The room can create insight. Only the organisation can create transfer.
A leadership programme can be exceptionally well received. The faculty are credible. The dialogue is energetic. Participants leave with new language, strong intentions and a notebook full of ideas.
Then they return to work.
The calendar is already full. The manager wants immediate delivery. Existing incentives reward familiar behaviour. The executive team has not changed its operating rhythm. Within weeks, the programme is remembered as valuable—but the organisation is largely operating as before.
This is the transfer problem. It is one of the oldest questions in learning research and one of the most persistent weaknesses in leadership development. Harvard Business School's work on the future of leadership development identifies a skills-transfer gap: executives often do not apply classroom learning to their roles.[1] The point is not that classrooms are irrelevant. It is that the classroom is only one part of the system required for change.
In my own work across leadership advisory and executive education, I have seen the same distinction repeatedly. A strong learning experience can create insight and commitment. Whether that insight becomes performance depends on what happens before the programme, around it and after it.
Learning is an event; transfer is a system
The most influential research on training transfer does not treat the learner in isolation. Baldwin and Ford's foundational model located transfer in the interaction between the design of the learning, the characteristics of the participant and the work environment. A later meta-analysis of 89 empirical studies confirmed that transfer is associated with factors including motivation and a supportive work environment.[2]
That matters because many organisations commission development as if content quality alone will determine impact. They invest heavily in what happens inside the programme while leaving the surrounding system unchanged.
Michael Beer and colleagues at Harvard Business School described a related pattern in The Great Training Robbery: organisations ask programmes to change individual behaviour while structural and managerial barriers continue to reproduce the old behaviour.[3] A leader may learn to delegate, collaborate across boundaries or challenge more constructively, but if decision rights, workload, incentives and senior role-modelling point the other way, the old system usually wins.
Begin with the work, not the curriculum
The first design question should not be, 'Which modules should we include?' It should be, 'What must these leaders do differently for the strategy to succeed?'
That shift changes the programme. Strategic priorities become the context. Real decisions become learning material. Participants work on live interfaces, commercial trade-offs and leadership tensions rather than discussing generic capability in the abstract.
Harvard Business Impact's 2025 global study of more than 1,100 learning and functional leaders argues that learning increasingly needs to happen faster and in the context of the organisation.[4] INSEAD research has also challenged one-size-fits-all leadership development, proposing that methods should vary with organisational level and the leader's career and role cycle.[5]
The closer the learning task is to the leadership task, the shorter the distance to transfer.
Design for four moments, not one
A transfer-led programme treats development as a sequence.
1. Before: create relevance and commitment
Participants need a clear line of sight between the programme and the work they are accountable for. Sponsors and managers should define the leadership outcomes, identify live application challenges and discuss what support or permission the participant will need.
Selection matters too. Attendance should not be a reward or a way to fill seats. The right participants have a real opportunity to apply what they learn.
2. During: make real work the learning environment
Insight is more likely to transfer when leaders practise with situations that resemble the complexity of their roles. Cases and frameworks have value, but they should lead into diagnosis, rehearsal, feedback and application.
For senior leaders, this often means working on a consequential decision, a difficult stakeholder conversation, an enterprise interface or an unresolved strategic trade-off. The programme becomes a place to see the work differently and test a stronger response.
3. After: change the conditions around the leader
The return to work is where good intentions are most exposed. Leaders need specific commitments, a cadence for reflection and feedback, and managers who ask about application rather than only whether the programme was enjoyable.
The organisation must also remove contradictory signals. It cannot teach enterprise collaboration and continue rewarding purely functional optimisation. It cannot ask for delegation while senior leaders routinely take decisions back. It cannot promote experimentation and punish every intelligent failure.
4. Over time: measure behaviour and business relevance
Participant satisfaction is useful service feedback. It is not evidence of transfer.
A better evaluation asks whether targeted behaviour changed, whether colleagues experienced a difference, whether live work advanced and whether the organisation strengthened a capability that matters to the strategy. Not every effect can be reduced to a clean financial number, but the line from learning to work should be visible.
The sponsor is part of the programme
Leadership development is often delegated to the learning function. The learning function can bring design discipline, evidence, facilitation and continuity. It cannot by itself create the organisational conditions for transfer.
Senior sponsors determine whether the programme is connected to strategy, whether participants receive meaningful assignments, whether managers reinforce the change and whether the executive environment models the leadership being taught. In that sense, sponsorship is not governance around the programme. It is part of the intervention.
This is one reason custom executive education can be powerful when it is genuinely custom. Its advantage is not that an organisation's logo appears on the materials. It is the ability to build the learning around a real strategic context, leadership population and transfer system.
From a memorable room to changed work
A powerful programme should be engaging. Leaders need space away from immediate demands to think, question assumptions and learn with others. But separation from work is useful only if it enables a better return to work.
The design standard is therefore not, 'Was this an excellent learning experience?' It is, 'What became different because this experience occurred?'
When that question shapes the commission, the programme and the follow-through, leadership development stops being an event leaders attend. It becomes part of how the organisation changes.
Questions for a sponsor or programme designer
- Which strategic outcome requires leaders to behave or decide differently?
- What live work will give participants a credible place to practise?
- Which organisational conditions currently reinforce the behaviour we want to change?
- What will managers and senior sponsors do before, during and after the programme?
- What evidence, beyond satisfaction scores, would show that learning transferred?
Sources and further reading
- Moldoveanu, M. & Narayandas, D. (2019), The Future of Leadership Development, Harvard Business Review / Harvard Business School faculty item. https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=55833
- Blume, B. D., Ford, J. K., Baldwin, T. T. & Huang, J. L. (2010), Transfer of Training: A Meta-Analytic Review, Journal of Management, 36(4), 1065-1105. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0149206309352880
- Beer, M., Finnstrom, M. & Schrader, D. (2016), The Great Training Robbery, Harvard Business School Working Paper 16-121. https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=50953
- Harvard Business Impact (2025), 2025 Global Leadership Development Study. https://www.harvardbusiness.org/insight/2025-global-leadership-development-study/
- Petriglieri, G., Wood, J. D. & Petriglieri, J. L. (2010), Seasons of a Leader's Development: Beyond a One-size-fits-all Approach to Designing Interventions, INSEAD Working Paper. https://sites.insead.edu/facultyresearch/research/doc.cfm?did=43958
- 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://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-032117-104443