How to Know If Your Leadership Development Program Is Actually Working
Most organizations invest in leadership development and hope for the best. Here is how to demand more than hope.
U.S. organizations spent approximately $98 billion on corporate training in 2024. That is a significant investment by any measure. And yet, according to High5Test’s 2024 leadership training research, only 18% of organizations say their leaders are “very effective” at achieving business goals.
That gap between investment and outcome is not a coincidence. It is a measurement problem, and in many cases, a design problem that started long before anyone sat down in a training room.
Most leadership development programs are evaluated on the wrong things. Participants fill out a feedback form at the end of a session. The scores come back positive. The facilitator was engaging. The lunch was good. And the organization concludes that the program worked.
Six months later, the same leadership challenges are still present, and no one has connected the dots.
Why Measuring Feels Hard
Part of the problem is that leadership development outcomes take time to surface. Behavior change does not happen in a workshop. It happens in the weeks and months that follow, as leaders apply new approaches in real situations, get feedback, adjust, and try again. Organizations that expect immediate, visible results from a two-day program are measuring the wrong timeline.
The other part of the problem is that many programs are never designed with measurement in mind. They are built around content delivery rather than behavior change, and content delivery is easy to measure in ways that feel meaningful but tell you very little about what actually changed.
According to research published by the University of South Florida’s Center for Executive and Leadership Education in 2025, the highest-impact programs are those explicitly tied to specific, measurable business challenges from the start, whether that means preparing a pipeline of ready leaders, improving cross-functional collaboration, or building a culture of accountability. When the program is designed around a business outcome, measurement becomes straightforward: did the outcome improve or not?
The Four Questions Worth Asking
Donald Kirkpatrick’s four-level evaluation framework, still considered the gold standard in learning and development, offers a practical structure for assessing whether a program is actually working. The four levels move from surface to substance:
Level 1: Did participants find it valuable? This is known as a “smile sheet”.. It is the easiest level to measure and the least meaningful on its own. A highly engaging workshop, with colorful slides and video, still scores well at Level 1 even if nothing has changed substantively.
Level 2: Did participants learn something? Pre and post assessments can measure whether participants absorbed new frameworks, concepts, or skills. This is more useful than Level 1 but still does not tell you whether learning will be translated into behavior.
Level 3: Did behavior actually change? This is where most programs fail to measure, and where the most important signal lives. Are leaders having different conversations? Making decisions differently? Handling conflict more directly? Behavioral change requires observation over time, structured manager feedback, and 360-degree assessments conducted before and after the program, not just at the end of it.
Level 4: Did business outcomes improve? Retention, engagement scores, team productivity, promotion rates, and reduction in leadership-related turnover are all measurable indicators of whether a development program had real organizational impact. A 2022 Harvard Business Review study found that among organizations most successful at implementing leadership development programs, 35% reported an increase in revenue as a direct result of their efforts. That kind of outcome does not happen by accident. It happens when programs are designed with business results as the explicit target.
What the ROI Data Actually Shows
When leadership development programs are designed and measured well, the financial return is real and significant.
High5Test’s 2024 research found an average ROI of approximately $7 returned for every $1 invested in leadership development. HiBob’s 2024 workplace learning report found that organizations which integrate evaluation into program design are significantly more likely to report positive ROI, with some achieving as high as $4.15 for every $1 invested.
DDI’s 2024 Forrester Total Economic Impact study found that effective leadership development programs lead to significantly lower turnover, with one client reducing salaried turnover by 80% and hourly turnover by 25% after launching leadership training.
These numbers are not flukes. They are the result of programs built around specific outcomes, measured at the right level, and sustained over time rather than delivered as one-time events.
The Signs Your Program Is Not Working
After decades of working with organizations on leadership development, I have seen the same warning signs repeat across industries and company sizes. Here is what to watch for:
Participants cannot describe what changed. If a leader who completed your program cannot tell you specifically what they do differently now, the program did not produce behavior change. It produced awareness at best.
The same leadership problems keep surfacing. If the challenges you designed the program to address are still present six to twelve months later, the intervention did not reach the root cause. This often means the program was built around content rather than the specific behavioral gaps driving the problem.
Managers are not involved in the process. Leadership development that happens in a vacuum, without the involvement of a participant’s direct manager in setting expectations, providing feedback, and reinforcing new behaviors, is significantly less likely to produce lasting change. The manager’s role in sustaining development is as important as the program itself.
There is no follow-through structure. A workshop with no follow-up is an event, not a development strategy. The organizations that see the strongest results build in coaching, peer accountability, and structured reflection in the weeks and months after the formal learning.
The program was not tied to a business problem. Leadership development that starts with a curriculum rather than a challenge is unlikely to produce the outcomes organizations are hoping for. The question that should drive every program design is not “what do we want leaders to learn?” It is “what do we need leaders to do differently, and why does it matter to the business?”
What Good Actually Looks Like
The organizations that get the most out of their leadership development investment share a few consistent practices.
They start with a clear, specific business problem rather than a generic competency framework. They design measurement into the program from the beginning, not as an afterthought. They involve managers as active participants in the development process, not just sponsors who signed off on the budget. They build in follow-through structures, coaching, peer groups, or structured check-ins, that extend the learning beyond the formal program. And they evaluate at the behavioral and business outcome level, not just at the satisfaction level.
These are not complicated practices. But they require a level of rigor and intentionality that many organizations skip in favor of the easier path of booking a program and hoping the rest takes care of itself.
The Bottom Line
If your organization is investing in leadership development and cannot clearly answer whether it is working, that is not a gap in your evaluation process. It is a signal that the program was not designed to be evaluated in the first place.
Leadership development is worth the investment. The research is clear on that. But the return does not come from the program itself. It comes from how deliberately the program was designed, how rigorously it is measured, and how seriously the organization treats the follow-through.
The leaders you are developing deserve better than a workshop that felt good and changed nothing. So does your organization.
Sources
- High5Test — Leadership Training and Development Statistics (2024 to 2025), 18% effectiveness and $7 ROI data
- University of South Florida, Center for Executive and Leadership Education — Measuring Success in Leadership Development (2025)
- HiBob — 2024 Workplace Learning Report, evaluation and ROI data
- DDI / Forrester — Total Economic Impact Study (2024), leadership development and turnover reduction
- Harvard Business Review — Leadership Development and Revenue Impact (2022)
- Afterburner — How to Measure Leadership Development ROI (2025)
- Techclass — Measuring the ROI of Leadership Development Initiatives (2026)
