Michael is a middle manager at the same company. Because he’s at a higher level of management than Javier, he was recently assigned a leadership coach. Michael meets with his coach every couple of weeks and makes progress on some issues he’s been struggling with.

However, he often wonders how the approaches he’s learning align with those of other leaders in his company. He wishes he had more chances to compare notes. At a meeting, Michael mentions some concepts he learned from his coach, thinking the other managers will understand, but they look confused.

Paula, an executive new to the company, just attended her first in-person senior leadership retreat. When the company sends out a survey to evaluate the retreat, Paula rates it a 10/10, commenting, “This was the best learning experience I’ve ever had. The sessions were so educational, and I enjoyed forming deeper relationships with my fellow leaders. I can’t wait to apply what I learned in my daily work.” One month later, the glowing memory of the retreat remains, but new skills and habits have faded. Especially in times of stress, Paula falls back into her old ways of doing things.

Do these situations sound familiar? Currently, many organizations are struggling to develop their leaders. Leadership development is a $77.9 billion industry, offering more options for training than ever before. However, only 23% of leaders rate their leadership development as high quality, and 77% of businesses report they struggle to find and develop leaders. There’s a disconnect, in other words, between organizations’ demand for high-quality leaders and what current training programs deliver.

In-person retreats, discontinued during pandemic-era restrictions, are coming back into fashion. They’re great for social learning and building relatedness on your team. But, with an average cost of around $4,000 per person, some employers are questioning whether these mainstays of leadership training are worth the hefty price tag—especially since they’re rarely effective at changing habits.

Another expensive option, one-on-one coaching, tends to be more successful at sparking insights that can change behaviors. However, it doesn’t build relationships or a shared language among leaders in an organization. Content libraries, on the other hand, are relatively inexpensive and easy to scale. They provide plenty of resources but no consistency. And the format (passively watching a video) isn’t compelling enough to motivate most leaders to use them over the long term. None of today’s commonly used options provide lasting learning at a reasonable cost and timeframe that scales to all leaders in an organization.

WHY WE CAN’T SLEEP ON A BROKEN SYSTEM ANY LONGER

Leadership development has been broken for some time, but the consequences are now being felt more acutely, partly due to rising levels of burnout, disengagement, and uncertainty. Also, managers across the board are being asked to do more with less and to handle new situations—such as creating a sense of community in hybrid work, accomplishing AI transformation, and balancing psychological safety with accountability—that weren’t on anyone’s radar a few short years ago.

NLI recently polled hundreds of talent executives, finding that 50% of skills leaders need today are skills they don’t yet have. The other 50% are skills—such as empathy—that were always needed but now are required at much higher levels. With so much reskilling and upskilling necessary, leaders need a more efficient way to learn.

The problem is, even if leadership training programs dispense useful information (which many do), they usually don’t do it in ways neuroscience tells us are required for effective, lasting learning. That’s why managers come away from e-learning courses, coaching sessions, and retreats with their brains full of fascinating new information they can’t wait to apply, but three months later, they remember very little.

And even if they do remember some of the information, translating it into new habits is a whole different ball game—one that most programs don’t train participants to play. Changing just a few top executives’ behavior over the long term is challenging, but changing the behaviors of hundreds of managers across a company—and, by extension, the organization’s entire culture—is something most learning solutions aren’t equipped to do.

Although current formats aren’t working, that’s not to say they don’t have individual strengths. In-person retreats are great for social learning and relationship building. One-on-one coaching can help spark strong insights that lead to new habits. Content libraries are relatively inexpensive and easy to scale. The challenge is to identify a format that delivers all these advantages—social learning, habit formation, and scaling—in one.

MAKE IT SOCIAL

Humans evolved in groups, and remembering social information has always been critical for our survival. As a result, our brains are highly receptive to social cues and encode them in memory automatically. When we’re learning with others, our brains focus not only on the material but also on who was there, what jokes were made, and how group interactions made us feel. Later, when we effortlessly remember this social information, it triggers recall of the learned material, as well.

Along with improving our encoding and recall of new information, learning in a group helps us translate this new information into habits. When we see others behaving in a certain way, we’re more likely to follow suit: Not only are we reminded to practice the new behavior, but we also feel pressure to conform to the group’s social norms.

Learning with others in your organization builds strong connections between leaders over shared experiences. And it creates a common language that helps teams communicate and collaborate more effectively. When a team learns a shared set of terminology, they don’t need to explain a concept to make sure everyone’s on the same page. They can act more quickly in the moment.

While we can absorb the richest social information when we’re actually in the same physical space as other people, interacting virtually (with cameras and microphones on) is likely a close second. An unanswered question that must still be addressed by research is: What type of environment is “social enough” to achieve the benefits of social learning?

NLI’s experience has been that, when done correctly, a virtual environment offers many of the same social learning benefits of in-person workshops and retreats, combined with increased convenience, lower cost, and optimal spacing of the material over time. When we delivered learning in a virtual format through a combination of individual lessons and interactive group webinars, 84% of participants were still practicing the new habits one month later. In contrast, when the same material was delivered in an in-person workshop, only 54% of participants were practicing the habits after a month. The increased effectiveness of the virtual option is likely due to improved lesson spacing and time for reflection, which usually isn’t possible with in-person training.

MAKE IT HABIT-FORMING

To build habits that stick, the first step is making the learning compelling and memorable. For optimal learning, the hippocampus (a part of the brain responsible for embedding new information into long-term memory) must be strongly activated.

To activate the hippocampus, the learning material must capture and keep our attention, using elements such as storytelling, compelling science, varied formats, interactive elements, and social learning. And because research shows that our attention wanes after 20 minutes, learning should be separated into bite-sized chunks, spread out over time. Spacing lessons over weeks or months, instead of cramming material into one long session, builds stronger long-term memories and increases recall. Lack of spacing is a major reason leadership retreats seldom produce lasting learning: People’s attention wanders increasingly throughout the day, only to have another long session the next day, overloading their cognitive capacity.

One of the most powerful ways to translate knowledge into behavior is insight. When we have a strong insight—one that fundamentally changes the way we view the world—we’re highly motivated to act on that insight. Knowledge goes from interesting and possibly useful to life-changing. Learning programs can encourage insight not just by presenting information but also by asking learners to reflect on it and think about how to apply the knowledge to their real-life situations.

Finally, any successful leadership development program must lay the foundation to support new habits long after the training has ended. Most programs don’t do this, and that’s one reason people quickly fall back into old behaviors. Effective training should give participants plenty of opportunities to practice new habits, both in real and simulated situations. It should also prompt leaders to develop systems—or processes, technologies, and environments—that make following the new habits the easiest option.

MAKE IT SCALABLE

Many organizations prioritize training for only their top-level managers, assuming new knowledge and behaviors will “trickle down” to everyone else. But in reality, such an approach rarely works. If people don’t see a majority of their colleagues practicing new behaviors, they won’t be reminded or inspired to act on the habits themselves.

Assigning a personal leadership coach to scores of managers in a company is usually not financially feasible, and it lacks the benefits of social learning and shared language. Therefore, it’s critical to identify a format that scales learning throughout an entire company at a reasonable cost. With so many people working remotely these days, a virtual option is often the most cost-effective and convenient way to learn.

But not just any virtual platform will do—it must incorporate social learning and habit building, with a strong focus on generating powerful insights. Flipping through a slide deck on your own or passively watching a video with your camera off will have few if any, lasting effects.

Given what we know now, let’s revisit Javier, Michael, and Paula a year later. After high expenses and lackluster results, the company decides to discontinue its usual programs for training different levels of leaders. Instead, all leaders now receive weekly training on an interactive digital platform designed to create insights and turn them into actions. Then, once a month, participants meet virtually with a cohort of their fellow leaders to share insights about what they’ve learned and how they’ve been applying it. The program now reaches all 1,000 leaders in the company for less than it once cost to reach 100, resulting in meaningful change across the organization.

By the end of the six-month program, the leaders’ new habits are ingrained so deeply they usually don’t have to think about them, even in times of stress. They’ve developed into agile leaders who are ready for any curveballs the new world of leadership may throw at them.