{"id":81010,"date":"2026-08-19T00:21:28","date_gmt":"2026-08-19T04:21:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/world.edu\/?p=81010"},"modified":"2026-08-19T00:21:28","modified_gmt":"2026-08-19T04:21:28","slug":"leadership-development-programs-what-doesnt-work-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/world.edu\/leadership-development-programs-what-doesnt-work-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Leadership development programs \u2013 what doesn\u2019t work? (Part 1)"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I\u2019ve had a beef with leadership development programs ever since I knew what they were.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure what triggered this. It could be the fact that back in high school, when I was a senior, we had a \u2018leadership day\u2019 that was held at a venue that wasn\u2019t our usual school campus. Exciting, right? The only thing I remember from that day is that the facilitator at one point told us to look at our peers to the left and to the right of us. He then said, \u201cOne out of every five of you will be dead by 30 years of age\u201d. I think he thought it was a galvanising thing to say, to push home the\u00a0carpe diem<\/em><\/a>\u00a0message. For me, it has fused leadership and mortality ever since.<\/p>\n

Fast forward a few decades.<\/p>\n

I have been in a fair number of leadership workshops, convened some of them myself, and been a participant in a year-long gender diversity in leadership program. I wouldn\u2019t count any of these experiences as particularly illuminating or motivating for me. If anything, they made me feel more alienated from the idea of leadership and affirmed my evasion of institutional leadership roles. In some ways, I\u2019m a weird fish because I was the convenor of a research network from my ECR (Early Career Researcher) days, which was a leadership role within the field. I\u2019ve written before about\u00a0my ambivalent relationship with ambition<\/a>, and I viewed aspiring to (institutional) leadership as an example of this. For me, it was one of those situations where, if someone\u2019s desperately wanting to be seen as a leader, they may not be the best leader.<\/span><\/p>\n

Wondering whether it was just my jaundiced view or a more widely shared perspective, I crowdsourced from the Research Whisperer community and surveyed their experiences of leadership development programs.<\/p>\n

The twenty responses were more enlightening about what constitutes admirable leadership than any leadership programs I had attended. They gave light and shade to the things in programs that didn\u2019t work (and why that might be), as well as talking about the most beneficial aspects of them. All the caveats in the world about this survey. As I flagged at the beginning of the survey itself: \u201cThis is not a formal study or research project \u2013 it\u2019s for a blogpost (or series if the response is big enough).\u201d The responses were anonymous unless people indicated they were happy to be identified and provided their name.<\/p>\n

The twenty responses came from academics who were located in Australia and the UK. One considered themselves an Early Career Researcher, 12 identified as Mid Career Researchers, 5 said they were Senior Researchers, and 2 did not answer. I did not have a \u2018gender\u2019 question in the survey but many of the respondents flagged that the leadership program they participated in was for women or gender diverse staff.<\/p>\n

All respondents attended the leadership programs on a voluntary basis, with some indicating that they were \u2018strongly encouraged\u2019 by managers and more senior staff. Reasons for participating in the programs ranged from curiosity about what their university meant by \u2018leadership\u2019 to planning for promotion applications and being nominated by others.<\/p>\n

Overall, 50% of respondents thought the program they attended was \u2018Not useful\u2019 or \u2018Very not useful\u2019. 25% thought it was \u2018Useful\u2019 or \u2018Very useful\u2019. The remainder were neutral.<\/p>\n

In the rest of this post, I share what folks liked and disliked about the programs they participated in. I\u2019ve summarised some of the elements and cut\u2019n pasted some of the more substantive comments. Some of the programs discussed were single day events, others were months-long programs with multiple workshops and other elements.<\/p>\n

What people appreciated<\/h3>\n

The elements of the leadership programs that folks said were valuable are:<\/p>\n