Flavor-of-the-Month Leadership Development

“The problem isn’t commitment—most leaders are serious about developing people. The problem is integration. They lack a unifying process they can own, one that connects learning to real work and real growth.”

Summary

Companies know they must develop their leaders to attract, engage, and retain talent. The business case is obvious: without strong leadership, performance, retention, and culture suffer.

Yet the way most organizations pursue leadership development is broken. They spend billions on workshops, certifications, and retreats that inspire temporarily but rarely change anything long term. Leaders themselves often grow jaded, even resentful, when the next “flavor of the month” (FOTM) program is rolled out.1

The leadership development industry thrives on this cycle. New frameworks, models, and tools arrive each year, promising transformation but usually delivering little more than new jargon. Over time, the accumulation of these disconnected efforts creates cynicism, fatigue, and wasted resources.

The alternative is a fundamentally different category of leadership development: Generative Leadership Development (GLD). GLD is not another framework to bolt onto the pile. It is a process—a system for discovering, co-creating, integrating, and sustaining leadership growth from within an organization. GLD offers the antidote to the FOTM cycle and establishes a path leaders can actually trust.

The Flavor-of-the-Month

The sheer volume of leadership content is part of the problem. Conferences, books, podcasts, and keynote speakers flood the market with competing philosophies and vocabularies. Leaders are constantly invited to adopt new frameworks, only to see them fade as another model captures executive attention.

The typical pattern looks like this:

1. A company adopts a leadership framework and experiences a short burst of clarity and enthusiasm.

2. After initial use, leaders hit a wall—the model has no further depth to offer.

3. Executives seek out the next framework, which is either layered onto the old one or used to replace it entirely.

Over time, leaders become fluent in multiple languages of leadership without ever mastering one. The result is a patchwork of frameworks, each carrying its own tools and jargon.

The leaders subjected to these cycles know they are simply being asked to play along until the next wave arrives. One younger leader put it bluntly:

“I dread when our CEO comes back from a retreat. I know he’ll introduce another leadership model that we’ll do for a while before it’s replaced by the next one.”

The problem isn’t commitment—most leaders are serious about developing people. The problem is integration. They lack a unifying process they can own, one that connects learning to real work and real growth.

The Three Flavors of the Leadership Development Delusion

Most FOTM programs fall into one of three categories:

1. One-Offs

Workshops, Motivational Speakers, and Leadership Event Days

Annual or quarterly “leadership days” and bootcamps deliver energy, inspiration, and sometimes useful skills. But the impact almost never lasts.

A Harvard Business Review analysis noted that only about 25% of senior managers believe training meaningfully affects business outcomes, citing systemic barriers that prevent application. Without reinforcement or integration, leaders quickly regress to the status quo.2

2. Products

Prepackaged Competency Models, Certifications, and Badges

This flavor prescribes lockstep pathways through a predetermined curriculum. Leaders march through modules, earn certificates, and check boxes.

The flaw is structural: these programs offer solutions without diagnosing organizational problems. They feel safe—popular, well-marketed, defensible—but they are decoupled from the leader’s actual challenges.

3. Grab Bag

Book Clubs, Manuals, and Languages

Groups of leaders commit to reading books or manuals, layering new frameworks on top of existing ones. Without a coherent process, this introduces competing leadership languages.

Leaders end up speaking different dialects of leadership, which breeds confusion, inconsistency, and jargon creep.

What unites these three flavors? They all assume that if leaders consume good information, transformation will follow. But this assumption is false. Information without integration creates insight, not change.

That is the essence of the Leadership Development Delusion—the belief that inspiration and intention will translate into transformation.

Push vs. Pull: The Fault Line

Most leadership development still operates as a push system. Organizations prescribe curricula, march leaders through content, and reward completion with certificates.

The result is compliance, not growth. Leaders endure content that feels detached from the real problems they are responsible for solving.

By contrast, a pull system removes obstacles and creates conditions where leaders draw development into their daily work. Learning is contextual, voluntary, and directly tied to problems leaders are motivated to solve. Growth becomes the path of least resistance.

Read through the following descriptions. Which sounds more like your company’s approach to developing leaders?

• Push Approach

  • Prescribes set curricula and linear pathways

  • Content delivered externally, often generic

  • Focus on completion, certificates, and badges

  • Episodic: workshops, retreats, or one-off events

  • Compliance-driven, leaders endure content

  • Short-term bursts of insight, little follow-through

• Pull Approach

  • Emerges from real challenges leaders face

  • Development is co-created and contextual

  • Focus on application, integration, and results

  • Continuous: embedded in daily work and culture

  • Owner-driven, leaders draw learning in voluntarily

  • Sustainable growth, adaptive to evolving needs

How’d you do? If you’re like most leaders, your experience up to this point in your career resembles the push descriptors.

Generative Leadership Development (GLD)

Breaking the push cycle requires a new category of leadership development—Generative Leadership Development (GLD).

GLD is not about content; it is about process. It shifts leadership development from consumption to creation, from prescription to participation, from episodic training to embedded practice.

GLD rests on four pillars:

• Discovery – Surface real challenges and opportunities through discovery interviews, small groups, and surveys. Instead of guessing what leaders need, the company asks.

• Co-Creation – Leaders collaborate in designing their own development journey. Rather than impose an off-the-shelf curriculum, the organization builds a program that grows out of lived challenges.

• Integration – The program weaves leadership growth into the company’s vision, values, and systems. Development is not an extracurricular activity; it becomes embedded in how the company operates.

• Sustainability – Because leaders co-create it, the program adapts and evolves. It is not discarded when the next trend emerges. It becomes the company’s own leadership system, designed to endure.

The generative process creates a leadership culture that leaders trust because they built it themselves. It replaces the churn of FOTM with a single framework that matures with the organization.

GLD: A Category All to Itself

Traditional leadership development can be critiqued, refined, and improved, but it cannot escape its structural flaws. It is locked into the push model, dependent on content delivery, and wedded to episodic, external solutions.

GLD, by contrast, functions more like an organizational philosophy—akin to lean manufacturing or agile methodology—than a program.

It is not something you buy; it is something you build and sustain.

This distinction forges a new category for leadership development:

• Traditional leadership development depends on external, prescriptive, episodic, FOTM-driven content.

• Generative Leadership Development includes and process that’s internal, generative, continuous, co-created, and embedded.

This category shift reframes the decision for executives. The question is no longer:

“Which vendor’s framework should we adopt this year?”

But instead:

“How do we build our own leadership system that lasts?”

Hello GLD. Goodbye FOTM.

The demand for a generative alternative is rising, and the reasons are clear. Cynicism is growing. Leaders have seen too many cycles of frameworks come and go, leaving them skeptical of anything billed as “the next big thing.” They are hungry for an approach that won’t fade once the novelty wears off. GLD answers that hunger by offering something leaders can build and sustain themselves.

Budgets are also under increasing scrutiny. Executives want measurable ROI, not just certificates and applause at retreats. They know the dollars spent on leadership development must produce observable change in performance, retention, and culture. GLD makes ROI visible because it ties development directly to business goals and builds systems leaders actually use.

Retention is another urgent driver. Employees don’t leave companies—they leave bad managers. Leadership quality is now a make-or-break factor for talent.3 By embedding leadership development into daily rhythms rather than outsourcing it to the next FOTM, GLD strengthens the manager-employee relationship and addresses one of the biggest levers of retention.

Culture, too, is on the line. Leadership shapes engagement, trust, and performance more than any single initiative. Without capable leaders, culture efforts collapse into slogans and posters. GLD ensures leadership growth is not an add-on but the operating system that makes cultural transformation real.4

Finally, adaptability has become critical. Companies need leadership systems that evolve as fast as their environment. Traditional leadership development is too slow, too rigid, and too dependent on external providers. GLD, by contrast, is generative: it adapts as the company adapts, ensuring leadership keeps pace with complexity.

Taken together, these factors show why leaders are ready for GLD. It speaks to the pain points they feel daily and offers a process they can trust to deliver sustainable growth.

The Future is Generative

The leadership development industry thrives on novelty. But leaders don’t need novelty—they need growth that endures.

GLD replaces the cycle of flavors with a framework that is both timeless and adaptive.

When organizations implement GLD, they discover that leadership development stops being something “done to” leaders. It becomes something leaders do for themselves, with their people, and for their company’s future.

It is not another box to check; it is the system that underpins how the company grows.

A Final Word

Recent trends in leadership development indicate the era of FOTM leadership is ending. The era of generative leadership has begun.

GLD isn’t just an improvement on existing leadership development. It is a different category entirely—one designed to create the kind of leaders companies actually need in a world where change is constant, trust is fragile, and culture is everything.

Subsequent articles expound on each element of the GLD approach and how to integrate it into your company.

1

ATD. (2023). State of the Industry Report. Association for Talent Development.

2

Beer, M., Finnström, M., & Schrader, D. (2016). Why Leadership Training Fails—and What to Do About It. Harvard Business Review.

3

Gallup. (2015). State of the American Manager: Analytics and Advice for Leaders.

4

Gallup. (2020). State of the American Workplace.