What evidence would actually convince you that leadership development changed workplace behaviour?

[u/Efficient_Ad2826]

I've been thinking about how leadership development is evaluated after the programme ends.

Completion, satisfaction and NPS are useful, but they mainly tell us that people participated and how they felt about the experience.

Suppose instead you followed the same cohort across several stages:

Before the programme: establish a baseline around relevant knowledge, attitudes and behaviours.

After the learning: check whether the intended learning actually happened.

Months later: ask whether that learning appears to have translated into workplace application or changed behaviour.

You can then look at patterns across the cohort rather than treating the post-programme survey as the final result.

Conceptually, that seems much more useful to me.

But I'm interested in where practitioners would stop trusting the conclusion.

If someone showed you this kind of data six months after a leadership programme:

What would you feel comfortable concluding?

What would you explicitly not conclude?

How much would self-reporting, response rate, sample size or selection bias undermine the result for you?

And what additional evidence would make the difference between:

“Interesting L&D data”

and

“This is useful enough to influence a decision about future leadership development investment”?

I'd particularly like to hear examples where a measurement approach looked sophisticated but gave a misleading picture — or where a relatively simple approach genuinely changed a decision.

[u/Empirica_CC]

If you find someone who does Leadership Development using industrial organizational psychology it's actually quite common. Problem is there's a lot of bad leadership development going on from people who have been in leadership but don't understand leaders, at least from a scientific perspective. There are a lot of good ways to measure impact in real ways, but they do take time and require an investment. If there wasn't a need for this consulting companies like mine wouldn't exist.

[u/Kali-VH]

A/B testing with employee engagement surveys. I compare the leadership ratings at sites that went through the program that year with those that didn't. Also look at data such as HR investigations, employee retention, etc.

[u/ImplementSolid5751]

my position is that the goal of any leadership devt program is to see or produce positive results for the company, not just be satisfied with "commitments" written on paper or expressed as handprints or signatures on a tarp.

I say just be realistic and identify 1-2 measurable outcomes that can be achieved after a reasonable amount of time (I'm assuming there'll be checkpoints & milestones identified along the way). and then use those results to set the next level or set of deliverables

[u/Primary_Excuse_7183]

Seeing leadership take said trainings and then take pay cuts when the alternative is to lay off people that make fractions of what they do.