Most companies run a leadership training program the same way they’d run a fire drill. Everyone gets in a room for a day. Information gets dumped. Slides click through. Sticky notes go on a wall. People go back to their desks, and by Friday, the energy is gone.
Two months later, nothing has changed. The team still defers the hard decision to the CEO. The manager still runs the same meeting the same way. The feedback loop still doesn’t exist.
This isn’t because the content was bad. It isn’t because the people didn’t care. It’s because the way we tried to teach it broke some basic rules of adult learning.
75% of training content is lost within a week if there is no reinforcement.
– Quarterdeck
The numbers back this up. Research on the forgetting curve shows 75% of training content is gone within a week and 90% within six months. A separate body of learning transfer research finds that only 10 to 20% of training investment produces observable behavior change on the job. In a Brandon Hall Group poll, 75% of organizations reported that their leadership development programs are ineffective. Companies spend around $366 billion on this every year, and the outcomes do not match the spend.
If you want leadership training that sticks, you need a system. Not a session. A system has phases. Each phase does something specific. When you skip a phase, the whole thing falls apart.
Here is what a real leadership development system looks like.
Phase one: information transfer happens before the room (microlearning, done right)
Traditional training wastes the room. People sit together, and someone stands at the front and talks. The first forty minutes are information transfer. The next forty are a Q&A dominated by three people. The last block is a group activity that simulates the application of what was just heard.
Nothing about that uses the room well.
In a real learning system, information transfer happens before the group ever gets together. Short video modules. A reading. A worksheet. Call it microlearning if you want, but the point is simple: the learner digests the content in their own time, at their own pace, before anyone walks into a room.
This is not a preference. It is how adult learners actually process information. Andragogy, the study of how adults learn, has been clear for sixty years: adults need time, relevance, and the ability to connect new material to prior experience. You cannot take in new material, test it against your own experience, and apply it for the first time all in a single session. The brain doesn’t work that way.
Here is the trap, though. If you only do microlearning, you’ve built a content library, not a learning system. People will watch videos forever and still not change their behavior. LinkedIn Learning has more than 25,000 courses, and it has not moved the needle on the corporate leadership gap. Microlearning without the next three phases is a meandering pathway. The growth pathway goes somewhere specific.
“If you only do microlearning, you’ve built a content library, not a learning system.”
Phase two: the large group makes the case for application
Now the group comes together. This is the session that most companies call “the training.” In a real system, it is the second phase, not the whole thing.
The purpose of the large group is not information transfer. The information has already landed in phase one. The purpose is to make the argument for application. Why does this matter inside our organization? What does this look like in our context? What are the obstacles we already know we’re going to hit?
You can run this with fifty people or five hundred. The interactivity is lower than it should be, and that’s fine, because the room isn’t where the real engagement happens. The room is where shared language gets built.
A handful of people will ask questions. That’s enough. You’re not trying to give everyone in the auditorium a personalized coaching moment. You’re trying to get everyone in the room to understand the principle in the context of your business.
This is also where business alignment gets made visible. Half of all leadership development programs fail because they never tie learning to actual business needs. The large group session is where you name the business case out loud.
Phase three: the small group is where behavior starts changing (peer coaching and cohort learning)
This is the phase most organizations skip, and it is the most important one.
Five to twelve people. A small room or a Zoom breakout. Sometimes it is a short working session tacked onto an existing meeting. The topic is specific: how do we apply the principle we just learned in our actual work?
In this setting, three things happen that cannot happen anywhere else.
The first is real engagement. You can’t hide in a group of eight the way you can in a group of a hundred. Everyone has to speak. Everyone has to surface what the principle means for them.
The second is peer feedback. You hear how a colleague on another team is wrestling with the same concept. You hear a version of the problem that sounds like yours but has a different solution. You start building a mental library of what good looks like across the organization.
The third is accountability. When you say out loud, in front of six peers, that you’re going to run your next one-on-one differently, you have made a commitment that has weight. A module can’t do that. A large session can’t do that.
This is why cohort-based leadership development outperforms self-paced learning. Self-paced courses are completed at low single-digit rates. Cohort programs regularly clear 90% completion, because peers see each other show up. Spaced repetition and social accountability are the two forces that actually drive behavior change, and phase three is where both live.
Behavior doesn’t change in an auditorium. Behavior changes in a small room where people you respect are watching whether you do what you said.
“Behavior doesn’t change in an auditorium. Behavior changes in a small room where people you respect are watching whether you do what you said.”
This is the rhythm we build into every cohort program we run.
Phase four: one-on-one coaching makes development specific
The fourth phase is where development gets personal.
One coach. One leader. Or one coach with a pair. The conversation isn’t a download. It is a conversation. The leader brings the real situation from this week. The coach helps them pressure test their thinking, name what they are avoiding, and decide on the next move.
This is where pace actually accelerates. The generic principle has already landed in phase one. The organizational context has already landed in phase two. Peer reinforcement has already entered phase three. Now the coach can get to what is specific to this person, this moment, this decision.
You can’t run a whole program on one-on-one. It is too expensive. And you can’t skip them because, without this phase, the best leaders in your organization never reach the level of personalized development that closes the gap between capability and capacity.
This is what the Next Level Leaders pathway is built around.
The 70 20 10 model, corrected
Most L&D leaders know the 70-20-10 model: 70% of learning comes from on-the-job experience, 20% from interactions with others, and 10% from formal learning. The model is broadly right and widely misused.
The misuse goes like this. An organization reads 70:20:10, decides that formal learning is the 10%, and cuts the formal program to a single workshop. The workshop doesn’t stick. Leaders are told to “learn on the job,” which in practice means no structure, no feedback, and no pathway forward.
The four phases fix this. Phase one is the 10% (formal content) done efficiently. Phases three and four are the 20% (interaction with peers and a coach) done deliberately. Phase two connects the formal content to the real work the leader is already doing, which is where the 70% lives. You are not picking one over the other. You are installing a system where all three reinforce each other.
Culture is the environment where development either compounds or evaporates. The Culture Signals assessment shows you which one yours is doing right now. leadersrisingnetwork.com/culture-signals
Why does the market sell you one phase at a time?
Most of what gets sold as leadership development covers one of the four phases and pretends it is the whole system.
LinkedIn Learning and every online module library? That is phase one. Useful input. On its own, a library, not a system.
Conferences, keynotes, big events? Phase one with a dose of phase two. They excite. They inspire. They do not move the needle. The energy wears off, and the behavior does not change, because there was no small group and no coach to carry it forward.
Coaching engagements? Phase four. Valuable, but when a coach is not connected to a larger learning sequence, the conversation circles the same ground month after month.
None of these is bad. They are incomplete. Buying one phase and expecting the full system’s outcome is the most common mistake in corporate learning. The way out is to design the four phases together from the start. That is what every LRN engagement is designed to do.
A systems approach has to go all the way through
Here is the simple version. If your company is trying to build a systems approach to anything, your learning and development function has to be a system too. You can’t bolt a one-day workshop onto an operating model and expect the workshop to deliver what the operating model needs from its people.
The four phases are not a preference. They are what a real leadership pathway looks like when behavior change is the goal. Pre-work and microlearning for content. A large group session for shared language. Small group application for peer accountability. One-on-one coaching for specificity.
Strip away any phase-out, and you are back to the fire drill. Everyone in a room for a day. Sticky notes on the wall. Nothing changed by Friday.
If you are not sure where the gaps are in your current pathway, the Leadership Culture Wayfinder will show you in ten minutes.
Build something that lasts. Build something that multiplies.
If your leadership training isn’t sticking, the culture is part of the answer. Take the free Culture Signals assessment and see what your culture is communicating beneath the surface. leadersrisingnetwork.com/culture-signals
Let’s rise.
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