An emerging leaders programme is usually aimed at people who are about to lead, or have just started. Some organisations call it a future leaders programme, others a leadership development programme for high potentials. The label matters less than the job it has to do: help people behave like leaders before the role, or its first difficult month, tests them.
That’s a behaviour job, not a knowledge job. Most of this page follows from that.
Who is an emerging leaders programme for?
People who will soon be relied on by others in a new way, and who still have room to practise before that reliance is fully on them.
Be careful how you choose them. A large study of sales firms by Benson, Li and Shue found companies tended to promote their best salespeople, and those people tended to become weaker managers. It’s one industry, so read it as a warning rather than a rule. Strong performance in the current job tells you someone is good at the current job. It doesn’t tell you they’ll be good at leading the people who do it.
So ask nominating managers for evidence that looks forward. Does this person already help others? Do colleagues bring them problems? Have they handled a disagreement well? And ask the candidates whether they actually want to lead. Someone nominated as a reward for good work, who doesn’t want the role, will be hard to develop.
What should a future leaders programme include?
The strongest single source here is a meta-analysis by Christina Lacerenza and colleagues, covering 335 independent samples of leadership training. It found leadership training more effective than earlier estimates suggested, across reactions, learning, behaviour at work and results. It also found that some design choices were associated with better outcomes: a needs analysis, feedback, multiple delivery methods (especially practice), spaced sessions, an on-site location, and face-to-face delivery that isn’t self-administered.
Turned into a programme, that looks something like this:
- A needs analysis that reaches each person. Not only what the organisation needs from its future leaders, but what each participant does least often now. Finding each leader’s focus before the first session means they arrive with something specific to work on.
- Fewer topics, practised properly. Delegation, feedback, setting expectations, handling disagreement, leading through change. Choose the ones your needs analysis points to, not all of them.
- Practice built in, not bolted on. Rehearsal in the room, then real attempts at work.
- Feedback on what they actually did, from a facilitator, a peer, their manager and, where possible, the people on the receiving end.
- Sessions spread over weeks or months, with the working days in between treated as part of the programme.
- Their own manager involved, before the programme starts and after each session.
Notice what isn’t on the list: more content. A long syllabus looks thorough when you present it to a sponsor. In practice it mostly means less time for each leader to practise anything.
Why does practice between sessions matter so much?
Because the session isn’t where the behaviour has to show up. The working week is.
This is what L&D people call learning transfer: whether what was learned gets used at work. Blume and colleagues’ meta-analysis of 89 transfer studies found that factors like motivation and a supportive work environment had stronger relationships with transfer for open skills, such as leadership, than for closed skills, such as learning a software package. There’s no single right way to run a difficult meeting, so a leader has to adapt what they learned to the person in front of them. That adapting only happens at work.
A separate review of 107 management training evaluations, by Taylor, Russ-Eft and Taylor, found transfer was greater when training included opportunities for practice.
So the gaps between sessions are the programme’s most valuable time, and in many programmes they’re empty. Give each leader one behaviour to work on, a short prompt for using it in a conversation they’re already going to have, and a simple way to note what happened. Then open the next session with what they tried. Moving practice into the workplace sets out how, and the twelve levers of transfer show which parts sit with the organisation rather than the programme.
How long should a leadership development programme run?
Long enough for leaders to practise between sessions, more than once.
Lacerenza’s review found that spaced sessions were associated with better outcomes and that duration made a difference. It doesn’t give a right number of weeks, and neither will we. Here’s a practical test instead: between each pair of sessions, can every participant name a real occasion when they’ll use what they’ve just covered? If the gap is too short for that occasion to arrive, it’s too short.
How do you show a programme’s impact honestly?
Start by being clear about what self-reports can and can’t tell you.
Taylor, Russ-Eft and Taylor compared ratings of transfer from different people. Managers’ ratings of their own improvement showed the largest effects and the most variation. Ratings from peers, and especially from the people who reported to them, showed much smaller effects. Blume’s review found a related problem: when the same source supplied both sides of a measure, the relationships looked stronger than they were.
That doesn’t make self-report useless. It makes it one kind of evidence, to be labelled as such. A picture you can defend has three layers:
- What each leader practised, and when. A dated record, not an attendance list.
- What they say changed, in specific terms: what the other person now does or says differently.
- A second account where you can get one, from a manager, a peer or the people they lead.
Sponsors are right to ask. Gartner reported in October 2024 that 75% of organisations had made significant updates to their leadership development programmes and were not seeing results. Promising more than your evidence supports is how a programme loses its credibility. Showing the impact of leadership development goes further into what you can realistically gather.
Where does trust fit in a leadership development programme?
Underneath most of it.
Trust is someone’s confidence in you with something they care about. Much of an emerging leader’s new job is earning that confidence from people who now depend on their decisions. Delegation works when the person believes you’ll back them. Feedback lands when they believe you have their interests in mind. Change goes better when people believe what you say.
That gives a programme a practical anchor. Trust Leader works from twenty behaviours that strengthen trust, grouped under the five Trust Questions. For people stepping into leadership, a few come up again and again:
- Set and confirm clear expectations before work begins.
- Only agree to what you can realistically deliver and control.
- Address issues directly with the person involved.
- Apply the same standards in tone, decisions and communication across people and situations.
Each one is something another person can see you do, which makes it something a leader can practise and you can ask about. They sit alongside whatever leadership model you already teach, and how the trust behaviours fit your leadership model shows where they overlap.
What should you ask a provider before you buy?
Five questions sort most proposals quickly:
- How will you find out what each participant needs to work on, before the first session?
- What will participants practise between sessions, and with whom?
- How will their own managers be involved?
- What evidence will we have at the end, and which parts of it are self-reported?
- What won’t you be able to tell us?
The last one is the most revealing. A provider who can answer it honestly is worth listening to on the rest.
Where this fits
The Trust Leader Hub carries the between-sessions part. Your sessions set the focus. Each leader uses the Self-Assessment, or a Trust Map for one relationship that matters, to choose one behaviour. They get short activities for it, practise in real work and record what happened. You see their progress, and you can download a Cohort Impact Report for the group, with no individual rows. It shows what leaders practised and reported, and how their own view moved. It’s reported movement, not proof.
If you run a named programme, you can discuss a 90-day pilot with a real cohort of 10 to 15 leaders.