HR and L&D leaders
How do we run leadership development on a small budget?
Do less and do it better. The most common mistake in under-resourced leadership development is spreading the budget across too many things — a workshop here, an online module there, a speaker at a team day — with no coherent thread connecting them. None of it sticks because none of it is reinforced. A small budget spent on one thing, done well and followed through, produces more change than the same budget distributed across six initiatives.
Framework: Brian Hartzer’s Leadership Star · Practices: All five practices
The highest-return activities on a small budget
A book and a structured discussion. A book for your management cohort, run as three structured sessions with the questions prepared well and the senior leader in the room, costs almost nothing and produces genuine conversations that formal programmes rarely match.
Peer learning groups. Managers talking honestly to each other about what’s hard, facilitated well, requires very little budget and produces a lot of value. The facilitation matters — undirected peer sessions drift quickly. But this is a skill that develops, and the infrastructure required is minimal.
Senior leader time. The most valuable leadership development resource most organisations have is their senior leaders’ attention. A CEO or Group Executive who spends an hour with a cohort of new managers, sharing genuine experience and taking real questions, is worth more than most external programmes. This costs money only in opportunity cost — and often produces significant intangible returns in trust and engagement.
Where judgment matters
Budget is one constraint. Attention and follow-through are often bigger ones. A programme that the senior leadership team treats as genuinely important and follows up on produces more change than one that’s better designed but treated as an HR initiative.
Of your current leadership development spend, how much goes to activities where the senior leader is actively involved — and how much goes to activities that run without them?
Books for your team
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