Redwood Shores, CA — LSA Global, a leading business consulting, coaching, and training firm that helps growth-oriented organizations align culture and talent with strategy, today announced a new leadership development program design for leading manufacturing company.
The action learning leadership development initiative is designed to raise the bar across four key areas:
Based upon our training measurement research, chances are that your leadership development program design is not not set up to deliver meaningful business results for one uncomfortable reason: They teach leadership skills without changing the leadership habits that drive performance.
Organizations invest heavily in customized training workshops, leadership simulation assessments, and leadership frameworks. Participants leave inspired, armed with new tools and good intentions. Yet months later, project postmortem analyses show that the same problems persist:
The problem is rarely a lack of training. It is ineffective leadership development program design.
The Business Challenge: Turning Operational Managers into Strategic Leaders
This large industrial organization was seeking to transform experienced business unit managers into strategic business leaders.
These managers understood operations, solved complex problems, and delivered against demanding production targets. But senior executives wanted more.
They needed leaders who could:
The challenge was not teaching managers more about leadership. It was changing how they led every day.
Before designing the program, we conducted discovery interviews with 11 leaders to understand the behaviors, obstacles, and performance expectations that mattered most.
The findings revealed three critical development priorities.
3 Leadership Development Program Design Priorities That Drive Performance
Discovery revealed that even experienced managers became overly directive when problems escalated.
The program design therefore emphasized practicing how to remain composed, communicate consistently, establish priorities, and protect time for strategic leadership.
The desired outcome: Leaders who inspire confidence under pressure instead of creating unnecessary dependence.
Managers needed to communicate business priorities, influence stakeholders, resolve recurring problems, and build productive relationships across departments.
The design had participants practice using actual operational challenges, financial information, stakeholder maps, and strategic narratives to make better decisions.
The desired outcome: Better decisions, stronger cross-functional collaboration, and fewer recurring operational problems.
Managers frequently retained ownership of work their teams could perform, limiting both productivity and employee development.
The program design emphasized clear goals and accountabilities, compassionate accountability, psychological team safety, recognition, and succession planning.
The desired outcome: Teams that take ownership, deliver commitments, raise concerns early, and develop future leaders.
Research reinforces the importance of designing leadership development around observable behavior.
These findings challenge organizations to move beyond measuring participant satisfaction toward evaluating skill application and on-the-job performance.
The Bottom Line
Effective leadership development program design begins with business outcomes, identifies the leadership behaviors required to achieve them, and creates action learning opportunities to practice those behaviors using real work. Reinforcement, accountability, and measurable performance expectations must extend beyond the classroom. The goal is not simply to develop more knowledgeable leaders — it is to build leaders whose daily habits produce stronger teams, better strategy execution, and sustainable business results.
Ready to transform your managers and leaders into strategic business owners? Download 5 Warning Signs that Your Managers Are Falling Behind Strategically to learn if your leaders need help.
Tristam Brown is an executive business consultant and organizational development expert with more than three decades of experience helping organizations accelerate performance, build high-impact teams, and turn strategy into execution. As CEO of LSA Global, he works with leaders to get and stay aligned™ through research-backed strategy, culture, and talent solutions that produce measurable, business-critical results. See full bio.
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