HR and L&D leaders
How should we measure whether a leadership programme is helping?
Most leadership programmes are measured by the wrong things. Training completion rates. Participant satisfaction scores. Hours of content consumed. These are inputs. The question worth asking is simpler and harder: are managers leading differently, and is that making any difference to the people they lead?
Framework: Brian Hartzer’s Leadership Star · Practices: Celebrate
The measures that tell you something real
Direct reports’ experience. Managers consistently overestimate how well they’re doing on the specific things leadership programmes teach. The only reliable signal is from the people being led. Pulse surveys, skip-level conversations, and qualitative feedback from direct reports — structured around specific practices, not vague satisfaction questions — get you substantially closer to the truth.
Team-level engagement. Organisation-wide scores are too blunt. They tell you the average, which often obscures the range. The most useful number is team-level: which managers have teams whose engagement is moving, and which don’t? That’s where leadership actually happens. Aggregate upward from there.
Whether managers can do the specific things the programme taught. If a programme teaches managers to run better one-on-ones, measure whether those conversations are happening and whether direct reports find them useful. If it teaches recognition, measure whether recognition is occurring with the right frequency and specificity. Capability should show up in behaviour. Behaviour is measurable.
Retention of people worth keeping. High performers who leave a good organisation often leave their manager. Voluntary turnover of high performers, disaggregated by manager, is an imperfect but meaningful signal. Imperfect because people leave for many reasons. Meaningful because the pattern across teams is hard to ignore.
The timing question
Six weeks after a workshop, you are measuring memory and intent. Six months after, you are measuring behaviour. Twelve months after, you are measuring impact. Design your measurement accordingly. The best leadership programmes build in structured check-ins at each interval — not as an administrative obligation, but because that’s when you find out what actually changed.
What not to measure
Net Promoter Score for the programme. People reliably rate workshops highly immediately after attending them. Enthusiasm is not application.
Hours of content delivered. More content is not better leadership development. The only question is whether managers are leading differently.
Where judgment matters
Some leadership development has genuine value that measurement frameworks miss — the relationship built between two managers at an offsite, the honest conversation someone had for the first time because the programme created the space. What can’t be measured still has value. But “it’s hard to measure” cannot serve as a reason to avoid measuring the things that can be measured.
Maps primarily to Celebrate. See also: How do we build a shared leadership framework? · How do we run a management book discussion programme?
If you stopped your leadership programme tomorrow, what evidence would you use to demonstrate it had made a difference — and do you have that evidence now?
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