The leadership program that works everywhere, works nowhere

A new financial year. Budgets locked and loaded. And somewhere in that budget, there's a line item for leadership development or culture work. Maybe it's a workshop series. Maybe it's a facilitator coming in for a day. Maybe it's a full program rolled out across your leadership cohort.

Before you sign that contract, one question worth asking: does the person you're engaging understand your business?

Not your values statement. Not your strategic pillars document. Your real business. How it makes money, how it delivers value, what your operational model requires of your people, and where you're trying to take it over the next three years.

If the answer is no, you're about to spend a significant amount of money on a high-fiving muffin fest that produces a blip on performance and nothing more.

The chemist that wasn't broken

I recently engaged in a post by a commentator in the leadership space. A photo of staff restocking shelves in a well-known discount chemist was accompanied by an argument that the business had fundamentally failed its customers. He described a short queue at a single open register while these staff stocked shelves. He labelled it a leadership failure. His argument: a mantra drummed into him at a former employer, copied and pasted onto a business he knows nothing about.

The problem is the business in that photo wasn't broken. It was working exactly as designed.

A discount chemist doesn't compete on customer experience. It competes on range and price. Its customers aren't there for a VIP interaction. They're there because the product they need costs less than it does everywhere else. Staff in the aisles, fast stock turnover, lean service, that is the model. That's what leadership in that business looks like when it's functioning well.

The commentator's advice wasn't wrong because it was poorly delivered. It was wrong because it was built for a different business entirely. He saw a scene, applied a framework he carries everywhere, and called it insight. That's not leadership expertise. That's intellectual copy and paste.

Unfortunately, it's happening in boardrooms and offsite retreats all over the country every single day.

The generic program problem

Most leadership and culture programs are built on the assumption that good leadership looks broadly the same regardless of context. There's a set of competencies. There's a framework. There are some tools. The facilitator delivers it with energy and warmth, people leave feeling motivated and connected, and three months later you're wondering why nothing has changed.

Here's what's happening. The program was designed for a business that doesn't exist. It was designed for a generic organisation with generic challenges and a generic leadership team. It wasn't designed for your operational pressures, your specific culture gaps, your strategic direction, or the particular reason your middle managers keep underperforming in the first place.

"We are committed to excellence in customer service" is not a business context. It's something someone wrote to fill a box on a strategy document. Real business context is understanding whether your model requires leaders who can drive performance through tight process compliance, or leaders who need to build autonomous, high-trust teams capable of making fast decisions in ambiguous situations. Those are not the same leadership challenge. They do not get solved by the same program.

When you invest in leadership development without that level of specificity, you're not developing leadership. You're running a professional development activity. It's a cost with a receipt, not an investment with a return.

Burnout is not a leadership symptom

Let me give you a live example of what happens when culture and leadership advice gets applied without business context.

Burnout. Every organisation is talking about it. The standard response, almost universally, is resilience training. Bring someone in to teach the team how to manage stress, how to set boundaries, how to protect their energy.

Burnout isn't a leadership symptom. It's a culture symptom. Resilience training applied to a burnout problem is like giving someone better shoes to run on a broken leg.

If "always on" is how your business wins, which is a real strategic choice, the fundamental assumption of resilience training is flawed from the beginning. You're training people to cope with a condition you have no intention of changing, and calling it investment in your people.

Own your culture. Recruit to it. Reward it. Be honest about what working in your organisation requires. The gap between what you reward and what you say is exactly where good people quietly leave. No amount of resilience workshops closes that gap. It just delays the resignation letter.

The same logic applies to courageous conversations training, psychological safety programs, and every other intervention that treats a culture problem as a leadership skill deficit. If the culture doesn't support the behaviour you're training, the training evaporates. You've spent money treating a symptom while the cause sits completely unaddressed.

Surface level is expensive

It is remarkable how often organisations invest in leadership and culture work at a surface level of business understanding. The facilitator reads the annual report. They might even sit in on a leadership team meeting. They do a pre-engagement survey. Then they deliver something that could have been delivered, more or less unchanged, to the organisation next door.

That's not their fault entirely. That's what the industry has normalised. Leadership development has been positioned as a people function, not a business function. So the rigour applied to understanding the business before designing the intervention is roughly the same rigour applied to ordering the catering.

The organisations that get a return on this investment are the ones who demand more. They don't accept a program that wasn't built for them. They insist it acknowledges how the business makes money, how the operating model influences the way performance is achieved, and what the real leadership gaps are - not the easy to name, nice to have ones. The gaps costing them. It must reflect their business, not a version of it that's been tidied up for a pre-engagement conversation.

What business-grounded leadership and culture work looks like

It starts before a single workshop is designed. It starts with understanding the operational model, the commercial pressures, the culture as it exists on the ground rather than as it's described in a values statement. It means being willing to name uncomfortable things. Not "we need to improve psychological safety." What does that mean in this organisation? Where is it breaking down? What's it costing you?

It means designing leadership capability around what this business needs its leaders to deliver, not around a generic competency framework built for a completely different industry.

It also means being honest about the future direction of the business and whether the current leadership culture can get you there. A culture designed for where you were five years ago is often the exact thing standing between you and where you're trying to go.

Before you spend the budget

A new financial year is a clean slate. It's also a genuine opportunity to make a different decision about how you invest in your business.

Before I started consulting on leadership and culture, I spent almost 20 years in senior finance roles. Building strategy, policy and systems to support organisational objectives. That's the difference I bring to my work with organisations - strategic business skills that ensure investment in culture and leadership provides a tangible return on investment. Understanding the business is imperative.

If it doesn't acknowledge your business - its model, your people and your direction - a blip on performance is the best you can expect from it.

Make sure this year's investment moves a number you report on.

If that's the standard you want to hold your next engagement to, I'm worth a conversation.