Five Things You Need to Know Before Starting a Leadership Programme

Launching a leadership programme is exciting!. You’ve got buy-in (hopefully), you’ve chosen your partner and you're excited to see the shift it will create.

But before you hit go, take a breath. Having worked with hundreds of leaders over the years, we’ve seen leadership development land brilliantly and sadly, we’ve seen it fall flat. The difference isn’t just in the programme design (though it helps, and humble brag, ours has an NPS of +100). It’s in the context you’re running it in.

Here are five things to get honest about before you roll out any leadership development. They’ll save you time, energy and those awkward “why isn’t this landing?” moments later.

01. You don’t have the right stakeholder engagement

If leadership development isn’t visibly supported from the top, it risks being viewed as optional. Or worse, “just HR’s thing.”

This doesn’t mean everyone needs to be hands-on. But you do need visible advocacy from senior leaders. The kind that says: “This matters. We’re behind it.”

Need help making the case? We wrote a post about how to do that using our POWER model. Read it here.

02. Your systems and processes might be working against the change you want

You can send leaders on the best programme in the world (ours is regularly called “transformational”, just saying), but if your day-to-day reality doesn’t support their growth, it won’t stick.

Here’s what we mean:

• You teach coaching skills, but leaders are still in back-to-back meetings
• You want ownership and autonomy, but decisions need five sign-offs
• You continually tasked with building a feedback culture, but senior leaders aren’t modelling it

If your operating system doesn’t make it easy to use the behaviours you're building, you’ll lose traction fast.

Before you launch, ask: What would make it easier for our leaders to practise what they’re learning?

03. You’re not clear on what great leadership actually looks like

This one’s easy to skip, especially when you’re moving at pace. But it’s fundamental.

If your leadership team says they want leaders to “step up” or “lead with more accountability" what does that actually mean in practice?

Without a shared definition of what great leadership looks like in your company, leaders will do their best, but often in different directions. A programme alone won’t fix that misalignment.

Ask: What are the behaviours, mindsets or impact we expect to see from great leaders? Where are we today?

04. Your vendor doesn’t understand your culture

Even the best programme will fall flat if it feels generic or misaligned with your brand language or cultural norms. Maybe the examples don’t land. Maybe the sessions feel too corporate, or too casual. Or maybe the facilitators never quite grasp what pressure your leaders are under.

Whilst many leadership behaviours are, broadly speaking, universal. They’re also contextual. And if your delivery partner doesn’t take the time to understand your culture, what you get will always be surface-level.

Before you commit, ask: What would make this programme feel like it belongs here, not just borrowed from somewhere else?

05. Your facilitator doesn’t know how to coach

Here’s the one we care about deeply, because it’s often overlooked. The difference between a good facilitator and a great one? Coaching skill. We also happen to believe coaching underpins exceptional leadership, but we’ll save that rant for another day!

Coaching creates space for insight, mindset shifts and behaviour change. And it’s what turns a training programme into something transformational, not just “engaging.”

We’ve made a conscious decision to only hire fully qualified coaches for our facilitation team. Rightly so, you expect us to practice what we preach.

Before you bring someone in, ask: Does this person know how to hold space, stretch thinking and help people shift? Will the learning experience be one where they’re taught interesting and useful frameworks, or reflect on how they’ll actively apply those frameworks and the behavioural shifts they need to make?

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Leadership development is a strategic investment. And like any investment, context matters. So, before you roll something out, take time to ask the harder questions.
You’ll save yourself friction later and set your leaders up to actually grow. 

Want to chat about how we can best support your leadership development? Drop us a message at hello@wearecoachable.com

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