Leadership development has never attracted more attention. Organizations are redesigning programs, expanding digital platforms, bringing in coaches and introducing new competency models. And yet, the results tell a more complicated story.
Gartner reports that leader and manager development remained HR’s number-one priority for a third consecutive year. Yet 69% of HR leaders said their managers were not equipped to lead change. Although 75% of organizations had significantly updated their leadership-development programs – and more than half were increasing their investment – many still were not seeing the results they expected.
There is the paradox: organizations are providing more training, but not necessarily developing leaders who are better prepared for what comes next.
Perhaps the problem is not the quality of the content. Perhaps it is the assumption that leadership is developed mainly by transferring knowledge.
The Future Is Moving Faster Than Our Leadership Models
For years, leadership development began with a fairly straightforward question: What do good leaders need to know and do?
The usual answer was a competency framework. Leaders were taught to communicate effectively, set direction, motivate teams, manage performance and make decisions. All of these capabilities still matter.
But today’s leadership environment is changing faster than most competency models can keep up. The World Economic Forum estimates that 39% of workers’ core skills will change by 2030. It identifies resilience, flexibility and agility, leadership and social influence, and curiosity and lifelong learning among the capabilities becoming increasingly important.
That leaves organizations with a difficult question: How do we prepare leaders for roles that are still taking shape? How do we train people for decisions that have never been made, technologies that are still evolving and disruptions we cannot yet describe?
We will not solve that challenge simply by adding more content to the leadership curriculum. A more sustainable answer is to develop leaders who can keep building new capabilities as their environment changes. This is where Learning Agility becomes central.
Leadership Development Is Not the Same as Leadership Training
Training can introduce an idea, explain a framework or demonstrate a skill. Development asks more of us. It changes how a person reads a situation, tests assumptions, responds to feedback and behaves when the familiar answer no longer works.
That distinction matters because leadership rarely happens under classroom conditions.
It happens when a trusted employee suddenly begins to underperform, when two strategically important priorities conflict, when a new technology changes the work faster than the organization can redesign roles, or when a leader must decide before all the relevant information is available.
In moments like these, remembering a model is not enough. Leaders must notice what is different, question their first interpretation, seek perspectives they may be missing, try a response and adjust as new information emerges.
That is Learning Agility in action. Learning Agility is not simply another topic to add to a leadership program. It is what allows leaders to keep developing after the program ends.
The Missing Ingredient Is Not Content. It Is Experience.
LinkedIn’s 2025 Workplace Learning Report reveals a telling imbalance. Although 71% of organizations offered leadership training, far fewer offered experiences that help leaders learn across boundaries: 45% provided cross-functional projects, 31% used peer-learning groups and only 26% offered job rotations.
That gap may help explain why leadership knowledge does not always become leadership capability. We often take people away from work to teach them leadership, even though work itself contains many of the experiences from which leadership is learned.
But a difficult assignment does not automatically lead to growth. Experience can reinforce poor habits just as easily as it can build new capabilities. What turns experience into development is the learning process around it.
Leaders need an opportunity to ask:
What did I expect to happen?
What actually happened?
Which assumptions influenced my response?
What feedback or information did I overlook?
What should I retain, and what do I need to change?
What will I test the next time I encounter a similar situation?
Without these questions, an experience may be just another event. With them, it becomes a source of development.
From Leadership Programs to Leadership Learning Systems
To develop leaders who are ready for the future, organizations need to look beyond individual programs and build leadership learning systems.
In practice, that means five interconnected elements.
1. A portfolio of unfamiliar experiences
Future leaders need opportunities to work beyond the settings in which they have already succeeded. Cross-functional projects, temporary assignments, international exposure, customer-facing work and responsibility for unfamiliar problems reveal how people lead when expertise provides only part of the answer.
The point is not to make assignments difficult for the sake of it. It is to place leaders in situations that require them to observe, inquire, experiment and adapt.
2. Reflection built into work
Most organizations rush from one project to the next. Reflection becomes optional – something to do if there is time.
Without reflection, however, leaders can accumulate experience without extracting its lessons. Short after-action reviews, decision journals, structured project debriefs and coaching conversations help them see the connection between their behavior and the outcomes they produce.
Reflection matters only if it shapes what happens next.
3. Feedback that provides new information
Leaders cannot learn from their own interpretation of events alone. They need information that challenges the view they already hold.
That takes more than an annual 360-degree process. It takes regular feedback from colleagues, team members, customers and stakeholders who experience the consequences of a leader’s behavior.
Seeking feedback is itself a critical learning behavior. The question is not simply whether the organization provides feedback, but whether leaders actively look for evidence that might prove them wrong.
4. Psychological permission to experiment
Organizations often say they want agile leaders, yet continue to reward certainty, control and flawless execution. Leaders notice the contradiction.
Experimentation means accepting that the first approach may not work. If every unsuccessful attempt is treated as a performance failure, leaders will protect themselves by falling back on familiar solutions.
Developing Learning Agility therefore requires clear boundaries within which leaders can test ideas, acknowledge uncertainty and talk honestly about mistakes – without giving up accountability.
5. Measurement of learning behavior
Leadership programs are often evaluated by attendance, satisfaction or completion. None of these measures tells us very much about development.
The more useful questions are:
Is the leader seeking more diverse perspectives?
Are they testing new approaches?
How do they respond when evidence challenges their assumptions?
Are they applying lessons from one situation to another?
Has their behavior changed in ways that colleagues can observe?
Learning Agility assessments can provide a behavioral baseline, but their real value comes when measurement is connected to experimentation, coaching and follow-up. An assessment should begin the development process, not bring it to an end.
Developing More Leaders, Not Just Selecting the Right Ones
This leads to another important implication.
For many years, Learning Agility was used mainly to identify high-potential talent. The question was: Who seems most likely to succeed in a more complex role?
That question still matters, but it is no longer enough.
When change reaches every level of an organization, Learning Agility cannot remain the preserve of a small executive pipeline. Managers, technical experts, project leaders and emerging talent all need to be able to learn through uncertainty.
So the leadership question is shifting from ‘Who has potential?’ to ‘How can we create the conditions in which more people develop it?’
That is more than a change in language. It moves Learning Agility from talent selection to organizational capability.
The Real Test of Leadership Development
We should not judge a leadership-development strategy by how much leaders know at the end of a program.
The real test comes later: when the context changes, the established solution fails or a leader faces a situation for which no competency model offers a complete answer.
Can the leader see that the situation is different? Can they become curious before becoming certain? Can they seek feedback without becoming defensive? Can they try an alternative, learn from the result and change their behavior?
This is why Warner Burke’s work on Learning Agility matters so much to me. Rather than offering another description of the ideal leader, it identifies observable behaviors that help people strengthen how they learn – and keep developing as their circumstances change.
I have had the privilege of learning from Warner, and one idea from his work has stayed with me: leadership potential is not only something organizations identify. It is also something they can deliberately develop.
No organization can prepare its leaders for every challenge ahead. But it can help them develop the behaviors they will need to learn their way through those challenges.
The future of leadership development is not more training about the future.
It is developing leaders – and organizations – that know how to keep learning when the future arrives.
