In The Room #30 – Leadership development shouldn't be designed before anyone walks into the room.
At the end of a leadership program recently, one of the participants said something that stayed with me. We'd just finished the final session in a series that had run over several months, and as we were talking afterwards, he mentioned that the sessions hadn't felt like a bunch of separate, disconnected workshops. They hadn't felt like something pulled off a shelf and delivered to the group. They'd felt like conversations.
I liked the comment at the time. The more I thought about it, the more I realised it described something I've been trying to do increasingly deliberately in my work, and something most leadership development doesn't do at all.
Most programs are fully designed before anybody walks into the room. There's a learning objective, a deck, a sequence of activities, a collection of models somebody decided the participants need. None of that is wrong in itself, good preparation matters. But there's a risk hiding inside it: when you decide too early what people need to learn, you can become so committed to delivering the program that you stop paying attention to what's actually happening in front of you. The workshop becomes the product.
The first session should change the second one
When this program began, I had a clear idea of what we wanted to explore: leadership capability, ownership, accountability, strategic focus and how individual strengths shape the way people lead. The first session surfaced things I couldn't have fully designed for beforehand. People talked about how easily they slipped back into doing rather than leading, about taking work back because it was faster, about the tension between wanting to develop someone and simply needing the job finished. One line captured most of it: “you can't lead and do at the same time.” Not literally. Every manager still has work to do, but when your default response to a problem is to become the person solving it, leadership quickly gets squeezed out by operations. That became important information, so the second session changed. Rather than moving to the next item on a predetermined curriculum, we spent more time on delegation, expectations and ownership, and the behaviours getting in the way of them, introducing tools that made sense because of what the group had already told us, not because they happened to sit on page 47 of a facilitator guide.
By the third session, we had a much richer picture of what each person was actually wrestling with, and none of it was hypothetical anymore. This was the work. Once the real work is sitting in front of you, it's close to irresponsible to ignore it and return to a case study you wrote weeks earlier instead.
Customisation is not putting someone's logo on the slides
The word customised gets used loosely in leadership development. Usually it means changing the organisation's name on the title slide, swapping in an industry example, adjusting an activity or two. That's not what I mean. True customisation happens when what you learn about the people changes what you do next. It means being willing to throw something away because it's no longer relevant. It means spending twenty minutes on something you expected to spend five minutes on, because the conversation reveals that's where the real issue sits. It means listening between sessions, not just during them, and accepting that the program you eventually deliver may look quite different from the one you imagined at the start.
That takes a certain amount of humility from the facilitator. You still need expertise. You still need structure, in fact you need a strong structure precisely so you have enough confidence to move away from it when the moment calls for it. But you also have to resist the temptation to prove how much you know. The objective isn't to get through your material. The objective is to help people lead better. Those aren't always the same thing, and the difference between them is where most programs quietly go wrong.
I'm increasingly convinced the conversation should be the product, not the workshop.
The conversation has to continue after the room
Our most recent session finished with each person identifying a specific leadership challenge to work on next, not a broad aspiration like delegate more or communicate better, but something observable. What will you experiment with? What will you stop, protect or change to make room for it? What should the people around you notice? What evidence will tell you whether it's working? Who will you review it with, and when?
Those five questions aren't arbitrary. Each one forces something a general intention doesn't: an observable action instead of a vague goal, a named observer instead of self-assessment, a scheduled review instead of good intentions that quietly evaporate. If a workshop ends with an interesting insight and nothing changes back at work, the insight probably wasn't worth much. Leadership development becomes useful when the conversation continues after everyone leaves the room.
That may be the part of the original comment I liked most. The sessions felt like conversations because, in a sense, they were one conversation interrupted by several weeks of actual leadership. People went back to work. They tried things. Reality gave them feedback. Then we picked the conversation back up.
That's probably a better way to think about leadership development generally: not a series of workshops to be delivered, but an ongoing conversation with enough structure to keep it moving, enough challenge to make it useful, and enough flexibility to follow the problems that actually matter. Because the most important leadership issue in the room isn't always the one written on the agenda. Sometimes you have to listen long enough for it to appear.
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