The priority everyone says yes to and nobody starts
Training Magazine’s 2026 report says this is the year leadership development finally gets its moment. Seventy nine percent of companies are shifting to skills based hiring. Learning in the flow of work is the talk of the industry. Leadership development sits at the top of the priority list for the year.
And almost nobody is starting.
Every leader I talk to right now says the same thing. Development is critical. There is no time. The calendar is full. AI is moving faster than policy. Return to office is still a fight. Half the team is burned out from the last change and the next one is already on the way. They cannot find thirty minutes to think, let alone thirty minutes to plan.
The priority keeps landing at number one. The execution keeps landing at zero. Everybody feels it. Nobody knows how to say it out loud.
Why this is not a willpower problem
The easy answer is that leaders need to try harder. Carve out the time. Put it on the calendar. Show up.
That answer is wrong.
The real issue is what Becky Rivest named on this week’s episode. Every change requires a slow down. You cannot drop a new skill or a new tool or a new way of thinking into someone’s brain and expect them to sprint the next day. Learning takes absorbing. Absorbing takes time. And for a leader already running at ninety five percent, there is no room to absorb anything else.
So the leader tries to do two things at once. Run the current job at full speed. Learn a new job at the same time. It does not work. The result is the one we see everywhere right now. The development goal stays on the list. The development work never happens. And the leader ends up feeling like they failed a commitment they never had room to keep.
This is not a people problem. It is a system problem. The system has not given anyone permission to slow down, and without permission to slow down, learning cannot happen.
What shifted for one change management leader
Becky told a story from her years doing change management work that is worth sitting with. She was often the person walking into a leader’s office with the next thing. A new rollout. A new training. A new message to pass down to the team. And she was not the only one. There were three, five, sometimes seven other people doing the same thing on the same week, with the same urgency, in the same tired office.
So the leaders she worked with started doing the only thing they could do. They stopped looking up. They looked at the next thing in front of them, got through it, and moved to the next next thing. The horizon disappeared. Their own development disappeared with it. Their people’s development disappeared too.
What shifted, over time, was not another training. What shifted was a hard realization. Every change that came in the door was stealing from the one thing leaders needed most. Time to think about who they were becoming and who their people were becoming.
Once that got named out loud, the question changed. It was no longer how do I get this change done. It was what am I going to protect this week so my people and I do not lose the ground we already gained.
Clarity before training, in plain English
Here is the tool Becky pointed to on the episode. Before you spend one more dollar or one more hour on training, answer one question with one employee on your team.
Not in a performance review way. Not on a form they fill out. A real answer. Can they draw a line, out loud, from what they do every day up to where the company is actually going?
If the answer is no, no amount of training will fix it. You will send them to a class, they will come back, and nothing will stick, because they did not know why it mattered in the first place. That is how you burn time and budget at the same time.
If the answer is yes, you now know exactly what to invest in. The training, the coaching, the one on one time, the stretch assignment. All of it becomes cheaper and faster because it has a target. Clarity is what makes development work. Everything else is decoration.
One honest conversation this week
Here is the bold move. Not a retreat. Not a new platform. Not a vendor call.
Pick one person on your team. Not your top performer, because they have already figured it out. Not your struggling performer, because that is a different conversation. Pick a mid performer. Solid. Quiet. Usually fine. Sit down with them for twenty minutes. No phones. No laptops.
Ask them two questions.
- Do you understand what success looks like for you in this role?
- What do you need from me to be successful so the team can be successful and the company can be successful?
Then listen. Do not fix. Do not defend. Just listen.
You will walk out of that conversation with more clarity about your team’s real development needs than any program could give you. And you will have done the one thing leaders cannot get from a class. You will have slowed down on purpose, for one person, for twenty minutes, and invested in a human being in front of you.
That is where 2026 starts for leaders who are serious about development. Not with a bigger plan. With a smaller, honest one.
