One of the biggest frustrations organisations have with leadership training is that the workshop itself can go really well, but very little seems to change afterwards.
Managers attend, engage in discussions, enjoy the activities, and leave with good intentions. The feedback scores are strong, people feel energised, and there’s often a genuine sense that the learning has landed well. Then a few weeks later, people are back in the reality of day-to-day work and old habits start creeping back in again.
The manager who wanted to delegate more is still taking too much on themselves. Difficult conversations are still being avoided. One-to-ones become inconsistent because operational priorities take over. Managers who said they wanted to coach their team more are back to solving every problem themselves because it feels quicker and easier under pressure.
I don’t think this happens because leadership training doesn’t work. More often, it’s because organisations expect behaviour change to happen much more easily than it actually does.
Awareness Alone Rarely Changes Behaviour
Many managers are aware of the behaviours they’re expected to demonstrate, at least in theory, but putting those behaviours into practice consistently is often much harder in the reality of day-to-day work, especially when workloads are high, pressure builds, and people fall back into familiar patterns.
That’s why leadership development needs to be about much more than delivering content.
A one-off workshop can absolutely create awareness, reflection, and motivation, but lasting behaviour change usually needs reinforcement over time. Managers need opportunities to practise, reflect, apply learning in real situations, and sometimes get things wrong before new behaviours start to feel natural.
The Problem With Measuring Training Activity Alone
This is also why measuring leadership development purely through attendance, completion rates, or feedback forms can be misleading. Those things tell you whether people showed up and whether they enjoyed the learning experience, but they don’t necessarily tell you whether anything has changed afterwards.
At Willow & Puddifoot, we think about leadership development in three stages: Intake, Insight, and Impact.
Intake focuses on the foundations. Did the right people attend? Were they at the right stage of leadership? Did they fully engage with the process? Were managers aligned on why the development mattered in the first place? These things have a huge influence on whether leadership training creates meaningful change later on.
Insight looks at what people take away from the learning experience. What reflections have they had? What have they recognised about themselves? What conversations has the learning prompted? What are they intending to do differently afterwards?
Impact is where things become much more meaningful. This is about what actually changes once managers are back in the workplace. Are they communicating more effectively? Delegating differently? Having better one-to-ones? Supporting their teams more consistently? Are teams experiencing stronger leadership as a result?
Linking Behaviour Change to Business Results
The most effective organisations also look beyond training activity and start exploring how behavioural change connects to wider business outcomes such as engagement, retention, communication, performance, productivity, and team effectiveness.
Leadership development is rarely about a single metric. More often, it’s about understanding whether managers are leading more effectively and whether that is creating a better experience and stronger results across the organisation.
One of the challenges organisations often face is that behaviour change can be difficult to measure properly. Attendance data and workshop feedback are relatively easy to gather, but understanding whether leadership behaviours are genuinely changing over time usually requires a more intentional approach.
This is why we partner with organisations to measure leadership development impact more effectively, helping them move beyond simple training metrics and think more deeply about behavioural change, application, and organisational outcomes.
Lasting Change Needs Reinforcement
The organisations that tend to see the greatest impact from leadership development are usually the ones that don’t treat it as a standalone event. They build reinforcement around the learning through things like coaching, manager involvement, reflection activities, peer discussions, practical application tasks, and ongoing development conversations.
Some of this support may come through the leadership development provider, but a huge amount also comes from the organisation itself through culture, expectations, accountability, and everyday leadership practices.
Because leadership is a craft. It develops over time through repeated application, feedback, reflection, and practice. Workshops can absolutely be part of that process, but they’re rarely the whole solution.
Final Thoughts
If organisations want leadership training to create lasting impact, the focus needs to move beyond simply delivering workshops and towards helping managers apply, embed, and sustain new leadership behaviours in the real world.
About the Author
Louise Puddifoot is the founder of Willow & Puddifoot, where she and her team CRAFT™ confident, capable leaders at every stage. With over 20 years’ experience in leadership and learning, Louise designs practical development that builds confidence, capability, and impact. Her work is built on the CRAFT™ Leadership Framework, focusing on communication, resilience, authenticity, future focus, and transformation, to create real behaviour change that lasts.