Why Leadership Development Fades After the Workshop
“People don’t resist change. They resist being changed.”
There’s a familiar moment at the end of a really good leadership workshop.
People are energized. They’ve had a few insights. Someone has filled several pages of a workbook. A leader has identified a conversation she needs to have differently. Another has realized he’s been holding onto work he should have delegated months ago.
Everyone leaves with good intentions.
And then Monday happens.
The inbox is full. Someone calls in sick. A project is behind. There’s a difficult employee situation waiting. The meeting schedule hasn’t changed just because you spent Thursday afternoon talking about becoming a better leader.
Slowly, the insight that felt so clear in the room gets absorbed back into the way work has always been done.
This is one of the central challenges of leadership development:
Learning something and leading differently because of it are not the same thing.
The research has a name for this: training transfer—the extent to which people actually apply what they learned once they’re back in their everyday work.
And if you want leadership development to last, what happens after the workshop matters just as much as what happens inside it.
IS YOUR LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT STICKING?A quick check-in
1. THE MEMORY
Can you still name what you wanted to do differently?
2. THE PRACTICE
Have you actually tried it in your day-to-day work?
3. THE FEEDBACK
Do you know whether others are noticing a difference?
4. THE REFLECTION
Have you stopped to consider what’s working—and what isn’t?
5. THE FOLLOW-THROUGH
What are you still intentionally practicing?The Workshop Usually Isn’t the Problem
I facilitate leadership workshops, so I’m certainly not going to tell you workshops don’t work.
They can.
In fact, a large meta-analysis of 335 independent samples published in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that leadership training produced meaningful improvements in learning, transfer to the job, and organizational results. The researchers also found that how leadership development is designed matters. Needs analysis, feedback, multiple delivery methods—particularly opportunities to practice—and spacing development over time were among the factors associated with stronger outcomes.
In other words, the takeaway isn’t that leadership workshops fail.
It’s that we sometimes ask a workshop to do a leadership development job it was never designed to do by itself.
A workshop can introduce an idea, give leaders language for something they’ve been experiencing but haven’t been able to name, and create space for reflection. It can teach and practice a skill. It can surface an important insight.
But eventually, that leader has to walk back into the actual conditions in which they lead.
That’s where the development work gets much harder.
Why Leadership Development Fades
There isn’t one reason a leader leaves a development experience with every intention of changing and finds herself doing exactly the same thing three weeks later.
Usually, several things are happening at once.
1. Insight feels a lot like change.
There’s something really satisfying about finally understanding a pattern.
That’s why I keep taking the work back instead of delegating it.
That’s what happens to me during conflict.
That’s why my team stops bringing me ideas.
Recognition — and validation — matters. I use assessments, reflection, facilitated conversations, and coaching precisely because awareness can give us a place to start.
But awareness is the beginning of development—not evidence that development has happened.
A leader can understand perfectly well that she needs to delegate more and still take over the next important project. She can recognize that she avoids difficult conversations and still postpone Friday’s conversation until next week. She can know she needs to listen differently and still start formulating her response halfway through an employee’s sentence.
Knowing what you do is different from interrupting yourself while you’re doing it.
That’s the territory where leadership development becomes practice.
2. Leaders return to the same environment.
We sometimes treat leadership development as though the individual leader is the only variable.
Send the leader to training. Develop the leader. Send the improved leader back.
Except that leader returns to a system. A complex system — and one that might not always encourage the behavior or skill the leader is developing.
The same workload is waiting. The same norms are operating. The same people have expectations of her. The same incentives reward certain behaviors. And the same pressures make familiar leadership habits efficient.
That environment matters.
A 2024 systematic review of soft-skills training transfer examined 91 studies and identified 69 different factors associated with whether people actually apply interpersonal and professional skills at work. Management support was the most frequently studied factor, followed by motivation to transfer and feedback or debriefing. The researchers ultimately organized the factors into four broad areas: 1) capability, 2) opportunity, 3) motivation, and 4) training.
That’s an important shift in thinking.
Instead of asking only:
Did we provide good leadership development?
We also need to ask:
What will make it possible for leaders to apply what they’re learning?
3. The new behavior is usually less efficient—at first.
Imagine a leader who has built a career on being the person who can fix things.
She makes decisions quickly. People bring her problems because she knows the answer. When something important is at risk, she steps in.
Then she attends leadership development and recognizes that her team needs more ownership. She decides she’s going to coach her direct reports rather than immediately solve the problems they’re running into.
And then someone walks into her office with a problem she could fix in three minutes.
Asking a few questions will take longer. Letting the employee wrestle with it feels inefficient. Allowing someone else to arrive at a solution she wouldn’t have chosen requires restraint.
The old behavior has years of practice behind it.
The new behavior doesn’t.
So under pressure, it isn’t surprising that leaders revert to what is familiar. Development requires enough practice for a different response to become available when the leader is busy, frustrated, uncertain, or moving fast.
That’s difficult to accomplish in a single event.
4. Leaders have to translate general principles into their specific context.
“Delegate more.”
“Give better feedback.”
“Set clearer boundaries.”
“Communicate your vision.”
“Have the difficult conversation.”
All reasonable leadership advice. But none of it tells a particular leader what to do at 2:00 Tuesday afternoon with his unique team dynamics and evolving role.
What should I delegate—and to whom?
How much context does this employee need from me?
What boundary can I reasonably set given the expectations of my role?
How do I give this feedback when the person receiving it is already discouraged?
How direct should I be with a peer when I don’t actually have authority over the situation?
This is where leadership development moves fromgeneral concept to contextual interpretation.
A framework can give leaders a starting point. They still have to determine what it means in the realities of their role, team, organization, personality, authority, and circumstances.
A small but particularly interesting long-term study of leadership development participants interviewed leaders at least two years after they completed leadership development courses. Among the themes associated with maintaining what they had learned were personalized feedback, opportunities to use new knowledge and skills at work, feedback from employees, management support, and continued reflection.
That last piece—reflection—is easy to underestimate. Leaders need opportunities not only to try something new, but to make sense of what happened when they tried it.
Turn Leadership Learning into Leadership Practice
If the goal is lasting development, I’d think beyond the workshop itself.
Not necessarily by adding more content. Often, leaders don’t need another model. They need help doing something with the one they already learned.
That might mean practice—opportunities to try the behavior while it’s still new and permission not to execute it perfectly. It might mean feedback that helps leaders see the gap between what they intended and how their leadership was actually experienced.
It also means reflection: creating space to notice what happened when they tried something differently. And it means application, connecting development to real decisions, conversations, and challenges rather than leaving it in hypothetical leadership situations.
Repetition matters, too. Instead of continually introducing something new, organizations can return to a few important leadership behaviors over time. And the environment has to support the change. If the organization quietly rewards the exact behavior it is asking a leader to stop, even excellent development has an uphill climb.
There’s some especially interesting research here. In a study of leaders participating in global leadership development programs, researchers looked at what happened after formal training. They found that both feedback-seeking and reflection helped leaders transfer their learning back to work—and transfer was highest when leaders engaged in both.
I think that finding gets at something important about development.
It isn’t simply:
Learn → Do
It’s much closer to:
Learn → Try → Reflect → Get Feedback → Adjust → Try again
And that takes us well beyond what can happen during a single workshop.
How Coaching Bridges Learning and Leading
This is one of the reasons I see leadership coaching and leadership training as complementary rather than interchangeable.
Training workshops can create a shared learning experience, introduce frameworks, build skills, and give leaders common language. Leadership coaching provides something different: ongoing space to apply that learning to the decisions, relationships, and challenges a leader is navigating in real time.
Coaching creates a different kind of learning. It allows a leader to bring the framework into the specifics of what happened this week.
I tried delegating this, and it didn’t go the way I expected.
I need to give feedback to someone who is technically performing well but creating problems on the team.
I know I need to stop solving everything, but I’m not sure when stepping in is actually the right leadership decision.
I handled that conversation differently. Here’s what happened.
Those are not problems that necessarily need another leadership model. They need space for interpretation.
A coach can help a leader slow the experience down, examine what happened, challenge an assumption, consider another response, and decide what to practice next.
The point isn’t to keep leaders perpetually dependent on development. It’s to help them become increasingly intentional about how they learn from their own leadership experience.
That’s a very different outcome from remembering what was on slide 37.
A leadership coach can help a leader slow the experience down, examine what happened, challenge an assumption, consider another response, and decide what to practice next.
If you’re considering how coaching, training, or a combination of the two could support the leaders in your organization, you can learn more about my leadership coaching and development work.
FAQs about Leadership Development
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Learning a leadership concept and applying it consistently at work are different processes. Research on training transfer suggests that what happens after training matters, including opportunities to practice, motivation to apply the learning, feedback and debriefing, management support, and the conditions of the work environment.
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Yes. A large meta-analysis found that leadership training produced improvements in learning, transfer, and organizational results. The effectiveness varied based on how the training was designed and delivered, with factors such as needs analysis, feedback, practice, and spaced sessions associated with stronger outcomes.
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Think beyond the development event itself. Give leaders opportunities to practice new behaviors, seek and receive feedback, reflect on what happened, apply learning to current challenges, and revisit important skills over time. Research with leadership-development participants has found both feedback-seeking and reflection to be important to transferring formal learning into the workplace.
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Leadership coaching gives leaders ongoing space to apply what they’re learning to their own decisions, relationships, challenges, and goals. Rather than simply introducing another framework, coaching can help a leader interpret an experience, experiment with a new behavior, reflect on what happened, and decide what to do differently next time.
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Not necessarily. They serve different purposes and can work particularly well together. Workshops can provide shared concepts, skills, experiences, and language. Coaching can provide individualized space for application, reflection, feedback, and continued development.
Making Leadership Development Last
I don’t think we need to give up on leadership workshops.
We need to stop expecting the workshop to carry the entire weight of development.
A great workshop can create the moment when something clicks. But lasting leadership development happens in the hundreds of moments that come afterward: the next time a leader chooses to ask instead of tell; the next time she gives the feedback instead of postponing it; the next time he lets someone else solve the problem; the next time a difficult situation triggers an old instinct and the leader notices it soon enough to choose something different.
The workshop can start the learning. What leaders practice afterward is what turns that learning into the way they lead.
That’s where ongoing leadership coaching can make a difference. It gives leaders a place to bring those real moments—the decisions, conversations, patterns, and challenges they’re navigating right now—and turn them into opportunities to practice a different way of leading.
If you’re looking for leadership development that goes beyond a one-time workshop, learn more about my leadership coaching.
Or schedule a free consultation and tell me a little about your leadership development needs. We can talk through what's happening, what you'd like to accomplish, and which approach might be the best fit.
Dr. Bethany Peters is a Professional Certified Coach (PCC) and leadership expert who helps individuals, teams, and organizations grow through leadership coaching, executive development, team facilitation, and evidence-based assessments. Whether she's coaching one-on-one or leading a workshop, Bethany creates practical, engaging experiences that help people communicate better, lead with confidence, and create lasting change.
