Most corporate leadership training changes nothing. Here is why, and what to do instead.
Your managers went to the leadership development program. Ninety days later, almost none of it exists. That is not a people problem and it is not a content problem. It is a design problem, and it has a known fix.
Trained & Unchanged is a free book by Bill McGlade. Read it and you will be able to audit any management training program in about ten minutes, tell in advance which proposals will produce behaviour change and which will produce applause, and defend the spend to your CFO with numbers instead of satisfaction scores.
Why leadership development fails, what behavior change requires, and the longitudinal method that delivers it
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Six things you can use before you finish the book.
This is not a book of leadership philosophy. It is a set of tests you can run against the program you are being sold this quarter.
- The ten-minute program audit. Four questions you can ask about any leadership development proposal that predict whether it will change behaviour. Most proposals fail on at least three of them, and you can see it before you sign.
- The verb test. Count the verbs in the proposal in front of you. Circle cover, explore, introduce, discuss. Underline demonstrate, apply, practice, measure, sustain. When the circles outnumber the underlines, you already know how this ends.
- Why sixteen hours is not sixteen hours. The same content delivered as two consecutive days and as eight sessions across four months are not two formats of one program. They are two different products with wildly different outcomes, and the reason is the calendar.
- What the field’s own flagship research actually found. A 2017 meta-analysis in the Journal of Applied Psychology identified exactly which design features separate the leadership programs that work from the ones that do not. The list reads like an inventory of everything the standard corporate purchase leaves out.
- Why the end-of-session evaluation is worse than useless. The smile sheet does not merely fail to measure change. It is a compass pointing the wrong way, and it rewards providers for optimising the one thing that does not predict whether anything sticks.
- The CFO page. One page, written before launch, that lets you make the money argument without a single claim your CFO can puncture. Plus four ways to measure behaviour change with no research department, all cheap on day zero and impossible to retrofit honestly at the end.
Written by someone who has sat on both sides of the purchase.
Bill McGlade
Bill is an entrepreneur, speaker and advisor who has spent his career building companies and helping organisations turn knowledge into action. Known on stage as The Opportunity Engineer, he speaks internationally on leadership, opportunity design and practical AI, and he serves on the board of Tandem Solutions.
His work spans company building, acquisitions and growth leadership across the events, technology and professional development industries. He has sat with executives deciding what to buy, and he has designed and delivered what gets bought.
Tandem Solutions
Tandem is the leadership development firm whose LongitudinaLearning approach and Tandem Method are presented in the book. The practice is built entirely on the longitudinal model the book argues for: learning distributed over time, applied to real situations at work, debriefed with a coach, and measured before and after.
The book is the argument. The firm is the argument put into practice.
If you are about to approve a leadership development budget, read chapter four before you sign anything.
There are four mechanisms that decide whether a program changes what people do: spacing, retrieval, feedback and deliberate practice. Each one is boring, proven, and almost universally ignored. Understand the four and you can evaluate any program in ten minutes, because every program either uses them or fails.
The book is free. It takes an afternoon. It will change what you buy.
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