Leadership development program: how to design one that changes behavior

A leadership development program is a planned set of experiences, spread over several months, that helps people who lead others (or soon will) build the skills to do it well: setting direction, delegating, giving feedback, motivating, coaching and handling conflict. The programs that work mix formal training with real assignments and support from a boss or mentor, and they measure behavior change, not attendance.

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This guide is for HR and L&D teams designing or refreshing a leadership program. It covers what to include for each level of leader, how the 70-20-10 guideline shapes the design, the main training formats compared honestly, a sample six-month plan and how to show the program worked.

What is a leadership development program?

Leadership training is usually a single course or workshop on a topic. A leadership development program is broader: a sequence of learning, practice and on-the-job experience with a clear goal, a defined group of participants and a timeline. Think of training as one ingredient and the program as the recipe.

Most organizations run separate programs, or separate tracks, for different moments in a leader's career:

The biggest mistake is putting all four groups through the same content. A first-time manager who has never delegated a task doesn't need a module on organizational strategy, and a director doesn't need the basics of a weekly one-to-one.

Why many leadership programs don't change much

Most leadership programs fail for predictable reasons:

• Too much theory, too little practice. Participants learn models and frameworks but never rehearse the conversation they dread.
• Everything happens in one block. A three-day workshop is followed by months of nothing, and old habits win.
• The boss is absent. If a participant's own manager doesn't know what they are working on, nobody asks them to apply it.
• No link to real work. Exercises are generic and never connected to the team the person leads on Monday.
• Success is measured by completion. Knowing that most people finished says nothing about whether they lead differently.

The fixes are simple to describe and harder to execute: practice, spacing, manager involvement, real tasks and behavior-based measurement.

The 70-20-10 guideline and what it means for your design

The Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) describes the 70-20-10 rule as a guideline that emerged from its Lessons of Experience research on how executives learn (CCL, “The 70-20-10 Rule for Leadership Development”). Leaders learn from three types of experience, roughly in these proportions:

• 70% from challenging experiences and assignments;
• 20% from developmental relationships (bosses, mentors, peers);
• 10% from coursework and training.

Treat the numbers as a ratio of emphasis, not a formula to audit. The practical message is that formal training is the smallest part, so it has to be good, and it has to connect to the other two. CCL itself recommends building the most effective 10% possible. In a program, that means every learning block comes with a real assignment (the 70) and a conversation with the participant's boss or a peer group (the 20).

The core skills a leadership program should cover

Choose four to six of these for each group, based on what your leaders actually struggle with. A quick training needs assessment will tell you where to start.

1. Setting direction and goals

Leaders need to explain where the team is going and what good looks like. That means clear objectives, roles and responsibilities, and the ability to translate company goals into something each person can act on.

2. Delegation

New managers often keep doing the work themselves because it feels faster. Good delegation means choosing the right task and person, agreeing the expected result and a checkpoint, and then stepping back.

3. Feedback and coaching

Specific, timely feedback (positive and constructive) is the most frequent leadership conversation there is. Coaching takes it further: asking open questions that help people find their own answers, instead of always handing them the solution.

4. Motivation and engagement

Different people are driven by different things. Leaders need to find out what motivates and demotivates each person on the team and act on it, not apply one formula to everyone.

5. Handling conflict and difficult conversations

Underperformance, friction between team members and missed commitments are the conversations leaders postpone. They need a method to mediate and the chance to rehearse it.

6. Building trust and leading change

For mid-level and senior leaders, the focus shifts to building trust across teams, bringing people on board with change and developing the next layer of managers.

7. Leading remote and hybrid teams

Setting goals at a distance, communicating without sharing an office and keeping a dispersed team together are skills of their own. If many of your teams are hybrid, give this its own module.

Leadership training formats compared

Strong programs combine several formats: simulations or e-learning for the knowledge and first practice, live sessions or peer groups to connect it to your context, real assignments to apply it, and coaching for the people who need it most.

How to design a leadership development program in 6 steps

1. Start with a business problem. For example: new managers leave within a year, engagement is low in certain teams, or the company is growing and needs leaders faster than it can hire them.
2. Define the group and the level. One cohort per level, with a clear profile (first-time managers in operations, for example).
3. Pick the behaviors to change. Four to six skills, written as observable behaviors: “gives one piece of specific feedback per week to each team member”.
4. Build the sequence. One skill every two to four weeks: learn, practice, apply on the job, discuss with the boss or peer group.
5. Involve participants' managers. A short briefing at the start and a check-in after each block. This is the cheapest and most underused lever in leadership development.
6. Agree how you will measure it before the first session (see below).

Sample six-month program for first-time managers

Two to three hours of formal learning per month is enough. The real work happens between sessions. For a version focused on line managers, see our guide to management training and development.

How to measure a leadership development program

The Kirkpatrick Model gives you four levels to plan for (Kirkpatrick Partners):

1. Reaction: did participants find it engaging and relevant to their work?
2. Learning: did they gain the skills and the confidence to use them? Simulation results and short before-and-after checks help here.
3. Behavior: do they apply it? Ask their teams in a short pulse survey three to six months later, and ask their managers.
4. Results: look at the indicators the program was meant to move, such as regretted turnover, engagement scores or team performance.

Most programs stop at level 1. Getting to level 3 needs planning from day one, which is why step 6 of the design comes before the first session.

Where Game Strategies fits

Our training catalog includes more than 70 game-based training simulations, many of them on leadership. Each one is a game with a story in which participants make leadership decisions, see the consequences and get personalized feedback:

• Pacific (about 8 hours, six modules) is our full leadership and team management game: stranded on a desert island, participants practice giving the team meaning, building trust, motivating, resolving conflict, delegating, giving feedback, coaching and assessing performance.
• Sahara (about 70 minutes) teaches a six-step delegation process.
• Titan (about 75 minutes) covers what motivates a team and how to keep motivation going.
• Aqua (about an hour) trains positive and constructive feedback across a dozen cases.
• Echo (about 2 hours) runs three simulated coaching sessions: objectives, reality, alternatives and an action plan.
• KAOS (about 45 minutes) gives a method to mediate conflicts in the team.
• Stellar (about 2 hours) is about leading remote teams.
• For mid-level and senior leaders, Heroes Inc. (about 90 minutes) covers leading change and Desdemona (about 90 minutes) building trust.

To rehearse the conversations themselves, AI Role Play lets leaders practice with an AI avatar in real time and get feedback at the end; the scenarios can be adapted to your situations. The games run on our platform or in your LMS (integration or hybrid SCORM), with single sign-on or a QR code, in up to 20 languages depending on the course. The Admin module reports with the Kirkpatrick model, participants get a certificate and every project has a Customer Success Manager. Our manager training page shows how the pieces fit together.

When we are not the right fit: we don't build custom leadership courses around your own competency model, and we don't replace executive coaching for a handful of senior leaders. We fit best as the practice engine of a program, when many leaders need to rehearse the same core skills at their own pace, with data HR can use.

Frequently asked questions

Sources: Center for Creative Leadership, “The 70-20-10 Rule for Leadership Development” (April 2025); Kirkpatrick Partners, “The Kirkpatrick Model”; Game Strategies course pages. Accessed November 2026.