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What Should a Leadership Program Include?
What Should a Leadership Program Include? Five Things to Get Right Before You Buy
A leadership development program should include five things: a clear link to what your organisation needs its leaders to do differently, content matched to the level of the people in the room, practice on real work between sessions, support from each participant’s own manager, and a way of checking whether behaviour changed. A program that has the first four and skips the fifth can’t show it worked. One built from a list of popular topics, with none of the five, is a set of good days out.
Key Takeaways
What Problem Is the Program Meant to Solve?
Start here. Every other decision depends on it. “Our leaders need development” isn’t a problem statement. “Our new team leaders were promoted for technical skill and are avoiding performance conversations” is one. So is “our senior team makes decisions in silos and projects stall between departments”.
The starting point for any program design
The quickest way to get to that sentence is a short needs analysis: talk to the people who manage the participants, look at engagement or exit data if you have it, and ask a handful of participants what gets in their way. Our step-by-step guide to training needs analysis walks through the process. It doesn’t need to be a large project, just enough evidence that the program is aimed at something specific.
If the analysis shows the problem is a broken process, unclear roles or a workload nobody could carry, training won’t fix it.
Who Is the Program For?
A first-time supervisor and a general manager need different things, and putting them in the same room usually serves neither. Most programs sort participants into three broad levels.
| Level | What they usually need | Example Essemy workshop |
|---|---|---|
| Emerging leaders and new managers | Getting work done through other people: delegating, setting expectations, giving feedback, the first difficult conversation | Delivering Through Others: How to Delegate Successfully |
| Experienced managers | Performance and accountability across a whole team, influencing peers, leading change they didn’t choose | Performance and Accountability for Leaders |
| Senior leaders and executives | Judgement more than skills: strategy, complex decisions, and how their own behaviour sets the tone | Thriving in Complexity: Leadership in a VUCA World |
Mixed-level cohorts can work for one purpose: getting a leadership group to agree how it will operate together. For skill building, group by level.
What Content Should a Leadership Program Cover?
Less than you might think. Programs that try to cover every leadership model leave participants with notes and no new habits. Pick the three or four capabilities your needs analysis pointed to and go deep on those.
For most Australian organisations, the list draws from a fairly stable set: communication and feedback, delegation, performance and accountability conversations, leading through change, wellbeing and psychosocial risk (a duty employers carry under work health and safety law, and one managers deliver day to day), and self-awareness. A module like Mastering Communication Skills for Leaders shows up in so many programs because feedback and difficult conversations come up at every level.
Ask any provider to show you the outcomes for each module, written as things a participant will be able to do. “Understand leadership styles” is a topic. “Hold a structured accountability conversation with an underperforming team member” is an outcome you can observe.
What Is the 70-20-10 Rule for Leadership Development?
The 70-20-10 rule says leaders learn roughly 70 per cent from challenging experiences on the job, 20 per cent from other people (managers, mentors, peers) and 10 per cent from formal training. It comes from research at the Center for Creative Leadership in the 1980s, which asked successful executives what had shaped them, and was later popularised by Michael Lombardo and Robert Eichinger.
Treat the numbers as a rule of thumb, not a measurement. The point that holds up is this: a workshop on its own changes very little. What happens between sessions does the work. For a buyer, that means the program should include more than the training days. Look for:
- a workplace task after each session, applied to the participant’s own team
- a short briefing for participants’ managers, so they know what to look for and how to follow up
- peer groups or coaching that keep people practising once the workshops end
How Long Should a Leadership Development Program Run?
Long enough for people to practise and come back. A single day can raise awareness or teach one specific skill well. Changing how someone leads takes repetition, so most programs aimed at behaviour change run over several months, with sessions spaced a few weeks apart and work-based tasks in between.
A common shape for a new manager cohort is four to six half-day or full-day sessions across three to six months. Senior programs are often shorter in contact hours and longer in elapsed time, with coaching in the gaps.
If a provider can’t explain why their program runs the length it does, ask. The answer should come from the practice built in between sessions, not from a standard brochure format.
How Will You Know If It Worked?
Agree on this before the program starts, not after. Satisfaction scores on the day tell you whether people enjoyed the session. They don’t tell you whether anything changed.
Better measures are the ones tied to the original problem. If the issue was avoided performance conversations, check whether those conversations are now happening, through the participants’ own managers or a short pulse survey of their teams at three and six months. If the issue was engagement, compare team results before and after. A 360-degree check before and after works well for senior cohorts.
Two or three measures you will actually collect beat a scorecard nobody fills in.
Should the Program Be Off the Shelf or Built for You?
Off-the-shelf programs are faster to start and cost less to set up. They suit small groups, open enrolments, and common needs like new manager basics. A program built for your organisation takes longer to design but uses your scenarios, your language and your priorities. That makes the work-based practice easier to transfer.
Many organisations end up between the two: proven workshops as the building blocks, put in the order their needs analysis suggests and delivered on site to their own people. That’s how Essemy approaches it. Our leadership and management training page lists the programs by level and explains how a program is built after an initial discovery call.
A Short Checklist Before You Choose
- Can you state the problem the program solves in one sentence?
- Are participants grouped by level, with content to match?
- Is every module written as observable outcomes?
- Is there practice between sessions, and do managers have a role?
- Have you agreed two or three measures, and when you will collect them?
- Do the facilitators have experience leading teams, not only teaching about it?
If you can tick all six, you have a program that can show its value. If you’re still working out the first one, a conversation with one of the Essemy team can help you get there, or you can ask Athena, our AI learning assistant.
Frequently Asked Questions