The programme should not sit beside the strategy. It should help leaders do the strategy.
When organisations commission executive education, the conversation often begins with content. Which themes should be covered? How many modules are required? Who could speak on each topic? These are reasonable questions, but they arrive too early.
The more useful starting point is the work.
What must this group of leaders be able to decide, influence or deliver that they cannot do consistently today? Which relationships or interfaces will determine whether the strategy succeeds? What live organisational challenge gives them a credible place to practise?
These questions change the commission. Leadership development stops being a collection of topics and becomes an intervention in organisational performance.
The evidence base supports this shift. Baldwin and Ford’s foundational model positioned learning transfer as an interaction among participant characteristics, programme design and the work environment.[1] Later research reviews have reinforced the importance of the conditions surrounding the learner, including opportunity to perform, support and motivation.[2] Leadership-training meta-analysis also shows that design, delivery and implementation all influence outcomes.[3]
Content matters. Context determines whether it travels.
Custom is not cosmetic
A programme can be described as custom because examples are adapted, executives appear in opening videos and organisational language is added to the materials. These changes may improve relevance, but they do not necessarily alter the learning architecture.
Genuine customisation begins deeper. It connects the organisation’s strategic context, leadership population and operating environment.
A business integrating acquisitions may need leaders to build one enterprise while protecting customer performance. A public organisation navigating reform may need to strengthen stewardship, stakeholder judgement and implementation across institutional boundaries. A growth company moving into scale may need its senior leaders to shift from personal control toward systems, delegation and collective accountability.
“Leadership” is not the same assignment in each setting. The required capabilities, cases, practice and sponsorship should therefore differ.
Start with a performance thesis
Before designing modules, sponsors and programme partners should be able to state a concise performance thesis:
If these leaders become more capable of doing this work, the organisation will be better able to achieve this strategic outcome.
The statement is deliberately causal. It does not promise that development alone will create performance. It identifies the leadership contribution and allows the organisation to examine the other conditions required.
For example: if business-unit leaders become more capable of making enterprise trade-offs across the customer journey, the organisation will be better able to deliver its integrated growth strategy. That thesis points toward live customer decisions, cross-functional work, executive sponsorship and measures of enterprise movement. It does not point first toward a generic module on collaboration.
Four design layers
Strategic work
Select a small number of real challenges that matter to the organisation. They should be consequential enough to create attention, but appropriately bounded so participants can experiment without pretending a programme cohort is a shadow executive team.
Real work may include diagnosing a growth barrier, improving a critical interface, testing a transformation choice or preparing a recommendation for senior sponsors. The purpose is not free consulting. It is to make judgement, influence and collective leadership observable.
Deliberate practice
Senior leaders do not become more capable by hearing concepts alone. They need to try, receive feedback, reflect and try again. Practice can involve strategic framing, a difficult stakeholder conversation, a board presentation, a cross-enterprise decision or the leadership of an ambiguous problem.
The closer the practice resembles the complexity of the role, the shorter the distance to application. Frameworks then become useful because they help leaders see and act—not because they expand a vocabulary.
Organisational reinforcement
Participants return to managers, systems and incentives that may either support or contradict the programme. Sponsors need to create opportunities to apply learning, ask about changed practice and remove barriers that sit beyond the participant’s authority.
This is why the line manager and executive sponsor are not peripheral stakeholders. Their behaviour is part of the design.
Evidence of movement
Satisfaction data tells us whether the experience was well received. It does not show whether leadership changed. Evaluation should return to the performance thesis.
Are leaders framing decisions differently? Have important interfaces improved? Is live work progressing? Do colleagues experience greater clarity or more useful challenge? Has the organisation strengthened a capability that the strategy requires?
Not every result can be attributed neatly or converted into immediate financial value. But the chain from experience to changed work should be visible.
Faculty and practitioners play different roles
Strong executive education benefits from multiple forms of credibility. Academic faculty can bring intellectual rigour, research and disciplined challenge. Experienced practitioners can bring pattern recognition, operating consequence and an understanding of how ideas behave under pressure. Organisational leaders bring the context and authority to connect the work with strategy.
The design question is not which voice should dominate. It is how the voices combine around the learning outcome.
An academic perspective without organisational translation can remain interesting but distant. Practitioner stories without conceptual discipline can become anecdotal. Internal expertise without external challenge can reproduce established assumptions. A thoughtfully assembled faculty model allows each contribution to sharpen the others.
Cohorts can become an organisational asset
The value of cohort learning extends beyond individual capability. Leaders who work across organisational boundaries can develop shared language, stronger relationships and a more accurate understanding of interdependence.
That network matters when the programme ends. If participants have worked on real enterprise challenges and learned how one another think, they can become a distributed capacity for execution. If they have simply attended the same sessions, the cohort may remain a pleasant social connection.
In international leadership roles, I have seen how much execution depends on translation across markets, functions and cultures. Custom programmes can create a protected environment to practise that translation. The aim is not to erase difference. It is to help leaders use difference while maintaining shared direction.
Build from consequence backwards
Good design still needs excellent learning experiences. Leaders need space away from immediate demand. They deserve faculty who respect their experience, evidence that withstands scrutiny and a setting that makes candour possible.
But the programme should be designed backwards from consequence.
Begin with the strategic work. Define the leadership contribution. Identify the real opportunities for practice. Engage sponsors in the conditions for transfer. Then select content, faculty, format and sequence.
The result may be less tidy than an off-the-shelf curriculum. It will be more connected to what leaders are actually being asked to do.
Executive education earns its place when the organisation can point not only to what participants learned, but to work that became possible because they learned together.
Questions for a programme sponsor
- What strategic work should become easier or more effective because of this programme?
- Which real leadership situations will participants practise?
- What will sponsors and managers do to reinforce application?
- Where would external evidence, practitioner experience and internal context each add value?
- What would credible movement look like six months after the formal programme?
Sources and further reading
- Baldwin, T. T. & Ford, J. K. (1988), “Transfer of Training: A Review and Directions for Future Research,” Personnel Psychology, 41(1), 63–105. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.1988.tb00632.x
- Ford, J. K., Baldwin, T. T. & Prasad, J. (2018), “Transfer of Training: The Known and the Unknown,” Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 5, 201–225. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-032117-104443
- Lacerenza, C. N., Reyes, D. L., Marlow, S. L., Joseph, D. L. & Salas, E. (2017), “Leadership Training Design, Delivery, and Implementation: A Meta-Analysis,” Journal of Applied Psychology, 102(12), 1686–1718. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000241
- Moldoveanu, M. & Narayandas, D. (2019), “The Future of Leadership Development,” Harvard Business Review. https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=55833
- Harvard Business Impact (2025), “2025 Global Leadership Development Study.” https://www.harvardbusiness.org/insight/2025-global-leadership-development-study/