Leadership Development Strategy: Does Your Organization Have What It Takes to Develop Great Leaders?

We are tasked with creating great leaders, often without great resources! One way to gauge how extensive it will be to develop great leaders is to complete the quick checklist below. The results give insight into what gaps you will have in creating and implementing talent development initiatives, and they are the starting point for a leadership development strategy that fits the organization you have rather than the one in the brochure. This guide describes what a leadership development strategy is, the four key supporters of leadership development that the checklist measures, how to score your organization, the discussion questions we use for each gap, how the four supporters become a strategy and a framework, and examples from our client work.

What a leadership development strategy is

A leadership development strategy is the organization's plan for who needs to lead what, the behaviors that define leadership success at each level, how those behaviors are built through training and everything around it, and how the organization will know the plan is working. It is different from a calendar of workshops. A calendar answers "what are we running this year"; a strategy answers "what do we need leaders to do differently, and what has to be in place for that to happen."

The need is not new, but it is growing. In a 2026 study by the Association for Talent Development, about half of organizations offered leadership development at all levels, 66% required it for people managers and nearly 79% of the organizations that provided it to all employees reported an improved organizational culture [1]. Gallup's research on managers points to why a strategy has to start with expectations rather than with courses: companies fail to choose the candidate with the right talent for the manager job 82% of the time, and about one in 10 people possess the talent to manage, often because people are promoted for tenure or individual performance rather than for what the leadership role requires [2]. Clear expectations help with selection and development alike, which is why they are the first item on the checklist.

The four key supporters of leadership development

In our work with organizations of every size, four conditions tend to separate leadership development that changes behavior from leadership development that fills a calendar. We call them the key supporters, and the checklist helps you to rate each one.

• Clarity of leadership expectations. Competencies and success factors are defined for leadership success now and into the future. When this is in place, leaders know what "good" looks like at their level, and programs, assessments and performance conversations all point at the same behaviors. When it is missing, every program defines leadership in its own way, and development is difficult to measure because there is no agreed standard.
• Using more than training as a solution. Development actions reinforce, teach or support the competencies from hire to retirement: selection, onboarding, coaching, assignments, performance management and recognition, not only workshops. When training is the only solution, the competencies are taught once and rarely reinforced, and the organization's other systems may quietly reward different behaviors.
• Development is a process. There are a variety of informal and formal ways in which the competencies are learned throughout a leader's career, linked to transitions such as the first management role, managing managers and leading a function. When development is a one-time event, leaders attend, return to work and find nothing waiting to support what they learned.
• Training is performance-based. Leadership training is designed to be skill-based, so that leaders can perform after training. Concept teaching builds vocabulary; performance-based design builds the behavior, with practice, feedback and application in the flow of work.

The checklist: does your organization have what it takes?

Rate your organization on each statement, using 1 for "not in place," 3 for "somewhat in place" and 5 for "fully in place." We suggest completing it as a group, with talent development, HR and at least one senior leader, because the disagreements are usually where the useful conversation starts. A printable version of the checklist is available.

Here is how to read the total:

• Scores of 4 to 9 mean the foundations are not yet in place. Adding more training tends not to produce great leaders until the first "key supporter" and clear expectations exist. That is the place to start.
• Scores of 10 to 15 mean you are strong in some areas, with one or two gaps that are often the reason an existing program is not producing the behavior change expected of it. Focus on the lowest-scoring key supporter first.
• Scores of 16 to 20 show the key supporters are in place. The work is to keep them current as the business changes and to extend them to leader populations the strategy has not yet reached.

Keep in mind that a single low score can hold the others back. An organization with clear competencies, a rich set of development options and a full learning process may still struggle if its training teaches concepts rather than skills, and an organization with excellent skill-based training may struggle when nobody has agreed on what leaders are expected to do.

Discussion questions for each gap

The score tells you where to look. Here are the questions we use with client teams to decide what to do about each gap, along with the approaches we tend to suggest.

If your organization has a lack of clarity around what is expected of leaders

• Against what are our leaders already measured? Can we build upon this?
• When we hire, what makes a leader "stand out"?
• If we could only build one leadership skill, what would it be that would make a difference?

Most organizations have more to build on than they think: performance criteria, values, a job description or an old competency model. We suggest defining expectations as observable behaviors by level and tying them to business outcomes. Our article on competency development covers how to build the model, and a 360 built on the competencies turns the expectations into feedback leaders can act on.

If your organization uses training as your only solution for leadership development

• What other resources and systems are in place?
• How can we drive individuals to manage their own development?
• What can we do that is low-cost or no-cost?

The answer is rarely more budget. Learning-from-experience assignments, structured peer learning, coaching by managers, action learning on real projects and curated learning paths cost little and build skills where they are used. Our guide to 20 ways to develop skills and knowledge lists the options by type of learning, the 70-20-10 model shows how to balance them, and group coaching makes coaching affordable for a whole leader population. Individuals manage their own development best when they have a written plan; our guide to individual development plans shows the format we use.

If your organization develops leaders using one-time events versus an integrated process

• How can we link leadership development to other performance systems?
• What is already in place that we could better utilize if we communicated it?
• On what can we build?

Development becomes a process when it is attached to the systems leaders already live in: performance conversations, development planning, succession planning and the transitions between levels. Often the pieces exist and are not connected, which is a communication task before it is a design task. Where a program already exists, our guide to keeping leadership development relevant describes how to evolve it into a process rather than rebuilding it, and our article on creating a learning culture addresses the low support for learning that keeps development stuck at the event stage.

If your organization focuses development on concept teaching rather than skill-building

• How can we add application activities into our current development?
• What real-life situations can leaders use to apply what they have learned?
• How can we "expect" more performance from leaders before, during and after development activities?

The higher the difficulty and importance of the skill, the more emphasis on practice with feedback should be built into the learning. Research on transfer supports the point: in a survey of training professionals in 150 organizations, 62% of employees applied what they learned immediately after training, 44% after six months and 34% after a year, and transfer was higher where organizations supported application before, during and after the program [3]. Practical steps include converting lectures into practices using leaders' own situations, live demonstrations by facilitators with the competencies to run them, simulations such as our Leadership Mastery Simulation and a reinforcement plan for the months after the program. Our article on 11 ways to reinforce training lists the options.

From checklist to strategy: a leadership development framework

The four key supporters mentioned earlier are the diagnosis. A leadership development framework organizes the responses into a strategy that can become a plan. Here is a structure we use with clients to build a solid strategy:

1. Business outcomes and leader populations. Start with what the business needs in the next two to three years and which leader groups drive it: emerging leaders and high potentials, new supervisors and managers, experienced managers, senior leaders and executives, and cross-cultural or affiliate leaders. Each group has its own transitions and its own priorities.
2. Expectations as behaviors. Define the competencies and success factors for each population, in observable terms, tied to the outcomes in the first step. This is key supporter number one, and everything after it depends on it.
3. Development architecture. For each population, decide the mix of formal learning, learning from others and learning from experience, and the sequence: what happens before a transition, in the first 90 days and over the following year. This addresses needs from key supporters number two and three.
4. Performance-based design. For the formal components, specify the practices, application assignments, manager involvement and reinforcement that turn concepts into behavior. This is supporter four.
5. Assessment and planning. Decide how leaders learn where they stand against the expectations, through leadership assessment tools matched to the priority, and how individual development plans and succession discussions use the results.
6. Measurement. Agree before the first cohort on the behaviors and business measures that will show the strategy is working, and who will collect them. Our guide to measuring leadership development describes the plan.
7. Resourcing and phasing. Cost the strategy realistically, including the time of participants and the managers who support them, and decide what runs first. Our article on the cost of leadership training gives current benchmarks.

Work in phases. Start with the highest-priority population and the two or three capabilities that drive outcomes, with formal skill-building and application within the business cadence, and add support tools and further populations in later phases. Too much content, stretched over too much time, with little opportunity to apply within the business cadence creates a shallow program that will struggle to get results. Organizations that need to reach many leaders quickly can read our guide to scaling leadership development.

Leadership development best practices we see in organizations that score well

• Visible senior leader sponsorship and participation in the program itself.
• Behaviors defined before methods are chosen, so that the format serves the outcome rather than the other way around.
• Managers of participants briefed, involved and equipped to coach the behaviors the program teaches.
• Development organized by transition, with different journeys for a first-time manager, a manager of managers and a senior leader.
• Existing resources reused and connected before new ones are built.
• Behavior and business measures agreed at the start, and reviewed annually, with smaller refreshes after cohorts or business shifts.
• Programs evolved rather than replaced, so that the reinforcement cycle leaders need is not interrupted.

Examples from our work

Here is one example for each of the four supporters, drawn from our client work:

• Clarity of expectations. For a global mining company's international sales leadership program, we created a behavioral success checklist focused on current and upcoming needs of the business and tied learning metrics to the organization's own measures of "retention of priority accounts" and "percentage of at-risk accounts with action plans," so that the expectations, the program and the business outcome pointed at the same behaviors. Our guide to planning sales leadership development describes the program.
• More than training. Career engineers with a sales target at a large North American engineering firm had no adopted competencies for the role, no documented sales process and managers who were not equipped to coach. The sales enablement engagement built a competency model, a documented process, a customized 360 with individual development plans and manager support tools, so that the skills, the process, the tools and the managers reinforced one another after the workshops ended.
• Development as a process. In a new manager development program for a global, technically focused organization, competency modeling came first, then a four-day event with structured mentoring by mid- and senior leaders, a strategic area management plan implemented over the following 90 days and formal reinforcement activities; 200 first-line managers completed it across six regions.
• Performance-based training. A digital upskilling program for about 2,500 manufacturing employees was built as eight 15-minute modules with specific behaviors for application, examples developed with client subject matter experts and application assignments, delivered through the technology employees already used. Use of data analysis tools rose by 31% in the population trained this way.

Frequently asked questions

What is a leadership development strategy?

The organization's plan for which leader populations it needs to develop, the behaviors that define success for each, how those behaviors are built through formal learning, learning from others and learning from experience, and how results are measured. A program is one component of a strategy; the strategy also covers selection, assessment, development planning, manager involvement and succession.

What is a leadership development framework?

The structure that organizes the strategy: leader populations and their transitions, the competencies for each, the development architecture, the design standards for formal learning, the assessment and planning process and the measures. The four key supporters in the checklist are a quick test of whether a framework is in place.

What are the steps to build a leadership development program?

Define the business outcomes and the leader population, define expectations as behaviors, assess the population against them, design the mix of formal, social and experiential learning with practice and application built in, involve the managers of participants, run a first cohort in phases and measure behavior and business results. The seven-part framework above is the sequence we use.

What is the 70-20-10 rule for leadership development?

A guideline from research on how executives said they learned to lead: about 70% from challenging assignments, 20% from other people and 10% from formal courses. We treat it as a reminder that most development happens outside the classroom, not as a formula; the right mix depends on the population and the skill.

How do you assess an organization's readiness for leadership development?

Rate the four key supporters, with a group rather than an individual, and use the discussion questions for the lowest-scoring one. Readiness is less about budget than about whether expectations are clear, whether systems beyond training support the behaviors, whether development is a process and whether the training that exists builds skills.

How often should a leadership development strategy be reviewed?

Annually, against the business outcomes it was built to support, with smaller adjustments after each cohort or when the business shifts. Refresh when the foundation still works but is not producing the behavior change or business outcomes expected; redesign only when the expectations themselves have changed.

Where to start

Complete the checklist with your team this week as an initial look into where your organization stands, take the lowest score and work through its three discussion questions in a working session; plan to gather more data from stakeholders after your initial work. Keep in mind that the answers to gaps usually point to something the organization already has that can be built on. PPS International Limited helps organizations assess leadership development needs and build the strategy, from competency models and assessments to custom learning journeys and the tools that make development a process. Discuss your leadership priorities with us.

References

1. Association for Talent Development (2026). Leadership Development: Cultivating Critical Skills for Employees at All Levels. Research report; figures from the May 2026 release.
2. Beck, R. J., and Harter, J. (2014). Why Great Managers Are So Rare. Gallup. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/231593/why-great-managers-rare.aspx
3. Saks, A. M., and Belcourt, M. (2006). An investigation of training activities and transfer of training in organizations. Human Resource Management, 45(4), 629–648. doi:10.1002/hrm.20135