Why Now? Five Triggers Reshaping Leadership Development Investments
In every new client discovery conversation, I ask a simple question:
“Why now?”
Why is leadership development a priority now? What changed? What is happening in the business or with your leaders that makes this important today?
As I celebrate one year since launching CDB Global Partners, I’ve been reflecting on the answers I’ve heard. It’s a question I’ve asked throughout my career, but lately, the answers sound very different.
A few years ago, I heard things like: “We want to create a great place to work. We want to offer leadership development as a benefit to our leaders. I went through this program at my last company, and it was fantastic.”
Those were great reasons to invest in leaders, and they still are. But they’re not the answers I’m hearing today.
Now I hear: “Several of our high-performing leaders just got scooped by the competition. A new leader made a bad call on a high-stakes deal. One of our long-time, trusted leaders struggled when presenting to the CEO. We completed our talent review and realized we don’t have enough “ready now” successors.”
Other times, nothing has “gone wrong.” The company reorganized, a key leader departed, or the industry has changed in ways that require a new set of leadership skills.
Looking across my client work this past year, I see five triggers reshaping the answer to “Why now?”
1. Leadership roles are getting bigger and more complex.
Layoffs, reorganizations, and flatter structures have created larger spans of control and changed what many mid- and senior-level leaders are being asked to do. At the same time, leaders are working across more matrixed organizations where cross-functional collaboration, influence, and leading through ambiguity are critical to their success.
For many of my clients, a reorganization with leader transitions created a natural reset moment. This gave teams an opportunity to clarify roles, recalibrate expectations, strengthen collaboration, and address leadership or performance issues they had been avoiding for too long.
2. AI investment isn’t delivering the planned productivity gains.
AI investment has raised expectations for productivity and revenue growth, yet many companies are struggling to translate individual efficiency gains into better business results. The senior leaders I speak with know that productivity gains are not realized through the technology alone. They require leaders who can clarify priorities, redesign roles and decision rights, coach teams through new ways of working, and exercise sound judgment about where AI should and should not be used. That is a refreshing shift I am hearing from leaders across many functions, including tech.
3. Legal and regulatory scrutiny is changing who gets access to leadership development.
New executive orders and updated federal enforcement guidance are prompting organizations to reassess eligibility criteria for leadership development programs. Some are opening previously affinity- or diversity-targeted programs to employees of all backgrounds. The shift is toward cohorts defined by skills, role, or leadership level rather than identity.
Interestingly, that doesn’t mean they want less leadership development programming. It means broader access, with organizations becoming more deliberate about which capabilities they need to build across their leadership population.
4. The people data is revealing some hard truths.
Executives are hearing less optimism, and even anger, from their middle-management ranks. Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report found that global manager engagement fell from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025. Glassdoor also reported that average senior-leadership ratings fell below 3.5 in April 2026, the lowest monthly level since 2017.
For several of my clients, discouraging employee survey results prompted a deeper look at their own leadership effectiveness. They engaged me to conduct confidential 1:1 interviews with their leaders, understand what was really going on, and help them rethink their leadership communication and coaching approach.
5. Talent reviews are exposing a lack of “ready now” senior-level successors.
In conversations with several HR leaders, I heard that leadership development took significant budget cuts between 2022 and 2025 as organizations responded to post-COVID expense pressures. For many, the impact of several “light learning” years is now showing up in talent reviews: too few leaders are landing in the “ready now” category for more senior-level roles.
My take is that three years of deferred maintenance on leadership skills, coaching, and mentoring is now showing up in the readiness of VPs to make the jump to the C-suite. The gap is visible in the empty boxes on succession plans.
So, how many of these are true for your business today?
You do not need to wait for a crisis or launch an expensive enterprise-wide program. But you do need to watch for the signals and get ahead of them. Here is a good place to start.
Start with the business outcomes. What business goal will stronger leadership help improve? Revenue growth, productivity, execution speed, AI adoption, or employee engagement? Choose one or two outcomes that matter most to the business.
Identify a small set of shared leadership capabilities, then make development personal. Select two or three skills the leadership cohort can collectively rally around, such as strategic thinking, decision-making, stakeholder influence, or coaching and developing others. Then assess each leader individually and identify one or two development goals specific to that person, such as executive presence, managing conflict, or making difficult performance decisions. This creates visible collective learning while keeping development highly individualized.
Be deliberate about who goes first and how you reinforce it. Start with the senior and high-potential leaders whose growth will create the greatest leverage. Then quickly follow with mid-level leaders. Give leaders a common language and clear expectations they can model, reinforce, and coach with their teams, and connect those expectations to how leaders are measured, recognized, and rewarded. Track the business measures you expect stronger leadership to influence and look for evidence that leaders are applying the new behaviors and making progress on the metrics that matter most.
Keep asking: Why now? What is happening in the business today that is creating a need for greater leadership capacity?
Then ask: What’s next? Looking 18 months ahead, what changes in your business or industry are most likely to affect what you need from your leadership team?
The strongest leadership development investments address the needs of today while laying the foundation for an uncertain future.
Sources
Gallup. (April 7, 2026). Global Employee Engagement Continues Decline.
Glassdoor. (August 12, 2026). Glassdoor Unveils 2026 Best CEOs List.
The White House. (January 21, 2025). Executive Order 14173: Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity. Executive Order.
The White House. (March 26, 2026). Executive Order 14398: Addressing DEI Discrimination by Federal Contractors. Executive Order.
U.S. Department of Justice. (September 14, 2026). Accenture Agrees to Pay $25M to Resolve Alleged Employment Discrimination Violations. DOJ press release.
The Wall Street Journal. (February 4, 2026). Nike Is Investigated for Alleged Discrimination Against White Workers. WSJ article.
