The leadership development industry is facing a critical moment. Global companies spend around $60 billion every year on leadership development. Surprisingly, most of these programs don’t lead to long-term behavioral change. It’s not that the programs don’t have good content, or that the leaders aren’t coached well, or that they’re not committed to learning. The real issue is that companies are investing in their leaders without first understanding the team and work culture they’re a part of. To make real progress, companies need to take a closer look at teams and their culture to identify strengths and opportunities before training their leaders.
Companies are now asking tougher questions about return on investment (ROI), and training professionals are feeling increasing pressure to demonstrate clear, tangible results. To respond effectively, we need to understand what’s really driving these expectations and determine the best ways to address them. In other words, we need better diagnosis to make a real impact.
When a leadership team is out of sync, it’s not usually because someone on the team is missing a key leadership skill. More often, the team doesn’t have a shared sense of how to work together — things like how they talk to each other, make decisions, handle disagreements and keep each other on track. These are often issues with the team’s culture, not with individual team members. In other words, you can’t fix a cultural problem by helping one person develop their skills.
The leadership development industry has long operated on an implicit assumption: develop better individuals, and better teams and cultures will follow. This assumption can be flawed. When someone attends a leadership program and learns new things, it doesn’t always mean they can change their behavior. If the work environment is still broken, they’ll likely revert to doing things “the old way” over time. For example, if someone attends a training session on giving feedback, it doesn’t mean their team will suddenly start talking openly and honestly with each other. If a team can’t talk candidly, it’s usually a deeper issue that needs to be addressed, and without a shared diagnosis, there is no shared language. When team members lack a common framework for understanding their collective strengths and gaps, development efforts remain fragmented and disconnected from the team’s actual experience.
A Diagnostic Framework: The 5Cs of Connected Culture
Effective leadership development starts with cultural diagnosis — a structured assessment of the team and organizational dynamics that either enable or inhibit leader effectiveness. Our research-backed approach, The 5Cs Model, identifies five interdependent dimensions of high-performing cultures: Connection, Candid Communication, Clarity, Collaboration and Contribution.
Connection within a team and organization reflects the ties that people feel with the organization’s ethos and with one another. It encompasses a deep sense of mutual trust that goes beyond mere association or involvement, as well as overall workforce well-being, including employees’ physical, mental and emotional health.
Candid Communication is about straightforward, unambiguous discourse among all members of the team and organization. It can be fostered through psychological safety, which is seen through people’s willingness to take interpersonal risks, the critical two-way processes of healthy conflict and feedback, transparency and openness of information sharing, and ideas meritocracy, which reflect the leaders’ willingness to listen to ideas.
Clarity in a team and organization refers to how clear people are in terms of their responsibilities (i.e., the processes they follow and the overarching goals). Clarity can be achieved through delineating roles and responsibilities and their associated expectations, clearly defining workflows and processes, and creating and constantly striving toward shared goals.
Collaboration measures how well people support each other and hold each other accountable for their performance. It’s reflected through strong team support, commitment to accountability in a fair and consistent way, and a drive toward excellence in team and individual performance.
Contribution reflects how team actions align with the organization’s core values, goals and impact. It incorporates the impact that the team and organization have on the broader community, the existence and acceptance of key core values that drive actions and discussions, the recognition of meaning and mattering and their importance to employees thriving and creating company-wide alignment on a shared vision that provides direction and purpose.
Diagnosis Before Development
Leadership development should always start with an understanding of the team and culture before beginning program design. To do so, use methods such as structured interviews, validated assessments and observation of how teams work together to identify strengths and areas for development. This approach shifts leadership growth from a standardized approach to tailored development plans that reflect each team’s unique needs. For instance, a team that collaborates effectively but struggles with honesty and openness requires a different development approach than one that struggles with clarity and collaboration. The first step is identifying what the team needs before building a plan to address it. This approach also affects the team’s dynamics, as it doesn’t involve sending just one leader to a multi-day program away from the team. Instead, it involves working with the entire team, tackling challenges together and addressing the patterns that emerge as they interact in their usual setting. By doing so, the team can work through their challenges in real time, leading to more effective, sustainable solutions.
When companies take the time to understand their organizational culture before delivering leadership training, they can make more informed development decisions. This approach moves them from reacting to isolated challenges toward designing solutions that work across the system. As a result, they are better positioned to create lasting behavior change — an outcome that has often been difficult to achieve. The most effective trainers are not only subject matter experts (SMEs); they are also skilled at reading and working within organizational culture.
