Your leadership development program has been running for three months. You've just pulled the latest participation report, and the numbers are well below what you’d hoped for. Fewer than half the managers you invited have attended a session. Some registered but never showed up. Others attended the first session and haven't been back since. And here’s the frustrating part: managers who do participate seem to love it. Their evaluations are positive. They say the content is relevant and the sessions are worth their time. But low participation in leadership development programs can have several causes, and the training itself may not be the problem.
You've put real thought into this program. You worked with stakeholders to identify what managers needed, built the curriculum around those needs, and painstakingly secured leadership support. The point of all that effort was to help managers lead their teams more effectively.
Now your leadership team wants to know why more managers aren't participating, and what you plan to do about it. You have options, of course. You could shorten the sessions, offer them virtually, promote the program more aggressively, or ask senior leaders to reinforce expectations around attendance.
Any one of those changes might help. But if they don't address what's actually keeping managers from participating, attendance will probably stay low, and the organization will have sunk more time and resources without getting any closer to its goal.
Even making attendance mandatory deserves careful thought. Research on voluntary participation in workplace training found that employees who had more choice about attending were more motivated to apply what they learned, and they actually put those lessons to work more often than participants with less choice. Making attendance mandatory might get more managers in the room, but it won't necessarily change what they do once they leave.
So before you make attendance mandatory—or change the program in any other way—it’s worth finding out why managers aren’t participating in the first place.
Why are managers not participating in leadership development?
Back to the report. This time, you notice that participation varies a lot across departments. In some, most managers have attended at least one session, while in others, only a handful have participated. That's worth investigating.
Why are managers showing up in some departments but not others? Are their workloads different? Do supervisors make it easier for managers to attend? Are the challenges managers face in those departments actually reflected in the program’s curriculum?
The differences might also have less to do with the trainings than with the conditions surrounding them. Consider a department where managers are expected to be available to their teams throughout the day. Even managers who value the program will struggle to attend without someone covering their responsibilities. In another department, managers may have more flexibility but see little connection between the curriculum and the situations they face at work.
Both departments have low participation, but for different reasons. In the first, managers may need coverage for their responsibilities so they can attend. In the second, the program may need to better address the challenges managers face. Understanding that difference can help you identify what actually needs to change. And here's another possibility worth considering:
The program may be gaining traction among managers who already have the support and flexibility to participate, while those facing the greatest obstacles stay away.
That distinction really matters. An increase in overall attendance could look encouraging while participation stays low in the very departments where managers have the hardest time getting to training and development. So the question isn't only how many managers are attending. It's also who is able to participate, who isn't, and what explains the difference?
How do you identify barriers to participation?
Your report gives you a starting point. Now you need to understand the experiences shaping the patterns. What happened with those managers who registered but stopped attending? What influenced those who never even signed up? What's different about departments with stronger participation? Some of the answers might already be answered in existing feedback or other organizational data you have. For the rest, you’ll probably need to ask managers directly, including ones who haven't participated.
What you learn could change where you focus your efforts. If managers can't step away from their responsibilities, shortening the sessions probably won’t solve the problem. If they don't see how the program relates to their work, greater flexibility might not persuade them to attend. And if supervisors say they support development yet consistently prioritize everything else, the program is competing with expectations that just don’t match managers’ circumstances.
Several of these factors might be operating at once. Figuring out which ones matter most, and where, can help you decide what to address first. You might discover that the biggest obstacles lie in managers' working conditions, not in the program itself.
Does higher participation lead to better leadership?
Let's say you've identified some barriers and addressed them. More managers are attending, and completion rates are improving. That's progress and it gives you something positive to report to leadership. But it still doesn't settle the larger question.
The organization invested in leadership development to help managers lead their teams more effectively. Are managers doing anything differently as a result? Your evaluations suggest participants find the training valuable. They don’t tell you whether managers have the opportunity and support to put what they’ve learned into practice.
Some managers will have supervisors who encourage them to try new approaches, make time for reflection, and reinforce what the program teaches. Others will return to workplaces where their established expectations make those same approaches difficult to put in practice. A large review of research on training transfer found that the work environment, including the support people receive, is associated with whether they apply their training on the job. What happens after a session can be just as important to investigate as what happens during it.
That creates a real challenge for interpreting the program's results. If managers aren't changing how they lead, is the training failing to equip them with useful skills? Or are they learning skills they don't have the opportunity or support to apply? Those are different challenges. Redesigning the curriculum might address the first, but it will do little to address the second.
A program can be well designed and well received yet struggle to produce change because of what happens outside the training room.
Before you redesign the program, you need to know whether the problem lies in what managers are learning or what happens when they leave the training.
How do you evaluate leadership development programs?
Now let’s return to the original goal: helping managers lead their teams more effectively. What would that look like in practice? Maybe managers are having more useful conversations with employees, setting clearer expectations, or addressing concerns earlier. Those are changes you could explore through managers' accounts of their work, employee feedback, and other evidence about how teams are functioning.
A comprehensive analysis of leadership training research found that leadership programs can improve learning, behavior, and organizational results. But it also found their effectiveness varies with how the training is designed, delivered, and implemented. The researchers also distinguished between whether participants liked the training, whether they learned new skills, whether they applied those skills at work, and whether the training contributed to improvements in organizational performance. Those distinctions matter when you're deciding what success looks like.
Suppose employees in one department report that communication from their managers has improved. Managers in that department also participated in the program. That's encouraging, but how do you know what contributed to the improvement? Perhaps managers are applying what they learned. Perhaps their department has also introduced new communication practices. Or perhaps changes in staffing or workload have made it easier for managers to spend time with their teams.
The same questions come up when you don’t see the improvements you expected. Is the program missing something important? Are managers struggling to apply what they've learned? Or are the outcomes you're looking for unlikely to change within the timeframe you're looking at?
You need to understand the relationship between what the program provides, what managers can actually do with it, and the changes the organization hopes to see. That understanding can lead to a more useful decision than simply declaring the program a success or failure.
What should you change about your leadership development program?
By now, your thoughts about the original participation report have changed. Low attendance may be one problem, but it may not be the only one—or even the most important one. You might need to change how managers access the program, address conditions that prevent them from applying what they’ve learned, or reconsider how you’re measuring its impact. You might also find that parts of the program are working well and should be preserved. That's an important possibility.
Without understanding what's producing the results, you risk changing the parts that work while leaving the real obstacles untouched.
These are the kinds of questions thoughtful program evaluation can help answer. In fact, research on realist evaluation looks beyond whether a program produces results to investigate why it works, for whom, and under what circumstances. That kind of inquiry can help explain why the same program produces different experiences and outcomes across an organization. The same approach can be applied to other organizational initiatives when results fall short of expectations.
Your leadership development program is more than the time and resources invested in it. It's an opportunity to help managers lead better and improve the experiences of the people who depend on them. That's worth getting right.
Before you decide how to get more managers into the program, understand what's keeping them from participating. And before you call it successful, understand what difference it's making.
Not sure what you need to understand next?
Download my free guide, What Are You Trying to Understand? It will help you take stock of what you already know, identify the questions your data can't answer, and decide what you need to investigate before making your next move.