TD Magazine Article
Leadership training programs receive significant support without yielding results.
Sat Feb 01 2025
For the third consecutive year, HR leaders surveyed for Gartner's Top 5 Priorities for HR Leaders in 2025 named leader and manager development as their top organizational priority. The report's other top priorities are organizational culture, strategic workforce planning, change management, and HR technology. Gartner surveyed more than 1,400 HR leaders from more than five dozen countries for the study.
Three-fourths of respondents reported that managers are overwhelmed with expanding their responsibilities. As a result, 70 percent of respondents believe current leaders and managers are inadequately equipped to effectively develop midlevel leaders, meaning most believe current leadership development approaches are inadequate. For example, only 36 percent of HR leaders find their organization's current leadership development programs effective at preparing leaders for future challenges.
"For organizations to deliver on their goals, managers must be prepared to successfully lead both today and tomorrow," says Mark Whittle, vice president of advisory in Gartner's HR practice. "Though 75 percent of organizations have made significant updates to their leadership development programs, and more than half are increasing spending on leader development, they are not seeing results."
Challenges to expanding talent development practices include that some companies have not fully integrated their strategic planning processes with business planning processes, which hinders a corresponding need for continuous HR transformation in the modern workplace.
To address management training deficits, three-quarters of organizations reported that they have significantly updated their leadership programs and plan to increase spending. Gartner's report notes that traditional TD initiatives such as seminars and lectures can have a negative effect on learners. Instead, the study recommends investing more time in networking events and team-building activities. In fact, according to Gartner's 2024 Leadership Development Leader Survey, leaders who have implemented peer-connection-based learning experiences are 18 percent more likely to be enterprise leaders.
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