Leadership Skill Gaps: How to Identify and Close Them

Leadership Skill Gaps Can Derail The Best Laid Plans
Training measurement analyses find that leadership skill gaps can be difficult to spot. Organizational culture assessment data tells us that when ill-equipped leaders undermine performance, their impact often shows up indirectly through:

• Missed handoffs.
• Slow decisions.
• Disengaged teams.
• Stalled strategies.

Organizations that treat leadership skill gaps as generic or vague “development needs” instead of measurable performance risks pay for it in:

• Lost change momentum.
• Inconsistent performance results.
• Avoidable turnover of top talent.

The good news is that identifying and closing leadership skill gaps can be far more systematic and objective than most companies make it.  Well-designed leadership assessments (e.g. more than a .50 predictive validity) provide objectives details about leadership readiness, performance, potential, and skill gaps.

Expected Results
On average, leaders who follow assessment-driven leadership development plans:

• Improve skills by 11% in twelve months.
• Are 6 times more likely to be retained and to be seen as a high performer.
• Report a 14% increase in engagement.

5 Proven Steps to Identify and Close Key Leadership Skill Gaps

1. Start With Business Strategy, Not Skills or Personality Traits
   The most common mistake in leadership development is focusing on theoretical core competencies and traits rather than strategy-driven outcomes. Effective leader skill gap identification begins by clarifying what leadership success actually requires given the organization’s unique strategy, operating model, and risk profile.

   Leadership effectiveness is context-dependent and not solved by generic leadership development options. What works in one company may not work in another.  For example, a high-growth technology firm needs very different leadership behaviors than a regulated healthcare system or a mature industrial company.

   Do you have a practical and strategy-driven definition of what it means to be a high performing leader at your company?

2. Use Evidence-Based Assessments, Not Self or Biased Opinions
   Once leadership success criteria are clear, assessments should move beyond self-assessments and opinions. Decades of industrial-organizational research demonstrate that leadership simulations, assessment centers, and work-sample tests are among the strongest predictors of leadership performance because they replicate the complexity of real roles.

   Multi-rater feedback can still add value, but only when used diagnostically rather than as a popularity contest. Patterns matter more than individual scores. When several independent data sources converge on the same gaps — for example, strategic thinking under ambiguity or holding peers accountable — the signal is hard to ignore.

   Are you using proven leadership assessment centers to measure and close key leadership skill gaps?

3. Look for Leadership Gaps That Multiply Business or People Risks
   Not all leadership skill gaps are equal. The most damaging ones tend to amplify organizational risk over time. Common high-impact gaps include weak talent development, poor decision discipline, low learning agility, and avoidance of difficult conversations. Leaders who struggle in these areas can often succeed short-term while quietly undermining a high performance culture.

   Learning agility deserves special attention. Research shows it is one of the strongest predictors of leadership success — especially in new roles or in rapidly changing environments. Leaders who cannot quickly and easily learn, unlearn, and adapt will fall behind regardless of past performance.

   Have you prioritized the leadership competencies matter most to your unique situation?

4. Close Gaps Through Deliberate Practice and Action Learning, Not Training Events
   Closing leadership skill gaps requires more than customized training workshops or inspirational offsites. behavior change happens through highly relevant and focused practice, feedback, and accountability in moving real work forward. Leadership action learning assignments should be intentionally designed to stretch the specific gap while adding strategic business value — i.e., leading a cross-functional initiative, managing a turnaround, or launching a new product.

   Coaching and manager reinforcement matter here. Without follow-through, even accurate diagnosis goes nowhere. Organizations that see sustained improvement tie individual leadership development plans to business outcomes and revisit them consistently.

   Are you using action learning leadership development to build leaders AND execute strategies?

5. Measure ROI and Progress Like Any Other Investment
   Leadership development should be positioned as a strategic performance investment and treated as a change initiative, not an HR activity or training event. When leaders know their development is visible and consequential, improvement accelerates.  That means defining business success metrics and then tracking skill adoption, behavior change, and business impact — e.g., engagement, retention, performance, and execution speed.

   Have you built in enough reinforcement and accountability to create meaningful behavior and performance change?

The Bottom Line
Leadership skill gaps are not soft issues — they are operational and strategy execution risks. Organizations that clearly define leadership success, assess it using evidence-based methods, and close gaps through disciplined practice gain a measurable edge in strategy execution and change resilience. The organizations that avoid this work struggle to perform at their peak.

To learn more about closing leadership skill gaps, download How to Fast Track Your Leaders with Just-in-Time Action Learning

by Tristam Brown: CEO

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.