Is your leadership development an event or a process?

How do we decide which training is best? And how do we know which one will have the impact we need?  

There is no doubt in my mind, at all levels of our organisations, people need training on how to lead. But first we need to ensure training is meaningful in our current workplaces. 

Leadership and Management.  Two words that that are often used interchangeably – and I question whether the definition really matters.  If you find yourself in a team with responsibilities for other people and outcomes or outputs, you likely need to be doing both and my question for most ‘team leaders’ and middle level ‘managers’, and even some executives up to and including those in a CEO or General Manager role, how many hours did you spend learning  and sharpening your manager/leadership craft? 

Think about how long it takes to become a nurse or a doctor. Years of training, practice, assessment, and feedback shape not only what they know but how they think. We would never expect someone to walk into an operating theatre without preparation. Yet in leadership, we often promote people into roles that require emotional intelligence, communication mastery, and the ability to motivate others. We often then offer a few hours of classroom training to prepare them. 

That’s not because organisations don’t care. It’s because leadership development has traditionally been treated as an event, not a process. But learning to lead is not a single moment; it’s a sustained practice that requires support, reflection, and feedback over time. 

Traditional leadership programs, including those such as an MBA which can be considered the pinnacle of business training, focus largely on the mechanics of business which are important skills.  Every team leader or manager of any kind needs to understand the mechanics and processes of management.  There are frameworks for everything, how to set goals, give feedback, run one-to-ones, manage time, and delegate effectively. Many of these tools are valuable, in fact essential. They help leaders understand the nuts and bolts of management, the scaffolding of structure that keeps teams organised. But with all this content and all this access, one question remains: why are we still struggling with effective

leadership? 

If you are accountable for another human’s actions you need to understand that we humans are messy, emotive and unpredictable therefore workplaces are emotionally messy. No amount of slide decks or clever acronyms can tidy that up. Emotions drive people and people drive productivity. 

Each of us bring a myriad of past lived experiences and different lenses to work and then every day, our brains are bombarded by information and ‘noise’. Managing this volume of cognitive load is challenging. When our amygdala fires when we just can’t understand why someone is behaving differently to us, and our brains are flooded by cortisol which shuts down problem solving, curiosity and empathy. Dopamine and serotonin levels swing with the rhythms of reward and stress. We’re overwhelmed by AI alerts, endless emails, and competing demands that make focus and curiosity almost impossible, and we don’t even know this is happening or our part to play! 

This is the heart of modern leadership: managing our internal world so we can lead well in the external one. And that’s something traditional training rarely touches. Training gives us the knowledge but not the practice, reflection, and accountability that turn knowledge into behaviour. 

That’s where coaching makes the difference. Coaching takes what’s learned in training and helps leaders apply it in the real, unpredictable world of human emotion and workplace complexity. It creates a space for pause, for self-awareness, for sense-making. It helps people notice their triggers, challenge their assumptions, and experiment with new responses. 

This is becoming more evident with the failure of traditional leadership training.  It is essential, but it can only take us so far.  If we want to become impactful in our leadership style which ultimately will help us to deliver results, we need to change how we are approaching our training.   

The research is clear. Training alone produces modest results a short burst of enthusiasm, a few good ideas. But when coaching is integrated, performance and productivity rise dramatically. Leaders begin to shift not just what they do, but how they think. They learn to balance confidence with curiosity, direction with empathy, and structure with flexibility. They build the muscle memory of emotional regulation and the courage to stay calm when others can’t. 

At Discretionary Efforts, this is where we focus our work, at the intersection of psychology and practice, where behaviour change actually happens. We don’t teach leadership as a checklist of competencies. We help people understand the human systems that drive them including their emotions, habits, and interactions. We support them to lead consciously in a world that constantly tests their bandwidth.

Leadership today isn’t about knowing more, it’s about developing the self-awareness, resilience, and emotional agility to stay steady when everything around you shifts. And that takes time, coaching, and a willingness to keep learning long after the workshop ends.