Set-and-forget leadership development is “a pretty good waste of money,” warns L&D expert
Leadership development programs that run on auto‑pilot are burning budget and missing the mark as business conditions, legislation and workforce expectations rapidly evolve, according to Karlie Cremin, Dynamic Leadership Programs Australia (DLPA) CEO
Speaking with HRD, Cremin said many organisations are still running the same leadership programs they introduced five, ten or even fifteen years ago, despite radical changes in their operating environment and employee expectations.
When leadership programs go stale
Cremin said “set-and-forget” or “one-and-done” approaches to leadership development are failing to reflect modern business realities and are therefore failing to deliver impact.
“We’ve seen quite a few organisations that have been doing the same program for five, ten, sometimes even 15 years and just haven’t noticed that it actually doesn’t reflect their business [or] external factors… expectations of the workforce are very different now, too,” she said.
Instead, Cremin argues that adaptive programs that can be refined as strategy and context change are the ones that deliver measurable results. These programs are explicitly linked to a strategic lever or element of the strategic plan and to how the organisation is building capability – not just in individual leaders, but across the business.
That linkage, she said, is what secures buy‑in from the board and executive, and creates room in the budget to continue iterating the program as strategy evolves.
Why L&D is still first on the chopping block
Despite years of rhetoric about people and capability being critical strategic levers, Cremin said leadership and learning spend still tends to be cut early when economic pressure bites.
“It’s when you get that more extreme pressure that it suddenly becomes the nice to have. There was all the narrative around it being a key strategic lever, and then as soon as you need to pull the strategic lever, it becomes nice to have,” she said, calling out what she sees as “confused narrative” around L&D.
Part of the problem, she suggested, is legacy investment in programs that were “flavour of the month,” not clearly connected to a business problem, and lacking any meaningful action‑planning or implementation component.
The other common objection – that employees are trained only to then leave – is also increasingly being challenged.
With greater economic scrutiny, Cremin believes a key capability for modern HR and L&D leaders is the ability to talk about leadership programs in hard commercial terms.
“The HR profession is changing and the L&D profession is changing. The skill set now is being able to talk about these programs in commercial terms… and linking to the strategy. Because if you don’t do that, then it is a nice to have and of course it’ll be the first thing to be cut,” she said.
That means clearly articulating the organisational outcomes a leadership program is expected to influence, how it ties into the strategic plan, and how impact will be measured over time.
Cremin said more mature organisations are also building in structured action planning so participants are expected to apply new skills on the job and leaders can track whether that’s occurring.
“We’re seeing a lot more focus on things like action planning from the L&D activity… saying this is the knowledge gap that we’re covering, this is how you would apply it, and then here’s how we’re going to actually implement that into the workplace and measure its impact,” she said.
Psychosocial risk laws turn ‘nice to have’ into compliance
One powerful lever HR can pull, particularly in Australia, is the organisation’s legal obligations around psychosocial risk. DLPA does significant work in this space and she pointed to recent regulatory changes – including new legislation in Victoria – as reshaping the business case for investing in leadership capability.
“What is good about [the new legislation] is it makes it very clear why and what you need to invest in. It’s not this fluffy stuff. It’s actually compliance and mandatory, and the costs for not doing it are so far greater than any costs you could invest in,” she said.
For HR leaders under budget pressure, she suggested explicitly connecting leadership programs to psychosocial risk management and broader health, safety and wellbeing obligations, reframing L&D as a core part of the organisation’s compliance posture rather than discretionary spend.
AI has commoditised content – but not learning
Cremin also warned HR leaders not to confuse access to AI‑generated content with effective development.
“AI will write the content pretty well, and… a lesson plan pretty well, if we’re honest, if you give it quality prompts,” she said, adding that this has been “a huge impact” for providers and internal L&D teams alike. “The content is no longer the commodity. That’s not what’s being sold.”
As generative AI tools make it easier and cheaper to push out large volumes of learning content, differentiation is shifting towards facilitation quality and learner engagement.
“What it means is it’s that facilitation method and those ways of actually engaging and keeping [people] engaged that are the difference,” Cremin said. “It can do the lesson plans, a lot of the content and a lot of the supporting materials, but actually keeping people engaged in a learning journey… that’s kind of the skill set of the L&D practitioner now, rather than the content itself.”
She also cautioned that AI can just as easily accelerate poor‑quality programs: “It can move poor quality content more quickly, too, which we’re certainly seeing.”
Leadership development is failing managers
Leadership development is failing many managers because organisations still treat leadership as an assumed by-product of technical performance rather than a distinct, learnable people skill.
As previously discussed by corporate psychologist Rudy Crous, leaders are promoted for being good at their jobs, then left to manage people with a default “control” mindset focused on tasks, deadlines and outputs, rather than empathy, integrity and genuine care.
Different employees need different balances of trust and control, yet many leaders apply one directive style to everyone, creating disengagement. The fix starts with self-awareness: helping leaders understand their personality, priorities and blind spots, and how these shape communication, conflict, and decision-making.
Crous recommends a “standardised but bespoke” approach where all leaders complete evidence-based diagnostics, then receive tailored coaching and development based on their specific profiles.
For HR and CEOs, the priority is to stop assuming leadership is innate, redesign promotion criteria to include people capability, embed personality and behaviour insights throughout the leadership lifecycle, train situational judgement, and rigorously track leadership impact over time, so leaders can truly adapt their style to their people and context.
From knowledge transfer to behaviour change
Asked what distinguishes an effective leadership development strategy, Cremin urged HR leaders to start by being explicit about the behaviours they want to see, not just the knowledge they want to transmit.
She recommended that HR teams:
- Pinpoint the specific behaviour changes that will indicate the strategy is working.
- Clarify what development their teams need to “operationalise that strategy more effectively.”
- Build in feedback loops so the program can be refined rather than locking into a fixed 12‑month plan that doesn’t adapt as conditions change.
Leadership development that is adaptive, commercially framed, legally grounded and laser‑focused on behaviour change is far more likely to survive budget scrutiny – and to deliver the organisational impact boards now expect.
