How to Design a High-Quality Leadership Development Program

When I work with small and mid-sized organizations without a full internal training team, I am often asked this question:

“We know we need to develop our leaders. What do you recommend?”

Sending everyone off to a university certificate program can be both expensive and too generic. A better option might be to develop a program in-house.
If you want to build a leadership development program that actually works, the key is to customize it to your people, ground it in adult learning, and structure it so that the training sticks.
This article walks through how I’d recommend approaching it.

When It Makes Sense to Develop a Program

A leadership development program isn’t right for every situation. 

But there are a few common reasons organizations decide it’s time.

• Turnover. You’ve had a wave of leaders leave, and now you’ve got new people in the role who’ve never been trained to lead.
• Promotion. You’ve moved your best technical people into leadership. A great lawyer becomes a partner. A great operator becomes a supervisor. They’re good at the work, but leading the people who do the work is a different job entirely, and nobody ever taught them the basics.
• Succession. You can see retirements and departures coming, and you want a bench of leaders ready before you actually need them.
• Metrics. Engagement scores are down. Satisfaction surveys are flagging problems with leadership. Turnover is climbing. Something is telling you that leadership capability is affecting your results.

Whatever the trigger, here’s the question to ask. 

“Are your leaders equipped to deliver on what the organization needs, today and into the future?

If the answer is no, or even “not consistently,” a structured program is worth considering.

What should you expect to invest?

A leadership development program is an investment of time and money up front. There’s no way around that. 

Done right, the payoff over the long run is significant. Think about what you’re already paying for the cost of not doing it: the turnover, the disengagement, the quiet quitting, the tension on teams. 

If that’s costing you real money every year, redirecting some of it into developing your leaders is a straightforward trade.

Rather than thinking about cost alone, we encourage organizations to consider the value of stronger leaders, healthier teams, reduced turnover, fewer people issues, and greater organizational effectiveness. 

The total investment will depend on the outcomes you’re looking to achieve. We work with organizations to recommend the right combination of workshops, assessments, coaching, and reinforcement to align with their goals, priorities, and budget while maximizing long-term value.

9 Steps to a High-Quality, Customizable, Scalable, and Repeatable Leadership Development Program

What follows isn’t a rigid template. 

It’s the logical order I’d recommend working through, and every piece builds based on what you learn along the way.

Step 1: Start With a Needs Analysis

Everything starts here.

Before you design anything, you need to know what you’re actually solving for. 

In adult learning we call this a needs assessment, and it answers a simple question: what do your leaders need that they don’t currently have?

A good needs analysis looks in two directions.

First, the present. Where are the current gaps in your leaders’ skills, knowledge, awareness, and capability?

Second, the future. What’s coming for your organization, your market, your industry, technology-wise? The skills that work today aren’t necessarily the skills your leaders will need in three years. 

A good program builds for both.

It’s also worth identifying what level of leadership you’re developing. Frontline supervisors need different things than senior directors or executives. And some organizations are starting from the very basics: how to give feedback, how to write a review, how to have a direct conversation. Others already have seasoned leaders and want to go deeper into vision, strategy, and change management. The needs analysis tells you which.

Step 2: Build the Business Case and Secure a Sponsor

Once you know what you need, the next step is to justify it and get the right people behind it.

This is where you build the business case. What is the current problem costing you? What are the potential outcomes if you address it? This is also where the ROI conversation lives. Take an honest look. What are you losing to turnover, to disengagement, to leadership gaps right now? Put that number next to the cost of the program. In most cases the math makes the decision for you.

Just as important is finding a sponsor. This is your internal champion, ideally a senior person who will stand up and say developing our people is a priority. That backing matters more than people expect. Without it, a program can slide down everyone’s to-do list until it falls apart.

There’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg here. Sometimes you need a senior person to authorize the needs analysis in the first place. Other times the HR or L&D team takes it on because they’ve already spotted the problem, and the needs analysis becomes the very thing that wins senior buy-in. 

Either way, by the end of this step you want a clear business case and a senior leader who owns it.

Step 3: Get Realistic About Budget, Timing, and Logistics

Now you deal with the constraints.

This is the practical layer. How much budget is there? What’s the timeline? Some organizations want to run a program in a single quarter. Others spread it across a year, September to March, or January to December. What can your people realistically commit to?

This is also where you decide the shape of delivery. In person, virtual, or a mix of both? How frequently: monthly, every other month, quarterly? How long can a single session run? I’ve had clients who could only manage 90 minutes for a virtual session, and others who could give a half-day. There’s no single right answer. There’s only what fits your organization.

Budget and timing shape how comprehensive a leadership development curriculum can be, so it’s better to know the boundaries before you start designing.

Step 4: Design the Curriculum

With the needs and the constraints understood, you build the actual program.

I like to organize programs around the Better Leaders, Stronger Teams, Healthier Workplaces framework, breaking it into parts that build on each other. 

To give you an example of what that can look like, here’s a version I’ve used, structured in four parts across a year:

Part 1: Better Leaders (Self-Awareness). This is where leadership development almost always starts. Holding up the mirror. Self-assessments, a communication-style assessment like DiSC, a 360 to gather feedback, some work on emotional intelligence. Understanding yourself before you try to lead others.

Part 2: Healthier Workplaces. Creating a psychologically healthy and safe environment as a leader. Respectful workplace practices. Managing conflict constructively, giving feedback, and being mindful of how a leader influences employee well-being and mental health.

Part 3: Stronger Teams. Developing the Five Behaviors: trust, clarity and commitment, buy-in, accountability, and focusing on collective results. Motivating and empowering the team. Facilitating effective meetings and one-on-ones.

Part 4: Better Leaders (Part Two). The more advanced work. Situational leadership, coaching, resiliency, helping the team navigate change, and clarifying a leader’s own vision, mission, and values going forward.

That’s one example. A different organization might need to start somewhere else entirely. A workplace dealing with a toxic culture might lead with the respectful workplace and psychological safety work. 

The curriculum changes based on what the needs analysis surfaced, and on the budget and timing you’re working within.

Agree on objectives and outcomes before you go any further. What will participants be able to do by the end? Tie a clear objective to each component of the program. Get this signed off 100% before design goes further, because everything else, including how you measure success, flows from it.

Step 5: Choose the Delivery Approach

What you cover is only half of it. How you deliver it is what makes it stick.

Talking isn’t training. A leader sitting alone, clicking through an online module and taking a multiple-choice quiz at the end, has not been developed. They might pick up a concept or two, but it won’t move the needle.

If you want real behaviour change, the delivery has to be built on proven adult learning principles. That means blending several approaches:

• Facilitator-led instruction to introduce concepts and frameworks.
• Reflective learning through assessments, personal action plans, or journaling.
• Application and reinforcement between sessions. We try not to call it homework, but that’s what it is: a guided activity, a workplace experiment, or an on-the-job assignment. Open the next session by checking in. How did it go? What worked? What didn’t? Then you problem-solve together.
• Experiential learning through case studies, real-world scenarios, and targeted role-play. This is especially useful for practicing things like feedback and coaching conversations.
• Peer learning through small buddy groups that meet between sessions to work through assigned topics together.
• Individual support through optional one-on-one coaching, facilitator office hours, and access to experienced facilitators for guidance on real workplace situations.
• Leadership accountability through ongoing commitments, reflection, and practical action planning that reinforces learning over time.
• Job aids like checklists and discussion guides that support people back on the job.

You don’t need every one of these in every program. But the combination of instruction, practice, application, and reflection is what turns learning into lasting behaviour. 

Step 6: Build the Cohort

A leadership program isn’t one person working through material alone. It’s a cohort.

A cohort is a selected group who go through the program together, and over time they become a genuine peer and support network. Dedicate time in one of the very first sessions to build relationships and set ground rules for how the group will work together.

In adult learning, a healthy cohort tends to run somewhere between six and about 25 to 30 people. 

There’s also a question of who’s in it, and how they get there. Are people nominated? Do they apply? Framing selection as an opportunity, “you’ve been chosen for this,” changes how people show up. It becomes a perk and a mark of investment, not another obligation.

You can also enrich the cohort experience with things like guest speakers from inside the organization, and a celebration at the end where a senior leader hands out certificates and says a few words. Small touches, but they reinforce that this mattered.

Step 7: Market It Internally and Protect the Commitment

This step is easy to overlook, and it’s often where programs succeed or fail.

Even with a great design, you’ll hear the same thing from busy leaders: “I don’t have time for this. My schedule is already full, and now you want a half-day a month plus meetings with my peer group in between?” That resistance is natural. It also has to be addressed head-on.

Participants need to understand what’s in it for them. And the leaders of those participants need to know what’s being covered and how to support their development by checking in during one-on-ones, offering help and feedback, and sharing their own experience. If a leader treats their person’s development as HR’s problem, the reinforcement disappears.

This is where the sponsor earns their keep. When development is a genuine, top-supported priority, the message is clear: this isn’t being dropped from the priority list, it’s being moved to the top of it. We’ll figure out the scheduling. We’re not sacrificing your development for the next urgent thing. 

The moment people start missing sessions or skipping the between-session work, the whole thing begins to unravel. Protecting the commitment is what makes development programs work.

Step 8: Measure What Happens

If you’re going to invest in a leadership development program, you should know whether it worked.

The most widely used approach to measuring learning is the Kirkpatrick model, and it’s the one I recommend and use. It looks at four levels:

1. Reaction. Did people find the session valuable? This is your session feedback survey.
2. Learning. What knowledge and confidence did they gain? Measured with assessments at the start and end of the program, so you can see the shift. It can be as simple as taking a baseline assessment at the beginning and repeating it at the end.
3. Behaviour. Are you seeing the learning show up on the job? This can come through pulse surveys, another 360, or skip-level meetings where you ask targeted questions.
4. Results. Are the metrics that started this whole process changing? Engagement, satisfaction, retention. Results often take a year or more to show up, so it’s measured well after the program ends.

Building measurement in from the start and tying it back to the objectives you agreed on, is what lets you prove the program did what it set out to do.

Step 9: Review and Evolve

A program isn’t finished when the last session ends.

The final step is to review what happened and evolve. What worked, what changed, what’s next. Part of that review is the success measurement itself, especially the behaviour and results levels that only become visible over time.

Leadership development that sticks depends far more on what happens after the training than on the training itself: the follow-up, the checking in, the removing of barriers. Build that ongoing review in, and the improvements keep compounding instead of fading.

When leaders genuinely develop, you see it in the people around them. 

Teams become more self-sufficient, more confident, and clearer on what they’re doing. People feel safer speaking up, asking for help, and admitting mistakes, which means problems surface early instead of festering. Leaders climb out of the day-to-day weeds and into the work only they can do.

At the organizational level, it shows up as stronger retention and engagement, a pipeline of next-generation leaders, and more consistency in how leadership is experienced across teams. People notice when one leader is investing in their people and another isn’t. Closing that gap strengthens cohesion everywhere.

None of this happens because you ran a program. It happens because you built the program well, delivered it on sound adult learning principles, protected people’s commitment to it, and kept coming back to it over time.

Yes, it’s an investment of time and money up front. But set that against what dysfunction is already costing you, and the choice gets a lot clearer. The organizations that develop their leaders proactively, rather than waiting until things break, are the ones that get the best results and keep their best people.

If you’re thinking about developing your leaders and want a partner to help you design and deliver a program that fits your organization, I’d be glad to help.

We can start with an honest look at where your leaders are today and what would make the biggest difference. From there, we’ll map out an approach that works within your budget, your timeline, and your culture.

Book a confidential call and let’s talk about what’s possible for your leaders and your organization.

Randy Kennett is the founder of Hone Training, where he works with organizations across Canada to develop better leaders, stronger teams, and healthier workplaces through practical, evidence-based training and facilitation. For more than 17 years, he has partnered with government agencies, universities, nonprofits, and private-sector companies to create lasting organizational change.