The True ROI of Leadership Training, and the Programs That Deliver Measurable Results

Training for leaders is only as good as the action it generates. Organisations must justify the investment in training and ensure it offers a good return on investment (ROI). Figuring out which leadership training programs are the best for a business’s needs is complex. When multiple leaders in a company use the same language, teams have greater clarity and direction, and more support to do their jobs well. The resulting ROI is evident through organisational stability with lower employee churn rates and higher output.

What Leadership Training Is and Why Organisations Invest in It

Providing leaders throughout an organisation with a shared agenda, beliefs and practical skills for navigating day-to-day operations and organisational change is a key function of leadership training.

Organisations invest in leadership development for several reasons. Leadership affects everything an organisation does, since leaders communicate strategy, set priorities, and enable employees to do their jobs effectively. But without a common approach to the best methods, teams may not have certainty about what is expected from one leader to another.

Well-designed programs are application-based, building on leaders’ ability to respond to changes in performance, to make accountability work, and to ensure employees feel supported. Leadership training becomes an integrated and institutionalised process that reflects the organisation’s values.

How to Measure ROI of a Leadership Training Program

Leadership development has the best ROI when organisations capture behavior and performance outcomes beyond attendance or satisfaction, such as new behaviors, quality of execution, employee engagement, and retention.

According to Gallup, organisations with highly engaged teams outperform competitors by 23% in profitability, underscoring the importance of leadership to organisational success. The top leadership training programs achieve results.

The first step in ROI calculation focuses on people’s challenges, such as inconsistent team performance and resistance to change. The next step is to monitor indicators such as engagement scores, internal mobility and performance consistency. Gains are most likely when leaders share a common framework that guides their direction and task support.

Leadership training creates winning scenarios as leaders become consistent, clearly communicate expectations with the team, and continuously execute their work to meet shared objectives.

What to Look for in a Leadership Training Program

Not all leadership training is practical. Organisations need programs that can be scaled across groups of leaders and that can endure beyond the event.

Good leadership development programs focus on a standard, shared language, specific applications, and help support leaders in transferring their learning into the routine work of their organisation. The training can be tailored to provide the leader with more or less structure and support depending on the task being addressed.

Other high-alignment programs, which provide support at the team or group level, embed leadership development into values, define accountability, and enable the group to maintain stability or adapt to change.

Leadership Training Evaluation Criteria

The selected programs were chosen based on several criteria, including demonstrated effectiveness, scalability within the organisation, and a focus on how leaders actually work.

What Are The Top Leadership Training Programs?

The programs below meet the key criteria and aim to equip leaders to lead at scale. Each training option also includes a leadership development component from a slightly different perspective, as indicated by the category.

1. Best for Large Organisations: Situational Leadership® Training Programs

Situational Leadership® training programs help larger organisations create a standard, workable leadership model that is practiced uniformly across organisational levels. This is not a personality-based approach to leadership — it provides a common language and framework for leaders to use to provide the proper levels of direction and support, depending on the Performance Readiness® of the individuals they are leading.

Situational Leadership® training is beneficial within complex organisations with many leaders, each managing multiple employees or teams with varied requirements. The program helps trainees understand their actions, account for them, and execute plans while avoiding the confusion caused by a one-size-fits-all training approach. Participants learn methods to adjust their leadership approach across varied contexts and to align with organisational aims and values.

The programs are developed and delivered by The Center for Leadership Studies as the sole provider of Situational Leadership® Model-based training. The Situational Leadership® Model is widely recognised as the most commonly used leadership model worldwide. Organisations have relied on the system for decades to achieve consistent leadership at scale. From 2016 to 2022, CLS was listed among Training Industry’s Top 20 Leadership Training Companies.

Organisations and businesses that have used the training have experienced increased alignment between leaders and more consistent performance outcomes.

2. Best for Senior Leaders: Harvard Business School Executive Education Programs

Harvard Business School Executive Education programs focus on developing the skills and capabilities of senior leaders who are responsible for setting direction, articulating it, aligning organisations, making decisions and leading through complexity.

Organisations that use Harvard Business School Executive Education programs typically integrate their program experiences into the broader leadership development system and encourage executives to share perspectives on decision-making and business impact. For organisations operating in complex or heavily regulated environments, this consistency reduces leadership fragmentation at the top and supports medium- to long-term alignment across units.

Studies by the Harvard Kennedy School have shown that leadership development programs improve participants’ psychological well-being and can reduce stress. The programs are ideal for organisations that want to build their executive leadership capability in line with their long-term planned goals.

3. Best for Building Practical Management Capability: McKinsey Management Program

Organisations looking for a foundation in leadership and management skills for high-potential employees often turn to the McKinsey Management Program at McKinsey Academy. The program develops management and leadership skills to increase team and organisational performance. The program acts as a base for cross-functional or cross-geographic initiatives. The approach can help mid-level leaders translate strategy into execution.

At the program level, the emphasis should be on practical management skills and on-the-job learning opportunities. In terms of ROI, this is where the firm’s training managers should be able to link learning to output metrics already used by the firm. Some examples include cycle time reduction, decision rights, project handoffs and team priorities. Many organisations can measure results by defining the before-and-after performance on specific deliverables and leadership practice routines.

For externally published proof points, McKinsey shares high-level participation metrics for McKinsey Academy and participant-reported outcomes for specific leadership-building programming. For example, McKinsey has publicly shared that it has enrolled more than 1 million participants in McKinsey Academy and has shared participant outcomes data for leadership-building programming that shows perceived leadership improvement.

4. Best for Enterprise Leadership Pipelines: DDI Leadership Development

DDI Leadership Solutions offers enterprise-level leadership training programs and services. The programs measure and report in ways that keep senior stakeholders’ needs top of mind when choosing a provider. The measurement aspect is incorporated into the model rather than added later. The program also works well when an organisation wants to create consistency in leadership expectations from frontline leaders to the most senior leaders.

DDI’s programs are ROI-compatible, and they avoid the “training felt good” trap by focusing on observable application and organisational-level outcomes. Programs are typically more effective with a rollout plan that includes cohort selection, preprogram baseline, alignment with manager stakeholders and checkpoints for post-program application. DDI encourages companies to tie evaluation to the specific work rather than a generic sentiment.

DDI also publishes quantitative results from its programs and subscription model, including motivation to use skills, value perceptions, retention impact, formal economic impact studies and evaluation findings. These results can inform organisations about what “good” looks like with respect to the benefits they provide through their learning investments, benchmarked against what is reasonable before setting targets and evaluation windows.

Where Leadership Training Programs Deliver the Greatest Value

Leadership development programs deliver the best return when leaders are prepared to implement scalable practices. Training that prepares leaders to use standardised frameworks equips teams to provide a consistent experience in everyday operations and during periods of uncertainty. When searching for leadership development programs, organisations should first look for measurable impact, scalability and organisational fit before investing in programs that create enterprise-wide implications.