Here’s a finding that should unsettle anyone who funds leadership development: good training can accelerate your best leaders toward the exit.
Not bad training. Good training.
In my doctoral research with federal healthcare leaders, participants described their development experiences in genuinely glowing terms. Others described expanded systems thinking, deeper peer connection, a transformed sense of what leadership could be.
And then the second edge of the sword appeared. Training was described as career-changing and… detrimental when they returned to leaders and systems that did not operate in alignment with those principles and intentions. The dysfunction became palpable and unignorable.
Read that again, because it’s the whole mechanism in two sentences. Training raised their sightline. It gave them a clear picture of what excellent leadership looks like. Then it returned them, unchanged organizations and all, to environments that fell short of that picture every single day.
The result wasn’t growth. It was a sharpened awareness of dysfunction and with it, frustration, emotional exhaustion, and the particular burnout that comes from value incongruence: knowing what right looks like and being structurally unable to practice it.
This is the finding most leadership development budgets ignore. We treat training as an unambiguous good…more is better, any exposure helps.
Training is an amplifier.
In an organization prepared to support what leaders learn, capability is amplified. In an organization that isn’t, it amplifies the gap between what leaders now know and what their environment allows.
So before the next cohort launches, ask a harder question than “is the curriculum good?”
Ask: what are we sending them back to?
If the answer is the same unprotected calendar, the same unaddressed dysfunction, the same leaders above them modeling the opposite of the curriculum, then you’re not developing people. You’re educating them about everything wrong with your organization, at your own expense.
Develop the environment alongside the leader, or don’t be surprised when your most developed leaders develop their way out.
Dr. Sarah Davis-Arnold
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