“The leadership we need will not happen by chance. There needs to be ever-stronger purposeful support and development.”
This quote from Leading in Complexity: An Initial Enquiry in Tasmania highlights a concern familiar to many leadership scholars and practitioners: effective leadership does not simply emerge from good intentions or coincidence alone. It must be deliberately cultivated. Especially in the face of complex, fast-changing conditions, leadership requires strategic focus and sustained effort.
Why Invest in Leadership?
More than a desirable attribute, leadership may be a foundational condition for organisational performance. Even studies from several decades ago indicated that up to 45 percent of variability in organisational performance may be attributed to leadership (Day & Lord, 1988). Since the 1980s, numerous studies have found that leadership is correlated with, and in some cases causally related to, favourable outcomes for individuals, teams, and organisations. For example, more recent research has demonstrated that leadership is related to followers’ motives and task performance (Kehr et al., 2022; Zhang et al., 2022), higher levels of team performance (Miao et al., 2019), and organisational citizenship and culture (Karadag, 2015; Newman et al., 2017). While the exact nature of the relationship between leadership and performance outcomes may be debated, the general implication remains compelling: leadership matters. It affects not only what organisations do, but how they evolve, how they respond to uncertainty, and how they generate value for stakeholders.
And yet, leadership is not always given the attention it deserves. It is something organisations know they should do, but it is not always something they do well. A closer look reveals that the field of leadership development is somewhat fragmented, with competing theoretical models, limited agreement on definitions, and mixed evidence of impact.
Leader Development vs Leadership Development
Professor David Day introduced a critical distinction between leader development and leadership development (Day, 2000).
- Leader development focuses on individuals. It aims to enhance psychological or behavioural capacities such as resilience or sense making. It is analogous to building human capital.
- Leadership development, on the other hand, focuses on collectives. It seeks to develop relational capabilities, shared ways of working, and conditions that enable leadership to emerge across groups. This is more aligned with building social capital.
In practice, many programs that are referred to as “leadership development” only focus on developing individual leaders. They may involve workshops, coaching, or 360-degree feedback, but often stop short of addressing how leadership emerges across executive teams or complex systems such as organisations. This is more than a mere semantic issue. It speaks to the gap between what complex organisational environments may require and what many development programs claim to deliver.
The Evidence: Mixed but Promising
The academic literature on the effectiveness of management and leadership development is mixed (Avolio, Avey, & Quisenberry, 2010; Avolio, Reichard, Hannah, Walumbwa, & Chan, 2009; Burke & Day, 1986; Collins & Holton, 2004; Day & Sin, 2011; Lacerenza, Reyes, Marlow, Joseph, & Salas, 2017; Rosch, Ogolsky, & Stephens, 2017). Some programs show significant impact. Others do not. From my experience working in this space for over 25 years on a global scale, I have found this variability to be the norm.
There may be several reasons for this. Some development initiatives are based on theoretical models that have not been rigorously tested. Some rely on psychometric instruments that have not been subject to robust psychometric validation. Some focus on approaches that have not been consistently shown to foster leader or leadership development. Some include leaders that may not be ready to participate in rigorous development processes. And some target constructs that may be relatively fixed in adulthood and therefore less amenable to development.
It is critical to distinguish between attributes we may want to recruit for (because they are relatively stable) and attributes we can reasonably develop (because they are relatively malleable). Without this distinction, we risk designing programs that sound promising but fail to generate meaningful change.
Eight Questions for Designing Leader and Leadership Development Initiatives
Of course, there are any number of considerations that need to be taken into account when designing leader and leadership development initiatives. Notwithstanding this multitude of considerations, I often begin with a series of foundational questions when working with organisations to design development initiatives. These help ground the initiatives in strategic intent, the scientific literature on leader and leadership development, and may increase the likelihood of impact. Illustrative examples of these questions include:
- Who or what might be the focus of development efforts? This may include individual leaders, leadership collectives, GenAI-enabled processes, a combination.
- Which constructs are we trying to develop, and how do they relate to critical leadership outcomes? This may include prioritising constructs that have been shown to predict important leadership outcomes such as leader emergence and leader effectiveness, and de-prioritising constructs that have not. Leader emergence is defined as the process of emerging as a leader and exerting influence over others, and leader effectiveness is defined as the process of enacting leadership to contribute to favourable outcomes for others, teams, and organisations (Galvin, Badura, LePine, & LePine, 2024).
- How have we considered the developmental readiness of leaders and their organisations? This may include considering the extent to which leaders are ready, willing, and able to prioritise their development, and whether organisations have the cultural conditions that permit leaders to practice new ways of leading. For example, see Avolio and Hannah (2008) on the topic of developmental readiness.
- Which developmental approaches might we prioritise? This may include considering more traditional event-based programs, deliberate daily practices, and broader developmental systems. For further information on these three developmental approaches, please refer to my podcast with Professor David Day and Professor Katherine Daniell (link), and a Professor Day’s recent publication on developmental systems (Day & Dannhauser, 2024) (link).
- How might we determine whether leaders and leadership have developed through the course of the initiative? This may include longitudinal measurement approaches and inclusion of well-validated psychometric instruments. (PS – due to popular demand, I will soon be offering a short course for leaders and leadership practitioners on how to approach the measurement of leadership in more mature and rigorous ways. If you are interested in learning more, please get in touch!)
- How might we demonstrate broader impact on team and organisational outcomes? This may result in considering improvements in team functioning, organisational performance, or shareholder return alongside the specific leadership constructs targeted by the development initiative.
- In what ways might we harness the potential of GenAI? This might involve leveraging GenAI to streamline and augment leadership tasks such as decision-making, stakeholder analysis, or scenario planning. GenAI could also be used to personalise leaders’ developmental journeys by adapting content, feedback, or developmental activities.
- How might this project create opportunities for leadership researchers and practitioners to collaborate? This might include integrating rigorous research methods including such as psychometrics or longitudinal tracking into program design and evaluation. Collaboration might also involve embedding researchers into delivery teams to co-design and test interventions in real time, helping to bridge the gap between the science and practice of leader and leadership development.
These questions are not just useful reflective prompts. They reflect the kind of rigour that may be required to move the field forward. That is why some of these questions will form the foundation of several discussions at the upcoming Leadership Development Summit 2025, hosted by The Australian National University in collaboration with the Australian Rural Leaders Foundation, the Menzies Leadership Foundation, The Leadership Network, and the ANU Complexity Leadership Lab. The summit will serve as a platform to bridge research and practice, and to explore how we can collectively advance more mature and effective approaches to developing leaders and leadership in an era of increasing complexity.
A Call for Evidence-Informed Design
Leader and leadership development still has a long way to go before it can consistently deliver results and demonstrate a legitimate return on investment. But by considering the questions outlined above, and creating conditions for researchers and practitioners to collaborate, we may begin to lay the foundation for more robust approaches to development. These are not simple tasks. But they may be necessary if we want to shift the field from a series of hopeful programs to a rigorous, evidence-based field that results in real-world impact.
At the ANU Complexity Leadership Lab, these are precisely the challenges we are exploring. If you are involved in designing or leading development initiatives, or want to be part of this inquiry, we welcome your insights and collaboration.
At the Menzies Leadership Foundation, we recognise that leadership doesn’t happen by chance — it must be deliberately developed.
In a world shaped by complexity, uncertainty, and change, it’s no longer enough to focus solely on individuals. Leadership must become a shared capacity — one that’s cultivated across systems, relationships, and time.
Because the future doesn’t belong to those with the most confidence — it belongs to those who invest in leadership with purpose and rigour.
What does it look like to take leadership development seriously?
