Quick Summary:
A truly custom leadership development program reflects an organization’s culture, leadership expectations, real-world challenges, and the way leaders actually work. It goes beyond generic leadership training by defining what effective leadership looks like in that organization and reinforcing those behaviors through shared language, relevant examples, leadership standards, career development, and senior leader involvement.
Early on, when I was teaching leadership classes, someone pulled me aside after a workshop.
“Kara, can I ask you something in private?”
Of course, I said.
Then they asked how they were supposed to lead the way we had just described, curious, people-first, collaborative, when their own manager modeled none of it.
I didn’t have a clean answer at the time. We talked for a long while, and I’m still not sure I helped. But the question stayed with me, mostly because it kept coming up in classes. And it wasn’t just mine, I would hear it from my fellow facilitators. Different people. Different rooms. The same question.
Eventually, I arrived at what has become my answer. I call it “do it anyway.”
“Do it anyway” means that good leadership (treating your people with respect) must be practiced even when the leadership above you isn’t modeling it. There will be seasons in your career when you are surrounded by exceptional examples, and there will be seasons when you aren’t. Don’t let the quality of leadership skills around you determine the quality of leadership skills you bring to others.
But “do it anyway” is not an organizational strategy. The goal is to limit how often a participant has to ask a facilitator that question at all, and to replace it with a different sentence: “I see examples of what you’re teaching in my own leaders, and it is so impactful to me, my team, and the organization.”
Over the years, working on programs and listening to leaders all over the country and world even, I have learned that leadership development cannot be separated from the culture it lives in.
And that is why leadership development is culture design and, therefore, will always need to be custom because culture (the one and organization has by default or the one they aim for) is unique to every group.
What makes a leadership development program
truly custom?
Customization goes beyond changing examples or adding an organization’s branding to generic leadership training. A truly custom program defines what effective leadership looks like within that organization and then builds the language, expectations, examples, and reinforcement around it.
And if we follow this thread, then the work of leadership development is never just a class; the work is building a system. The organizations that get lasting results build that system deliberately. Here are a few ideas we’ve seen work well over the years.
1. Define What Leadership Looks Like Here
One way to define what leadership looks like is to create a “How We Lead Here” statement: a short statement paired with a plain list: how we collaborate, how we make decisions, how we talk to each other, how we handle mistakes, and what we don’t tolerate.
It takes the invisible social norms and makes them explicit and shared, so people aren’t guessing at the standard or absorbing it only from whoever they happen to report to. Once it is written down, you can teach it, hire to it, promote it, and hold people to it.
In practice: facilitate a session and co-create a one-page “How We Lead Here” with your leaders, reference it in every session, and build it into onboarding, training, reviews, company communications, and promotion criteria.
2. Integrate the Language and the Frameworks
Almost every leadership development program touches the same core people skills: communication, coaching, motivation, delegation, change management, strategy, collaboration, conflict management, etc.
Streamline the models behind them, so everyone is working from the same playbook. If you teach Crucial Conversations, use it everywhere. If you use the Thomas-Kilmann conflict model, use it everywhere.
Those models create a shared language, and that’s where the magic happens – when it shows up in how people talk, in meetings, in reviews, and in the hallway, not in a vocabulary that exists only inside the training room.
In practice: pick one model per skill, commit to it across every level and team, and build the organization’s real scenarios and stories into the learning itself.
3. Use Your Organization's Own Stories
Every company has them: the legendary save, the deal that fell apart and then paved way to a transformational idea, the leaders still quote, the failure that taught everyone a crucial lesson.
Integrate those stories instead of borrowed case studies.
A story people actually lived stops being theory and becomes, “Oh, that’s what happened with so-and-so,” and it lands in a way a generic example never will.
In practice: invite senior leaders to talk about leading people-first and the results it created, or about learning through a mistake, what the story was and how it shaped the organization.
4. Connect Leadership Development to Career Growth
Engagement soars when leaders can see how leadership development, their work, and career growth connect.
When growth is clearly tied to advancement, the program stops feeling like an extra thing and starts being the way up. People will become proud to showcase growing their leadership skills.
And you have a common language and skilled management pipeline which is always a plus.
In practice: highlight achievements in the company newsletter, add badging to the LMS, and yes, I’m a big fan of shirts.
5. Define and Reinforce Leadership Standards
A culture is only as strong as the worst behavior it tolerates. That makes clear leadership standards an important part of a custom leadership development program.
I think the mistake every organization has made or is currently making is promoting the high-performing individual contributor that also acts as a human bulldozer into management. The thought is that the high performer will duplicate their success. Work would be so easy if that strategy worked, but unfortunately, this common scenario is that the high performer forgets they need to learn a new set of skills and sometimes (if not always) wreaks havoc on the culture, which ends up negating their once big flashy numbers of that individual.
Research from Harvard Business School found that keeping one toxic employee out of an organization can be worth more than hiring a star performer.
But here’s the part that sounds strange: a lot of the time, people don’t know they’re being jerks – a jerk doesn’t have a pathway out or a firm definition. I like to use the mindset of a culmination of accidental leadership mistakes. There are still people out there that think leadership is an innate skill, so why would they go learn a new field if they don’t know one exists?
So that’s why definitions and clarity need to be created and understood.
Introducing something like Radical Candor gives everyone the language, so “obnoxious aggression” becomes something you can name instead of a personality everyone tiptoes around. Communicating in a radically candid way where you are being direct and talking to others like they are equals becomes standard.
A strong 360 feedback process lets leaders see for themselves that their communication isn’t working as well as they think.
Hopefully you can even help jerks turn their behavior around and use their strengths for the good of the organization.
In practice: give everyone a shared model and vocabulary like Radical Candor, use 360s, teach leaders of leaders how to spot and coach jerk behavior, and hold the standard evenly, all the way to the top.
6. Involve Senior Leaders in Leadership Development
Senior leader involvement reinforces that leadership development is an organizational expectation, not simply an HR or L&D initiative. I’ll be honest, this one can feel like a pipe dream, and your leadership-facilitator friend over here understands that. But it is hard to describe how impactful it is on the rare occasions it happens. I had a senior leadership group last year that attended every session and coaching session together, stayed engaged, and completed their assignments for six months straight. That is almost unheard of. The reason? Their VP was doing the same, right alongside them.
When the people at the top learn alongside everyone else, raw and unpolished, it tells the room the whole thing is real and important.
Too often, leadership development gets delegated. Leaders approve the budget, announce the initiative, and then disappear while everyone else attends the sessions.
The employees see this. Again, culture is what we observe, not what is on the wall. Whether anyone intends it or not, the message becomes: this is something you need to learn, not something we need to learn.
People watch what leaders practice far more than they listen to what leaders promote.
When a senior leader sits in the room and says, “I’m working on this too,” the learning stops being an HR initiative and starts becoming something more.
In practice: have leaders attend the sessions, be a part of the assignments, participate in discussions, and/or publicly share what they are working on in their own leadership.
Custom Leadership Development Is
About Building the Culture
I want to be very clear that we can glean inspiration from many different experiences at work and in life. If you are running an off-the-shelf leadership program right now, it could introduce one concept to one leader that could completely positively impact a team. My view is the more the merrier, but if you have the opportunity, try a few experiments in your system of learning.
The best leadership program isn’t the one people just remember. It’s the one that changes conversations, the words people use, the feeling the employees have on a Monday morning.
When we do this work well, we stop asking people to lead against the culture.
We stop asking them to do it anyway.
Instead, we build a culture where leaders at every level, including the most senior ones, are learning, practicing, and growing together.
And that is the big why of custom leadership development work.
Sources: McKinsey, “Why Leadership-Development Programs Fail”; Center for Creative Leadership, “Make Learning Stick”; Harvard Business School research on toxic workers, via Harvard Business Review; Fast Company on leadership-development spending.
What to Read Next
These articles continue exploring whether custom leadership development is right for your organization.
A Practical Guide to Building Leadership Development Programs That Stick
Ready to Build a Leadership Development
Program That Fits Your Organization?
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Frequently Asked Questions About
Custom Leadership Development
What makes a leadership development program custom?
A leadership development program is truly custom when it reflects how leadership works within a specific organization. That includes the organization’s culture, leadership expectations, shared language and frameworks, real-world challenges, and examples. Rather than simply teaching generic leadership skills, a custom program defines and reinforces what effective leadership looks like within that organization.
How is custom leadership development different from off-the-shelf leadership training?
Off-the-shelf leadership training typically teaches leadership concepts and skills that can apply across many organizations. Custom leadership development connects those concepts to the organization’s own culture, expectations, language, stories, and challenges. Established leadership models can still be used, but they are applied in ways that make the learning relevant to how leaders actually work within the organization.
Why does organizational culture matter in leadership development?
Organizational culture matters because leaders learn from more than what is taught in a leadership program. They also learn from the behaviors they see modeled, rewarded, promoted, and tolerated every day. Leadership development is more likely to influence behavior when what is taught in the program is reinforced by the organization’s leaders and culture.
