Jump to section:
- What is leadership development?
- Why is leadership development important?
- What are the benefits of leadership development in organisations?
- How do you develop leadership effectiveness at every level?
- How do leadership development initiatives work?
- What are today’s leadership development trends?
- How do you design good leadership development programmes?
- How do you measure leadership development success?
- How can you build stronger succession pipelines through leadership development?
What is leadership development?
Leadership development is the process of building a person’s ability to lead effectively. It uses targeted interventions such as assessment, coaching, feedback, and experiential learning, and it can focus on individual leaders, emerging talent, or entire leadership teams.
Leadership development is often compared to management development, but not all leaders are managers, while all managers need to be leaders. That is why leadership development focuses on understanding yourself and others, and on aligning and maximising people’s efforts and motivations towards a shared goal.
Why is leadership development important?
Leadership development is important because effective leadership shapes how well people perform, even when the world around them keeps changing. Effective leaders balance transformation with stability, and people with performance to create an environment where employees can perform effectively and achieve business goals. To achieve this, leadership development needs to go beyond developing skills, attitudes, and capabilities, by taking an ‘inside-out’ approach. This starts by developing their leadership identity, values, and emotional intelligence. With that foundation in placed, leaders stay effective even as demands, goals, and ways of working shift.
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What are the benefits of leadership development in organisations?
Leadership development creates great value for organisations as it optimises leader performance, and consequently performance of their teams. The benefits of leadership development in organisations range wide, including:
Reduced employee turnover
Research has shown that managers have a significant impact on employee tenure. Employee turnover is reduced when leaders know how to create a culture where employees feel seen and heard, have clarity on where they are going, and are challenged and supported.
A strong leadership pipeline
Developing future leaders early builds bench strength for succession planning. This prepares the organisation for whatever comes next, and a diverse, inclusive leadership pipeline widens the talent pool and drives better decisions.
Creating a culture of accountability
Well-developed leaders own their decisions and outcomes, and they build the same sense of ownership in their teams. When things go wrong, they fix problems and learn from them instead of assigning blame.
Successful organisational change and transformation
Leaders who can drive change by explaining why change is happening and model the way forward, help their teams adapt faster and with less disruption.
Ultimately, great leaders influence people for the better. This increases employee motivation, accountability, goal-orientation, and performance, which adds up to increased organisational success.
How do you develop leadership effectiveness at every level?
Talogy’s research shows that 80% of leaders have had to change their behaviour when moving to another leadership level, showcasing that leadership development will differ for each level:
First-time managers
New managers move from managing their own work to getting results through others, often while leading former peers. Leadership development at this level should focus on communication, building trust, and delegating; 58% of first-level leaders said improving their communication style was key to a successful transition. They rate individual coaching as the most useful support (62%), yet it’s often reserved for senior leaders.
Mid-level managers
As leaders of leaders, mid-level managers need to step out of the detail and balance operational delivery with strategy, while managing pressure from above and below. Even so, this is the transition organisations pay the least attention to. Leadership development here should centre on empowering others, communicating across levels, and building a wider network.
Senior leadership
The move to senior leadership calls for the biggest mindset shift: from managing teams to setting the vision for the whole organisation. Strategic thinking and inspiring purpose become essential for leadership development at this level, with 58% of senior leaders rating inspiring purpose as essential at their level. Yet only 26% feel well prepared for their next step, the lowest of any group. Senior leadership development should combine executive assessment to understand gaps and strengths with personalised executive coaching to build and grow capability.
How do leadership development initiatives and programmes work?
Leadership development takes many forms, but effective leadership development programmes tend to follow the same path. They start from the inside out, with a leader’s identity (their values and motivations) and their awareness of themselves and others (emotional intelligence). From there, they build the leadership behaviours needed in the role, such as building relationships and strategic thinking. Each initiative should set clear development goals that link to the organisation’s long-term priorities.
Leadership development typically follows the 70-20-10 rule. Leaders learn around 70% from on-the-job experiences and stretch assignments, 20% from social learning such as mentoring and coaching, and 10% from formal training. So effective leadership development combines workshops, coaching, and real-world experience. Its aim goes beyond teaching skills: it changes how leaders think, which in turn changes how they behave. With our Talogy InView leadership solutions, you can develop your leaders from the inside-out, using diverse and engaging leadership development methods.
What are today’s leadership development trends?
As organisations recognise how much effective leadership matters in a volatile workplace, leadership development is evolving quickly. Below are three key trends in what leaders are developing, and three in how that development is delivered.
What leaders are developing
- Human + AI leadership: Leaders are learning to work alongside AI by questioning its outputs, spotting bias, and combining it with sound human judgement.
- Human-centred leadership: With burnout and disengagement on the rise, organisations are prioritising leaders who build trust, support wellbeing, and connect with people while still delivering results.
- Level-specific leader development: One-size-fits-all approaches are giving way to development tailored to the demands of each leadership level, ideally starting before a promotion rather than after.
How leadership development is delivered
- Coaching for every level: AI-supported tools combined with human coaching and mentoring are making regular, personalised support available beyond the executive team.
- Learning in the flow of work: Short, frequent learning moments and real-world practice are replacing one-off workshops, so leaders can apply new skills right away.
- Assessment-led development: Leadership assessment and 360 feedback increasingly shape each leader’s development journey and help measure real behaviour change.
How do you design good leadership development solutions?
The most effective leadership development is built around leaders themselves: their challenges, their goals, and the roles they’re growing into. It should also connect clearly to your wider talent strategy and succession plans. These five design principles help make that link:
Relevance
Start with the real challenges your leaders face day to day. Leadership development that reflects their context feels useful from the start, and it’s far more likely to stick.
Personalised
Every leader starts from a different place. Give each one a development journey shaped around their strengths, goals, and needs, so they can see the value for them personally.
Immersive
Leaders learn most by doing. Give them real challenges to work through, build in time to reflect, and use vertical learning to change how they think and feel, not just what they know.
Human
Make it personal and authentic. Great leadership development reconnects leaders with the human side of leadership and helps them build genuine relationships with their teams and with each other.
Trusted
Focus on proven leadership behaviours that reflect your company’s values. Strong, visible support from senior leadership shows everyone that development matters.
How do you measure leadership development success?
You can only measure the success of leadership development if you know what success looks like and where you started. Effective measurement looks at whether leaders’ behaviour has actually changed and whether that change makes a difference to the organisation, not only at completion rates or participant satisfaction. To do this, you need data in three areas:
- Where you want to be: Clear, specific goals are the foundation of measuring success. Effective leadership development starts by defining the behaviours and outcomes you expect to see, linked to your organisation’s strategy now and in the future. For example, that might be stronger delegation among first-time managers or more strategic thinking among senior leaders.
- Where you started from: A strong baseline shows you how far leaders have come. Combining assessments, performance ratings, and 360 feedback before development begins gives you a well-rounded picture of each leader’s strengths and areas of opportunity, as well as targeting development where it will have the most impact.
- Where you are now: Repeating the same measures during and after the leadership development journey shows real progress. 360 feedback is especially valuable here, because it captures whether the people around a leader see a difference, not just whether the leader feels more confident.
The strongest indicator for measuring successful leadership development links leadership growth to the outcomes the organisation cares most about, such as employee engagement and retention in leaders’ teams, internal promotion rates, and readiness for succession. This turns leadership development in organisations from a cost into a measurable investment in performance.
How can you build stronger succession pipelines through leadership development?
Identifying who has the potential to step into future senior roles is an important first step for building stronger leadership pipelines, but getting them ready for those roles is another. Potential only turns into readiness through meaningful leadership development that is goal-focused, intentional, and personalised to both the leader and the role they’re preparing for. That gap matters: in Talogy’s research, only 38% of leaders felt well prepared for their next leadership step.
How Talogy supports leadership development in your organisation
Talogy offers a wide range of research-based leadership development solutions, from leadership development assessments and 360 feedback to coaching and tailored development journeys. Our flagship Talogy InView Leadership solution takes an inside-out approach to leadership. It starts with leaders’ identity and emotional intelligence, then develops six key leadership qualities, all grounded in science-based assessment and our latest international research. Whether you’re supporting first-time managers or preparing your next senior leaders, we can help you build leadership that lasts. Get in touch to find out more.
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Leadership development FAQs
Leaders have a major impact on how engaged their people feel, for better or worse. Effective leaders help employees prioritise, connect their work to a bigger goal, and feel they belong. Few leaders do all of this naturally, so leadership development helps them build these skills to keep their teams engaged, even in uncertain times.
Leaders shape the performance, engagement, and retention of everyone around them, so developing their leadership identity, self-awareness, and skills should be a priority for any organisation. Working with an external partner like Talogy adds objectivity. Science-based leadership development assessments and independent expertise reduce the risk of development being driven by internal opinions or bias, so leaders get an accurate picture of where to grow.
Coaching gives leaders personalised, one-to-one support to explore their leadership identity, build self-awareness, and work through the blockers holding them back. It’s especially valuable for senior leaders, whose growth is often less about learning specific skills and more about developing their presence and impact. In Talogy’s research, though, individual coaching was also the top-rated development support among first-level leaders.
Leaders are only effective when they guide their teams toward the organisation’s goals, so leadership development should be built around company strategy from the start. That means defining the leadership behaviours your strategy requires, now and in the future, and developing leaders to deliver them.
Leadership training is one part of leadership development rather than something entirely different. Training usually focuses on one or a few specific topics and is more formal, often with classroom learning at its core. Whereas, leadership development is broader. It can combine many types of learning, such as workshops, coaching, mentoring and on-the-job practice, and a coaching journey on its own can count as leadership development.