Things go quiet after a programme for ordinary reasons. Leaders go back to full diaries. Nobody is quite sure what they were meant to try first. Extra exercises feel like homework on top of the job. And L&D, often one or two people, has already moved on to the next cohort.
How do you follow up after a leadership programme?
Give every leader three things before the last session ends:
- One next step. A behaviour to practise and the moment to use it. Not a list of takeaways.
- One date. When someone will ask how it went. Thirty days is a good default.
- One manager conversation. Ten minutes where the leader tells their manager what they’re working on.
That’s the whole structure. It’s small on purpose, because follow-up that takes a lot of effort is the first thing to drop.
Why do things go quiet?
Mostly because nothing at work asks for the new behaviour.
Brian Blume and colleagues reviewed 89 studies of training transfer. Support at work, especially from a person’s manager, was among the factors most related to whether training was used. That’s why the manager conversation is in the structure above. It costs ten minutes and it changes what the leader expects to be asked about.
How specific should the next step be?
Specific enough that the leader would know the moment it arrives.
“Delegate more” never arrives. “When the Q1 plan comes in on Tuesday, I’ll hand the supplier section to Priya and agree a check-in rather than rewriting it myself” does. Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran pooled 94 tests of plans written this way, naming when, where and how. They worked noticeably better than holding the intention alone. Those studies weren’t about leadership, but the lesson carries: attach the plan to a situation, not a virtue.
How do you keep follow-up manageable with a small team?
Don’t chase people one by one. Build the follow-up into things that already happen.
- Use existing one-to-ones. The manager conversation can be the first five minutes of one.
- Ask everyone the same few questions on the same date, in writing.
- Run one short group review at around 30 days, rather than a call with every leader.
- Look at the answers together, as a group, before deciding who needs more support.
What should you ask at the follow-up?
- What did you try, and when?
- What happened? How did the other person respond?
- What got in the way?
- What will you try next?
The third question is the one people skip, and it’s often the most useful. It tells you what the programme can’t fix on its own: workload, a manager who doesn’t model the behaviour, or no real chance to use it.
What can follow-up show, and what can’t it?
It shows what leaders tried and what they noticed. It’s their account, so treat it as evidence of practice, not proof of behaviour change. For a fuller view, see how to show the impact of leadership development.
How does Trust Leader help?
In the Trust Leader Hub, each leader finds the behaviours to work on, practises them through short activities in real work, and records a dated Reflection after each one. Check-ins at 14, 30 and 60 days ask what they’re doing differently, and the Hub sends the reminders, so the follow-up has a shape you don’t have to build yourself.