Developmental leadership program is a phrase worth taking literally. Most programs develop the leader in the room. Far fewer, however, develop that leader’s ability to grow anyone else. So the investment stops with one cohort. A year later, the organization is back where it started, looking for the next group to send. If you’ve funded a program like that, you know the feeling. The participants came back energized. Meanwhile, the people who report to them noticed nothing.
Fortunately, there’s a different kind of program, and it’s built on a different measure of success. A developmental leader judges their own performance by the growth of the people around them. A program built on that idea produces something a workshop can’t: leaders who create more leaders. This guide explains what a developmental leadership program includes and the behaviors it builds. Then it covers why the approach is the shortest route to a leadership pipeline, and how to measure whether it’s working. Along the way, we’ll show where the assessment, the practice, and the second measurement fit, because that’s what separates a program from an event.
What a developmental leadership program is.
Start with the leader, then the program. A developmental leader is someone who measures their own success by how much the people around them grow. In practice, that definition covers a peer who mentors a new colleague as fully as it covers a vice president who builds a bench. The title doesn’t matter. The habit does.
In fact, most organizations already have a few of these leaders, and usually nobody has named them. They’re the manager whose former reports keep getting promoted, or the senior engineer whom every new hire is quietly routed to. A developmental leadership program takes what those people do by instinct and makes it teachable, repeatable, and measurable across the whole organization.
From there, the program follows. A developmental leadership program is a structured effort that teaches leaders to grow the people they lead, and then measures whether those people actually grew. Above all, notice the second half. Most programs stop at the participant’s own scores. By contrast, a developmental program looks one level down, at the direct reports. That’s where the results of the leader’s new habits show up first.
How it differs from a standard program.
Generally, a standard program teaches skills to a leader: communication, delegation, giving feedback. A developmental leadership program teaches the same skills with a different purpose. Instead of “how do I communicate better?” the question becomes “how do I help this person on my team communicate better?” Certainly, the content overlaps. Still, the target moves from the leader to the leader’s people. Consequently, the program’s value multiplies through the team instead of ending with one person.
If you’re still deciding what kind of program to fund, start with our guide to choosing a leadership development program. It covers the main types and how to compare them. This post picks up where that one leaves off. Here, we assume instead that you want the type that keeps paying after the cohort ends.
One more distinction matters for buyers. A developmental leadership program is not a mentoring scheme, although mentoring can be part of it. Mentoring pairs a senior person with a junior one, usually outside the reporting line. A developmental program changes how every leader treats the people who already report to them. The first is an add-on. The second is a change in the job itself.
The behaviors a developmental leadership program builds.
Developmental leadership sounds abstract until you name the behaviors. In practice, five habits do most of the work. Equally important, every one of them can be observed by the people on the receiving end.
- Explains the reason before the decision: Leaders who share the why teach people how to think, not only what to do. As a result, the team starts making the same calls without being asked.
- Hands over decisions early: Giving someone ownership slightly before they feel ready is how capability grows. Meanwhile, the leader stays close enough to help, but the decision belongs to the other person.
- Asks before telling: A question builds judgment; an answer builds dependence. Leaders who ask questions before offering answers develop stronger decision-makers on their teams. The habit takes discipline, since telling is faster.
- Gives feedback weekly, not annually: Small, frequent feedback changes behavior; a yearly review records it. Accordingly, the developmental leader treats every one-on-one as a feedback conversation.
- Makes growth part of the agenda: Development isn’t a separate meeting. Instead, it sits inside project reviews, one-on-ones, and hard conversations, where the real practice happens.
Why behaviors, not topics, are the unit.
Topics fill a curriculum. Behaviors, on the other hand, change a team. For example, “delegation” is a topic; “handed a decision to a direct report this week” is a behavior. Because a behavior can be observed, it can be practiced, counted, and reported. A developmental leadership program should define its outcomes as observable behaviors, because behaviors can be measured and topics cannot. In short, that’s the difference between a program you can defend at budget time and one you can only describe.
In our model, two of the four elements map directly to this list. First, Accelerate is built on exceptional transparency and clear expectations, which is the first behavior above. Second, Elevate is built on challenging others to grow and handle more, which is the second and third. Consequently, when a leader’s scores on those elements rise, the people around them are the first to notice.
Why developmental leadership programs build a pipeline.
Here’s the multiplier that makes this type of program different. One leader who develops five people produces more leadership capacity than five people sent to a course. The course ends. The leader, however, keeps going, with the next hire and the one after that. Developmental leadership programs build a leadership pipeline because every leader who learns to develop others becomes a source of new leaders. For that reason, the return compounds instead of expiring.
Organizations already know they need this and rarely get it. According to LinkedIn’s 2025 Workplace Learning Report, 71% of organizations offer leadership training. Yet only 15% of employees say their manager helped them build a career plan in the past six months. That figure fell five points from the prior year. Similarly, half of the professionals surveyed said managers lack proper support for developing their people. So the training exists. The developing doesn’t.
That gap is the opportunity. Organizations don’t need more training hours; most have plenty. What they need is for the hours to change how managers spend the next one-on-one. A developmental leadership program aims at exactly that conversion, from what a leader learned to what a direct report experienced.
The cost of not growing your own.
Now consider what happens when the pipeline runs dry. Wharton professor Matthew Bidwell studied seven years of hiring and promotion data at one large firm. He published the results as Paying More to Get Less in Administrative Science Quarterly in 2011. In that study, external hires were paid about 18% more than people promoted into the same jobs. Even so, they received lower performance ratings for their first two years and left at higher rates. Promoting leaders from within costs less and produces better early performance than hiring leaders from outside. Therefore, a developmental leadership program is how you make sure there’s someone to promote.
The pipeline starts lower than most programs look. Our founder, Chris Sprague, PhD, has written that leadership starts before you get the title, and the data backs him up. Indeed, the peer who already helps colleagues think through problems is a developmental leader without the role. Our Enterprise page describes what it takes to build a leadership pipeline that scales. Notably, it begins by including those people, not by waiting until they’re promoted.
How to build a developmental leadership program that includes everyone.
Whether you’re designing a program or evaluating one, the same five steps separate a developmental program from a standard one. Then each step below can be checked against a provider’s proposal or your own plan. A developmental leadership program includes leaders at every layer of the organization, because the leadership pipeline begins with people who lead without a title. That’s also the step most providers skip.
Five steps to a program that grows leaders.
- Baseline every leader, peers included: Measure each person’s current leadership behaviors before the program begins. Also include contributors who lead without a title, since they’re the pipeline’s first stage.
- Choose two or three behaviors per leader, not a curriculum: Personal scores show where each person should start. For instance, a leader who already explains decisions well doesn’t need that module. They need the next one.
- Pair leaders working on the same behavior: Peer accountability outlasts reminder emails. For example, when two leaders are both practicing “ask before telling,” they hold each other to it.
- Practice inside real one-on-ones: The developmental behaviors above all happen in conversations the leader already has. Therefore, practice belongs there too, not in a classroom.
- Re-measure the leader and the people they lead: After enough time for habits to form, survey both. The clearest evidence that a developmental leadership program worked is a change in how direct reports rate their leader, not a change in how the leader rates themselves. Compare the two sets of scores, and then adjust each leader’s next behavior.
For distributed teams and multiple sites.
Developmental leadership is hardest to build where leaders rarely see one another. For example, an operations organization with plants, regions, or shifts can’t rely on a single cohort in a single room. Instead, it needs every site leader practicing the same few behaviors and measured the same way. We make that case for consistent leadership across sites and shifts on our Operations page. Ultimately, it’s the strongest argument for a program that runs inside the work rather than away from it.
If step one sounds like the hard part, it isn’t. Our 20-statement survey takes 4 to 5 minutes and produces scores across the Foundation, People, and Organizational layers. As a result, a developmental leadership program can start with data this week, for everyone at once.
Measuring whether a developmental leadership program worked.
Finally, a developmental program has a built-in test that other programs lack. In other words, if leaders learned to grow people, the people will say so. Here’s how the cycle runs in our approach, which is grounded in our founder’s book, Lead Without Limits: How Inspirational Leaders Make the Improbable Possible.
First, each leader takes the survey and invites the people who experience their leadership. At the People layer, that means all direct reports. Next, their answers produce a stakeholder score beside the leader’s self-score on the My Enluma Compass dashboard. Stakeholder scores from direct reports are the most direct measure of whether a leader is developing the people on their team. Where the two scores differ, the leader has found the behavior to practice first. You can see how stakeholder scores show growth on our How It Works page.
From scores to a habit, and from a habit to a mentor.
Then the scores open three development paths. The AI Coach turns a priority behavior into practical steps and lets the leader rehearse a hard conversation before having it. Meanwhile, Community pairs leaders working on the same development statement, which is step three above, built in. Finally, AI Courses go deeper on the topics tied to each person’s scores. Altogether, it takes 20 to 30 minutes a week, inside meetings the leader already has.
Later, both the leader and their direct reports take the survey again. We recommend at least six months between retakes so new habits have time to show. A developmental leadership program proves its value when the second measurement shows direct reports rating their leader higher on the behaviors the leader practiced. For an organization, those scores roll up into a view of which teams are growing leaders and which aren’t yet.
Over a longer horizon, Mastery Levels close the loop. Specifically, leaders who sustain their growth can work toward accreditation and eventually qualify to mentor others. In other words, the program’s last step is the developmental leader’s whole purpose: a leader who is now growing the next one.
Final Thoughts
A program that develops leaders ends when the cohort does. A program that develops developers, though, doesn’t end at all. That’s the whole case for building on developmental leadership. Teach a leader to grow one person, and measure it through that person’s eyes. Then you’ve built something that keeps producing after the budget line closes.
If you’re weighing a developmental leadership program for your organization, bring us the pipeline question. Then tell us where your next leaders should come from and how you’ll know they’re ready. After that, Talk to Our Team, and we’ll walk through what measuring leaders through their teams would look like for you. If you lead a team and want to start on your own, you can take the 20-statement survey on our Individual page today.
The best leaders you’ll ever have are the ones your current leaders grow. Give them the program that makes it their job.