development. Companies we’ve trained include Citibank, Microsoft, Samsung, Deloitte and BCG. At London 2012 I was a coach at the Olympic Village training facility, supporting coaches, teams and athletes.

1. The 1% Scorecard. Free, 8 questions, 2 minutes. Take it yourself, then have your leadership team take it, and you have a baseline before anything is bought.
2. Corporate workshops. For leadership teams that want behaviour in the job to change. Get in touch for scope and pricing, and put the 5 questions above to me first.

Train your leaders for the job they do, in the state they actually do it in.

Related reading: Stress management for executives: load versus recovery.

FAQ

Sources

1. Lacerenza, C. N., Reyes, D. L., Marlow, S. L., Joseph, D. L., & Salas, E. (2017). Leadership training design, delivery, and implementation: A meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 102(12), 1686-1718. doi.org/10.1037/apl0000241
2. Blume, B. D., Ford, J. K., Baldwin, T. T., & Huang, J. L. (2010). Transfer of training: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Management, 36(4), 1065-1105. doi.org/10.1177/0149206309352880
3. de Haan, E., & Nilsson, V. O. (2023). What can we know about the effectiveness of coaching? A meta-analysis based only on randomized controlled trials. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 22(4), 641-661. doi.org/10.5465/amle.2022.0107
4. Barnes, C. M., Lucianetti, L., Bhave, D. P., & Christian, M. S. (2015). “You wouldn’t like me when I’m sleepy”: Leaders’ sleep, daily abusive supervision, and work unit engagement. Academy of Management Journal, 58(5), 1419-1437. doi.org/10.5465/amj.2013.1063
5. Kuoppala, J., Lamminpää, A., Liira, J., & Vainio, H. (2008). Leadership, job well-being, and health effects: A systematic review and a meta-analysis. Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 50(8), 904-915. doi.org/10.1097/JOM.0b013e31817e918d

This article is general information, not medical advice.