Outmoded and Best Practices in High-Potential Leadership Development

The need to develop the next generation of high-potential leaders has never been more critical than in today's turbulent, rapidly evolving business landscape. Organizations face unprecedented complexities driven by digital transformation, rapid technological advancements such as artificial intelligence and automation, evolving workforce demographics, and increasingly diverse global markets.

This complex environment demands leadership development approaches that not only build critical skills but are also strategically aligned, agile, and capable of demonstrating measurable returns on investment. Forward-thinking organizations must critically evaluate outdated practices and adopt advanced strategies to foster leaders who can drive sustained growth and innovation.

In this article, I examine five outmoded leadership development approaches and five evidence-based practices that drive results. I also highlight technological innovations transforming leadership development notably digital twins, organizational network analysis and predictive analytics.

Outmoded Approaches in Leadership Development

Although they make substantial investments, many organizations continue to use leadership development practices that consistently underdeliver. These approaches persist due to institutional inertia and inadequate evaluation, reflecting fundamental misunderstandings of adult learning and behavior change. By identifying these counterproductive methods, organizations can greatly enhance the effectiveness of their leadership initiatives and achieve better returns on talent investments.

Programs That Aren't Based on Business Priorities

When leadership development operates as an isolated initiative rather than a strategic business priority, it loses both influence and impact. The Center for Creative Leadership’s recent research highlights significant gaps between leadership training and actual business priorities.[1] Programs disconnected from current business challenges or transformation efforts typically lack executive support and sustainable momentum.

Consider a company launching a leadership program focused on traditional competencies like delegation and feedback while simultaneously undergoing digital transformation, which requires fundamentally different leadership capabilities. Neither executives nor participants see the program as relevant to pressing needs, and support quickly erodes.

Without integration into business strategy, leadership development becomes an isolated intervention. It is also often among the first things cut during budget constraints. The most effective programs serve dual purposes: developing leader capabilities while simultaneously addressing critical business challenges.

The One-and-Done Training Event

Perhaps the most pervasive and least effective approach is the standalone leadership workshop without proper follow-through. These isolated events might satisfy compliance requirements but fail to create lasting behavioral change. Studies repeatedly confirm that without reinforcement, learners typically forget over 70% of new material within days, and over 90% within a month.[2]

When leaders return to high-pressure environments after training, they immediately face the gravitational pull of established habits and team expectations. Without structured opportunities to practice new behaviors, receive feedback, and reflect on application, even compelling workshop content quickly fades from memory.

These one-off training events may check a compliance box but do not create effective leaders in practice, as Beer et al. (2016) documented.[3] Without coaching, action planning, or workplace application, participants inevitably revert to habitual behaviors rather than implementing new approaches.

The most effective organizations have moved beyond this event-based mindset to create continuous development journeys with built-in application and accountability.

Traditional In-person or Virtual Lectures

Another outdated method is the traditional in-person or virtual approach dominated by lectures and conceptual frameworks. While conceptual knowledge has its place, today's high-potential leaders need more than academic presentations. They require interactive, hands-on experiences that mirror real-world challenges.

Meta-analyses in educational research consistently demonstrate that active learning methods significantly outperform lecture-only formats, delivering greater retention, engagement, and practical skill transfer. This isn’t surprising. Leadership is fundamentally a practice, not merely knowledge. Leaders must learn how to lead and theory without context fails to stick.

The most effective programs limit conceptual content to digestible segments interspersed with discussion, application exercises, and peer feedback. Interactive experiences that reflect daily leadership challenges are far more effective for developing actual leadership capabilities.

Generic Programs

One-size-fits-all leadership programs consistently underperform in today's diverse business environment. Research by DDI confirmed that most companies still fail to customize development experiences to participants' specific leadership needs.[4]

This standardized approach reflects an outdated assumption that leadership development simply requires exposing all participants to the same core concepts. It fails to recognize that effective development must meet leaders where they are and address their specific challenges.

Today's high-potential employees expect and respond to personalization. When forced through generic programs that ignore their specific strengths, weaknesses, and aspirations, promising leaders often disengage or seek growth opportunities elsewhere.

Organizations that excel at developing leaders have moved toward modular, adaptive approaches that maintain consistent principles while allowing customization. Personalized, modular programs yield higher satisfaction and behavior change scores, especially when aligned with succession goals.

Programs Without Measurement or Accountability

Finally, programs that lack clear success metrics, post-program measurement, or accountability mechanisms fail to justify their investment. Surveys consistently show fewer than half of organizations track meaningful leadership development outcomes beyond participant satisfaction surveys.

Many organizations limit their evaluation to participant satisfaction surveys, the infamous "smile sheets" completed at a program's conclusion. While satisfaction matters, it provides little insight into behavioral change or business impact. Organizations that don't measure change via promotion rates, behavioral shifts, or team performance struggle to validate ROI.

Forward-thinking companies have moved toward multi-dimensional measurement that captures both individual development and organizational impact. They establish clear baseline metrics before development begins, track progress through mixed quantitative and qualitative measures, and follow participants longitudinally to assess sustained change and business results.

By addressing these five common shortcomings- strategic disconnection, one-off events, lecture-heavy formats, generic programming, and insufficient measurement- organizations can transform their leadership development from compliance-oriented activities to strategic initiatives that build leadership capability and drive business performance.

Best Practices That Drive Measurable Results

Forward-thinking organizations have pioneered leadership development approaches that consistently deliver substantial returns on investment. These practices reflect a sophisticated understanding of adult learning, behavioral change, and organizational impact. By embracing integrated experiences, multiple reinforcing methodologies, blended delivery models, balanced expertise, structured yet flexible formats, organizations create leadership development initiatives that transform individual capabilities while simultaneously advancing strategic priorities and building competitive advantage.

Integrated Development Journeys

Best-in-class high-potential programs blend multiple learning modalities to create holistic development journeys. Leading organizations recognize that comprehensive leadership growth requires diverse, interconnected learning experiences rather than relying on singular approaches. They combine 360° assessments and executive coaching with formal business education and on-the-job stretch assignments. This integrated approach acknowledges a fundamental truth: no single intervention is sufficient for leadership development. Classroom learning builds knowledge, coaching develops self-awareness, and stretch assignments build practical capability. The deliberate combination and sequencing of these experiences creates transformative growth.

Multiple, Reinforcing Methodologies

Effective leadership development requires a diverse methodological toolkit that combines both innovative technologies and proven approaches. Conceptual introductions serve as essential foundations, providing leaders with theoretical frameworks and mental models that contextualize leadership challenges within broader organizational and social systems. These frameworks, ranging from adaptive leadership to transformational leadership models, offer critical cognitive scaffolding that helps leaders interpret complex situations and make principled decisions.

Coaching relationships, both peer-based and individual, create powerful spaces for reflection, feedback, and personalized development. Traditional coaching is increasingly augmented by AI-supported coaching systems that provide on-demand guidance, track developmental progress, and offer evidence-based recommendations tailored to individual leadership styles and challenges. These AI coaches can complement human coaching relationships by providing consistent support between sessions and offering data-driven insights that human coaches might miss.

Action learning methodologies bridge the gap between theory and practice by immersing leaders in real-world challenges with meaningful stakes. These approaches, which include stretch assignments, cross-functional projects, and strategic initiatives, create authentic contexts for applying new skills while delivering tangible value to the organization. Action learning is particularly effective when paired with reflective practices and community support that help leaders extract maximum developmental value from their experiences.

Blended Delivery Models

Leading organizations increasingly leverage hybrid delivery models balancing in-person sessions with virtual components. This approach maximizes the unique benefits of each format: in-person for deep networking, cultural immersion, and intensive collaboration; virtual for scale, accessibility, and ongoing reinforcement.

Studies show that virtual leadership training can be as effective as in-person training in building skills, though participants still value face-to-face connections. In-person sessions remain irreplaceable for building trust, facilitating networking, and enabling intensive collaborative work, creating the psychological safety essential for transformative development.

Between these anchor events, virtual components extend the learning journey and enable consistent application. Digital platforms support ongoing coaching, peer collaboration, and learning reinforcement without requiring participants to step away from operational responsibilities.

The key is designing each component intentionally rather than simply moving traditional formats online, leveraging technology for scale and personalization while including periodic in-person touchpoints for relationship-building.

External Expertise Balanced with Internal Leadership

High-impact programs use a mix of external and internal facilitators. External experts (business school faculty, coaching consultants) bring new perspectives and unbiased coaching, while internal senior leaders serve as mentors, teachers, and role models grounded in the company's context.

External experts contribute subject matter expertise not available internally, cross-industry perspectives, and the psychological safety of confidential conversations. However, external perspectives alone risk creating development that feels disconnected from organizational realities.

Internal senior leaders play a vital complementary role, simultaneously signaling the strategic importance of talent development, ensuring content relevance to specific business challenges, and creating visibility opportunities for rising leaders.

The most sophisticated programs thoughtfully sequence these contributions, using external specialists for cutting-edge content and confidential coaching while engaging internal executives to reinforce culture and signal top-level commitment.

Structured Yet Flexible Formats

Effective programs typically span 6-12 months with sequenced phases: assessment and feedback to identify development needs; formal learning modules; experiential projects or stretch assignments; ongoing coaching/mentoring; and a capstone presentation or measurable outcome.

The journey begins with thorough assessment incorporating 360-degree feedback, psychometric instruments, and stakeholder interviews to establish a baseline of each leader's strengths and development needs. This diagnosis informs a personalized development plan prioritizing high-impact growth areas.

The middle phase combines formal learning with application opportunities through business-critical projects or stretch assignments, providing a laboratory for practicing new behaviors and translating conceptual learning into practical leadership capability.

Throughout this process, coaching and mentoring provide the support, feedback, and accountability necessary to sustain behavioral change. The journey culminates in an integration activity. This could be a capstone presentation, a review of learning outcomes, or transition into a role leveraging newly developed capabilities.

For sustained growth, some companies extend development through multi-year rotations. The most effective programs maintain enough structural consistency to ensure quality while building in flexibility to address individual needs.

By embracing these five best practices - integrated journeys, blended delivery, digital ecosystems, balanced expertise, and structured yet flexible formats - organizations transform leadership development from an expense into a strategic investment that builds both individual capability and organizational competitive advantage.

Innovations in Leadership Development

Today, leadership development is evolving through data-driven innovations. There is a wide and fascinating range of technologies, such as immersive VR experiences, that are still in development. However, there are three advances – leadership digital twins, organizational network analysis (ONA), and predictive leadership analytics – that already are changing how organizations cultivate and support leaders. These technologies enable companies to create virtual leadership models, map complex organizational relationships, and forecast leadership potential with unprecedented accuracy.

The evidence from academic research and corporate implementation demonstrates that these innovations deliver tangible benefits when properly deployed. Leadership digital twins provide personalized development pathways, ONA reveals hidden influence networks that formal hierarchies miss, and predictive analytics identifies emerging leaders before they become visible through conventional metrics. Together, these tools represent a fundamental shift from intuition-based to evidence-based leadership development, helping organizations build more resilient and adaptive leadership pipelines in an increasingly complex business environment.

Leadership Digital Twins

A leadership digital twin is essentially a virtual, data-driven replica of an individual leader. It aggregates data from an employee’s career experiences, training, performance, and other attributes to create a comprehensive digital profile. By using simulation and machine learning, this “digital human twin” can model a leader’s behavior and development, providing personalized insights and recommendations for growth.

For example, Woodside Energy partnered with the UNSW Business Insights Institute to build digital twins of its leaders, using employee data to create a predictive, evidence-based analytical model of leader development.[5] This project produced virtual profiles for personalized employee development and career growth planning. In practice, such a system allows organizations to run “what-if” scenarios on leadership decisions and tailor development strategies to each individual. Early implementations in industry (including a pilot in the pharmaceutical sector, according to researchers) indicate that digital twin technology can deliver hyper-personalized coaching and training content by mirroring each leader’s strengths and gaps. While still emerging, leadership digital twins show promise in scaling personalized leadership development through data and simulation.

Organizational Network Analysis

Organizational network analysis (ONA) is a technique that maps and analyzes the informal relationships and collaboration patterns among people in an organization. Rather than looking only at hierarchical org charts, ONA uses communication data (e.g. email, meetings, advice-seeking) to reveal how information and influence actually flow. This can identify hidden influencers, silos, and collaboration gaps that impact leadership effectiveness and team performance.

Another application is in onboarding future leaders: Microsoft researchers analyzed the communication networks of over 10,000 new employees during their first months at the company.[6] They found that new hires’ networks remained significantly smaller and less diverse than those of tenured employees even after six months on the job. This insight, made possible by ONA, alerted leadership to the integration challenges of remote and hybrid onboarding. In response, leaders can intervene with mentorship or structure team interactions to help newcomers build connections. These examples illustrate ONA’s power as a leadership development tool – by making the invisible social structure visible, it enables data-informed interventions (coaching, team restructuring, etc.) to strengthen collaboration and identify emergent leaders in the network.

Predictive Leadership Analytics

Predictive leadership analytics refers to using advanced analytics (statistical models, machine learning) to forecast outcomes related to leadership and talent, so that organizations can make proactive, evidence-based decisions. Companies are increasingly leveraging their “people data” to predict things like who the next successful leaders might be, which teams may underperform, or which valued employees are at risk of leaving. For instance, Deloitte has developed a Leadership Development Modeler tool that mines workforce data to identify emerging leaders so they can be fast-tracked for next-level roles.[7] This kind of model analyzes indicators of potential (such as project success, network centrality, and peer feedback) to flag high-potential talent for leadership development programs.

Predictive analytics is also being used to retain and optimize current leadership talent. One well-documented example comes from Hewlett-Packard (HP), an early adopter of HR analytics. Based on two years of workforce data, HP’s data scientists built a “Flight Risk” algorithm that computed a score for each employee’s likelihood of quitting.[8] The model revealed key predictors of attrition (for example, receiving a promotion without a significant pay increase sharply raised quit risk) and gave managers an early warning system to intervene. According to independent analysis, HP’s predictive attrition program enabled targeted retention efforts that saved an estimated $300 million by preventing unwanted talent loss.

Google similarly applies predictive analytics in its people operations; the company found that sales employees who fail to earn a promotion within four years are far more likely to leave, an insight that prompted changes in how Google manages promotions and career progression. These cases show how predictive models can inform succession planning, leadership training investments, and retention strategies. By anticipating future outcomes – whether identifying who could thrive in bigger roles or pinpointing which managers might need support – organizations can move from reactive to proactive leadership development.

Moving Forward

As you evaluate your organization's approach to high-potential leadership development, critically assess whether your current methods reflect contemporary understanding of leadership growth or remain anchored in outdated assumptions. Are your initiatives truly integrated with business strategy and talent management processes, or do they operate as isolated events disconnected from organizational priorities? Do your development pathways honor the unique starting points of emerging leaders or force everyone through identical experiences regardless of need?

Consider whether you've progressed beyond event-based training to create sustained learning journeys with clear accountability. Have you implemented feedback mechanisms measuring meaningful outcomes in terms of promotion rates, performance improvements, business impact that demonstrate tangible returns on your development investment?

By retiring outdated approaches and embracing integrated, personalized, measurement-focused practices enriched by thoughtful digital transformation, you can elevate leadership development from a questionable expense to a powerful strategic advantage. Organizations that excel at developing their next generation of leaders create a competitive edge that competitors find difficult to replicate—building not just better leaders, but stronger organizations capable of navigating future challenges.

References

1.        Center for Creative Leadership (2025) “The Leadership Gap: How to Fix What Your Organization Lacks”  https://www.ccl.org/articles/leading-effectively-articles/leadership-gap-what-you-still-need/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

2.        Kohn, A. (2014) “Brain Science: The Forgetting Curve–the Dirty Secret of Corporate Training “https://www.learningguild.com/articles/1379/brain-science-the-forgetting-curvethe-dirty-secret-of-corporate-training

3.        Beer, M., Finnström, M., & Schrader, D. (2016). Why Leadership Training Fails—and What to Do About It. Harvard Business Review, 94(10), 50–57.  https://hbr.org/2016/10/why-leadership-training-fails-and-what-to-do-about-it

4.        Development Dimensions International (DDI). (2018). Global Leadership Forecast 2018.  https://www.ddiworld.com/research/global-leadership-forecast-2018

5.     University of New South Wales, “Human Digital Twins for Leaders” https://www.businessinsights.unsw.edu.au/human-digital-twin-leaders

6.     Microsoft, “Large-Scale Analysis of New Employee Network Dynamics https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/large-scale-analysis-of-new-employee-network-dynamics/

7.     Deloitte, “Workforce Intelligence: Making smarter decisions about talent” https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/us/Documents/process-and-operations/us-cons-workforce-intelligence-022210%20.pdf

8.      Academic to Innovate HR, “Predictive Analytics in Human Resources: Tutorial and 7 case studies” https://www.aihr.com/blog/predictive-analytics-human-resources/