What Leadership Training Actually Works?

If you are a HR Director or a CEO, one of the most important decisions you make is where to invest your leadership development budget.

Get it right, and you build a consistent, engaging leadership culture across your business. Get it wrong, and you spend serious money on training that changes very little.

The problem most leaders bring to me is remarkably consistent. Somewhere along the way, technical experts have been promoted into leadership roles because of their undoubted expertise. They are excellent at what they do, but they have not yet developed the leadership skills their new responsibilities demand. The result is an inconsistent approach to leading across the business: inefficient working, low team engagement, and employee survey scores that trend in the wrong direction.

So what actually works? In Summit’s work with leaders and organisations over more than 28 years, here is my honest answer.

Why So Much Leadership Training Disappoints

The most common mistake I see is the belief that a one or two-day leadership training course is a magic wand that makes every problem disappear. It is not that straightforward. Leadership is a capability built over time, not a topic you can tick off in a single workshop.

The second mistake is subtler. Leaders can be unduly influenced by the sales representative from the leadership training consultancy, and fail to look beyond the sales pitch.

Before you sign anything, ask for a catalogue of verifiable client testimonials that reflect genuine expertise and social proof. And not just proof that the consultancy can deliver leadership training, but proof that it delivered significant value for the client organisation through leadership training. There is a big difference between those two things.

A Story From the Factory Floor

One manufacturing client engagement illustrates how Summit designed leadership development around a specific business problem, rather than starting with a generic course.

The CEO of a fast-paced manufacturing business appointed Summit to create and deliver an immersive five-day leadership training programme, spaced over 16 weeks. The business challenges were significant, and they will be familiar to anyone who has worked inside a growing business.

Silo working had become the norm. Communication across departments was poor, inconsistent, lacking in clarity, and not structured in a timely manner. The impact was serious: quality errors were increasing and proving financially costly, profit margin was being eroded, and customer projects were being delivered after the agreed deadline, which damaged customer trust and repeat orders.

The Sales team were selling, but not checking with Procurement about the availability of required resources and at what price. Sales did not check with the Production department about what capacity they had available in people and production space for new orders alongside existing orders already in production. The result was a backlog of orders and frustrated customers as agreed timescales slipped.

The Quality Director did not have sufficient people resource to check the quality of production as the backlog grew, and his team could only undertake so much checking. Because of this, some items were shipped in the hope that everything would work perfectly well. It did not.

The number of engineers who had to visit customer sites to investigate quality and reliability issues was rising fast, which ate further into profit margin and adversely impacted the trusting customer, who normally requested or demanded compensation.

My team at Summit researched the root causes of these issues and developed a leadership training programme focused on commercial responsibility and personal ownership. The standard we set was simple and memorable: right first time, on time, every time. Every department joined up, at the right time, for the right reasons, to maximise efficiency and productivity and protect profit margin.

And the programme included a heavy element of emotional intelligence skills development. That was not a nice-to-have add-on. Emotional intelligence skills development was central to the leadership programme's design.

What Effective Leadership Development Needs

Emotional Intelligence Is Not a "Soft Skill"

In my experience, one of the most important elements that conventional leadership training leaves out is emotional intelligence skills development.

Partly this happens because emotional intelligence is viewed, incorrectly, as a soft skill which is "nice to have" but not vital. It is also because there are very few recognised emotional intelligence experts who are accepted authorities in successfully applying EI in the leadership development arena. That absence of understanding leads easily to one of the most important learning subjects being easily overlooked or simply ignored.

That is a mistake. When technical experts become leaders, their success depends less on what they know and more on how they communicate, influence, listen, and build trust across departmental boundaries. Those are emotional intelligence capabilities, and they can be taught and developed.

When you evaluate training providers, look for a facilitator who can demonstrate how they apply emotional intelligence to leadership and business problems, not simply someone who lists it in a course outline.

Time, Spacing, and Immersion

The second thing effective leadership development needs is time. In the manufacturing programme, we spread five training days over 16 weeks rather than cramming them into a single day. Leaders need time to apply what they learn, run into real workplace challenges, and come back to refine their approach. My advice is to look beyond the number of training days and ask how participants will apply their learning between sessions, and how those commitments will be reviewed. More training days are not, by themselves, a guarantee of better leadership.

How to Choose Leadership Training Worth Your Budget

If you are the decision maker on leadership development, here is my practical checklist. Insist on the following:

Client testimonials specifically related to leadership development, from organisations you can verify.
Clarity on whether the programme is an off-the-shelf generic course, or one which will be customised to match your most important objectives and goals for your business.
Expert-led facilitation, not a generalist who knows a little about a lot of subjects.
A meeting with your facilitator before the programme, to ensure there is a good fit personally, not just expertise-wise.
Clarity on what pre-training communication will take place, such as a learning priority questionnaire for every participant.
Clarity on what post-training resources and support are available, such as a private online video course or a WhatsApp group to check in on every participant's progress.
Clear success criteria for how the learning will be proactively promoted and applied back in your workplace. Before the training begins, agree how you will measure progress against the specific problems you are aiming to solve, whether that is quality errors, missed delivery dates, or employee engagement and survey scores.
Learning linked to development commitments and performance appraisals, so success is measured on an ongoing basis.

That final point matters more than most people realise. Leadership training that is not connected to how people are managed, supported, and appraised afterwards will fade. Training that is connected becomes a system for developing leaders, not just an event.

The Bottom Line

Leadership training actually works when it is treated as a genuine development journey rather than a quick fix. Look for a customised, expert-led, emotional intelligence programme with real accountability before and after the training programme itself.

Buy against your business priorities, relevant client evidence and a credible plan for workplace application, not the polish of the sales pitch.

Find out more about customised leadership training courses call us on 0845 052 3701

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