When everyone's an expert and no one can lead
As organisations pour unprecedented resources into leadership development, institutions are failing at record rates. What if the cure has become part of the disease?
In November 2024, as 15,000 executives gathered at the Global Leadership Summit—paying £3,200 each to discuss vision, execution, and empathy frameworks—business headlines painted a grimmer reality. That same month witnessed 18 Fortune 500 CEO departures, part of Russell Reynolds Associates' documentation of 220 global CEO appointments in 2024. The mathematical paradox was inescapable: never had so many people been learning leadership theory whilst so many leaders were failing in practice.
This scene captures a puzzling modern contradiction. We inhabit an era of extraordinary leadership knowledge. The global leadership development industry has mushroomed into a $60 billion market projected to reach $564 billion by 2035. Executive coaching alone expects to hit $161 billion by 2030. Organisations consistently rank leadership development as their highest priority, with sophisticated frameworks proliferating across business schools, consulting firms, and corporate universities.
Yet by every measurable standard, institutional leadership is deteriorating. American confidence in institutions has plummeted to a historic low of 27% across all sectors. CEO turnover hit record highs, with median tenure dropping 20% over the past decade. Trust in government hovers at 22%—levels not seen since the Watergate era. Congress commands just 7% public confidence, whilst 57% of Americans express "very little" faith in their elected representatives.
The arithmetic bewilders. If leadership development programmes yield the industry's claimed returns of 11 for every dollar invested, with some studies citing 415% annual ROI, why do institutions fail at such rates? If 77% of organisations invest substantially in leadership development, producing sophisticated frameworks and evidence-based curricula, why does research reveal persistent leadership gaps across sectors?
The answer lies not in implementation failures or temporary setbacks, but in a systematic misalignment between how leadership development operates and how actual leadership works.
The transfer gap nobody discusses
Buried within academic research lies a devastating statistic the leadership development industry rarely publicises: only 30% of training content transfers to workplace application. Harvard Business Review researchers describe corporations as 'victims of the great training robbery', noting that despite enormous spending, 'learning doesn't lead to better organisational performance, because people soon revert to their old ways'.
This isn't anecdotal observation. Multiple peer-reviewed studies confirm that workplace application remains the exception rather than the rule. Leadership development professionals themselves estimate that less than half of what they train gets applied on the job. Only 35% rate skills training as extremely effective, compared to 60% for coaching. The Centre for Creative Leadership documents fifteen years of persistent leadership gaps with minimal progress despite increased investment.
This pattern appears repeatedly across organisations. Executives describe getting energised by frameworks and insights during programmes, finding the concepts intellectually compelling. Yet within weeks, they revert to managing crises and stakeholder demands through established patterns. The theoretical knowledge remains accessible, but the pressure of real decisions pushes behaviour back toward instinct and habit.
Her experience reflects research on cognitive bias and behavioural change. Under stress—precisely when leadership matters most—people revert to established patterns regardless of recent training. Yet most programmes ignore this fundamental psychological constraint, focusing on knowledge transfer rather than behavioural rewiring.
Rather than addressing this basic human limitation, the industry has pursued exactly the opposite strategy.
The sophistication trap
The industry's response to poor transfer rates has been to develop more sophisticated programmes, not simpler ones. This creates what researchers identify as the 'sophistication trap'—the assumption that complex challenges require complex solutions.
Eugene Yan's recent leadership framework exemplifies this trend. His vision-execution-empathy model, combined with commando-soldier-police styles, offers nuanced analysis of leadership challenges. The framework feels authentic because it follows traditional patterns—deriving principles from studying successful leaders. Yet it arrives in an ecosystem where theoretical proliferation has outpaced practical application.
Market pressures reward this complexity. Organisations purchase sophisticated solutions because they appear commensurate with leadership challenges. Executive education programmes at prestigious institutions compete on framework innovation rather than effectiveness metrics.
Internal learning and development departments justify budgets through programme comprehensiveness rather than behavioural change. The result is an arms race of theoretical sophistication that moves further from practical application with each innovation.
Training effectiveness research reveals the perverse incentive structure. Academic studies consistently show simple, repeated practice with immediate feedback produces better results than comprehensive frameworks. Yet simplicity doesn't sell. Organisations want their leadership development to feel as sophisticated as their strategic challenges, creating market pressure for complexity over effectiveness.
This sophistication trap extends beyond content to delivery mechanisms. Programmes now incorporate artificial intelligence, virtual reality simulations, and personalised learning algorithms. The technology adds layers of complexity whilst research suggests basic coaching conversations produce superior outcomes.
The institutional laundering effect
Perhaps most significantly, leadership development serves an unacknowledged function: institutional legitimacy laundering. It provides the appearance of competence without substance, creating plausible deniability for organisational failures.
When institutions fail, leadership development offers a socially acceptable explanation. Poor performance gets attributed to "implementation challenges" rather than framework inadequacy. High turnover justifies more succession planning rather than questioning development quality. Declining trust prompts additional leadership programmes rather than examining systematic application failures.
This laundering effect may be more valuable to stakeholders than actual improvement. Training providers benefit through revenue regardless of outcomes. Executive education institutions gain prestige independent of graduate performance. Internal learning departments secure job security by demonstrating activity rather than results. Executives obtain credentials and networking opportunities whether or not they acquire skills.
The arrangement resembles other sectors where professional apparatus supersedes original purpose. Academic publishing prioritises journal publications over knowledge creation. Compliance consulting focuses on documentation rather than risk reduction. Similarly, leadership development has evolved into an institutional end rather than a means to effective leadership.
This laundering function becomes most visible when examining what happens to leaders who emerge from these systems.
When frameworks meet reality
The disconnect becomes stark when examining specific leadership challenges. Consider the 2024 collapse of several major corporations despite their executives having completed multiple leadership programmes. These leaders possessed sophisticated understanding of strategic thinking, stakeholder management, and organisational transformation. Yet they made fundamental errors in judgment that frameworks couldn't prevent.
Research from the Russell Reynolds Associates Global CEO Turnover Index reveals why. CEO effectiveness peaks around year six and declines thereafter, yet median tenure has dropped to 4.8 years. This suggests systematic early failure rather than natural career progression. Despite unprecedented access to leadership development, 85% of 2024 CEO appointments were first-time CEOs, indicating that experience pipeline development isn't working.
The pattern extends beyond corporate leadership. Government officials attend leadership institutes whilst trust in institutions reaches historic lows. Healthcare administrators complete executive programmes whilst systemic problems persist. Educational leaders study transformational frameworks whilst student outcomes stagnate.
Research on institutional effectiveness identifies the core issue: leadership development treats symptoms rather than causes. It assumes individual competence drives institutional performance, ignoring systemic factors that constrain even competent leaders. Frameworks cannot address structural problems, misaligned incentives, or organisational culture that shape behaviour more powerfully than training.
The knowledge-wisdom inversion
Modern leadership development has inverted the traditional relationship between knowledge and wisdom. Historical leadership development emerged from studying successful leaders and extracting principles. Today's approach starts with theoretical frameworks and attempts application.
This knowledge-first methodology explains why contemporary frameworks feel mechanistic despite their sophistication. Warren Buffett's leadership principles emerged from decades of investment success. Jim Collins' concepts derived from extensive research on exceptional companies. Peter Drucker's insights reflected years of organisational consultation.
Contemporary frameworks reverse this sequence. Theoretical models get developed in academic settings, then marketed to practitioners for implementation. This approach prioritises explicit knowledge over practical wisdom, creating the appearance of scientific rigor whilst missing the tacit understanding that distinguishes effective leaders.
The inversion has practical consequences. Leaders trained on frameworks can articulate leadership principles but struggle with situational judgment. They understand strategic thinking concepts but make poor strategic decisions. They recognise emotional intelligence components but fail to read organisational dynamics.
The industrial complex
The leadership development industry has evolved into what economists recognise as a "complex adaptive system"—one that perpetuates itself regardless of external effectiveness. Like defense spending or healthcare administration, it creates stakeholder networks with vested interests in continued expansion.
Universities establish leadership centres requiring steady enrollment. Consulting firms develop proprietary methodologies needing regular refresh cycles. Corporate learning departments grow budgets by demonstrating programme innovation. Professional associations multiply conferences and certifications. Each stakeholder has logical reasons for industry growth independent of leadership outcomes.
This creates powerful resistance to effectiveness measurement. Rigorous evaluation might reveal poor transfer rates and limited behavioural change, threatening the entire ecosystem. Instead, the industry relies on participant satisfaction surveys, soft skill assessments, and correlation studies that suggest rather than prove impact.
Meanwhile, organisations continue investing because leadership development provides psychological comfort. It demonstrates managerial concern for performance problems whilst avoiding harder questions about structural change. It offers transformation hope without systematic reform disruption.
The path forward
The evidence suggests that leadership development's fundamental assumption—that individual competence drives institutional performance—may be backwards. Institutional structure, culture, and incentives shape individual behaviour more than training programmes shape institutions.
Effective organisations don't necessarily have superior leadership development. They create systems that enable competent people to make good decisions and constrain poor ones. Their leaders succeed not because they've mastered frameworks, but because they operate in environments that support effective leadership.
This insight points toward a different approach: designing institutions that develop leaders through practice rather than theory. Instead of sending people to leadership programmes, create leadership challenges within organisations. Rather than teaching frameworks, provide real-time coaching during actual decisions. Focus on changing organisational systems rather than individual knowledge.
The irony is that such approaches already exist in successful organisations. They just don't scale into profitable industries. Mentorship relationships, stretch assignments, cross-functional rotations, and authentic feedback systems develop leaders through experience rather than instruction. But these methods resist commodification, making them less attractive to the development industry.
As institutional trust continues declining whilst leadership development spending soars toward half a trillion dollars, perhaps it's time to question whether we're solving the right problem. The greatest leadership challenge may not be developing better frameworks, but recognising when frameworks become obstacles to the wisdom they're meant to create.
The November 2024 scene that opened this investigation—thousands paying premium prices to learn leadership whilst institutions collapsed around them—captures more than irony. It reveals a civilisational bet gone wrong: the wager that we could systematise wisdom, productise judgment, and scale authenticity.
Until we abandon that bet, the paradox will persist: an industry dedicated to leadership that has become part of the leadership crisis it claims to solve. The solution requires something no framework can provide—the intellectual courage to admit when our most sophisticated theories have become our most sophisticated problems.