Episode 38: Why Leadership Development Fails (And What Actually Works)
Welcome to the Podcast.
Whether this is your first episode or you've been with us all season, here's a quick frame for where we are.
This season I sat down with six extraordinary leaders across healthcare, aviation, transit, philanthropy, biopharma, and nonprofit work. And in these next few episodes, I'm pulling the thread across all of those conversations — using what they shared to illuminate something bigger about what people-forward leadership actually looks like in practice.
In our last episode, I explored the first pillar of our People-Forward Leadership™ framework — Leader Awareness. The idea that before you can build anything meaningful around you, you have to know yourself. How you show up. The impact you create. The shadow side of your strengths.
Today we're moving to the second pillar — Empowered Ecosystems.
And I'm going to draw specifically from conversations with Carla Jeter at Delta Air Lines, Kate Azizi at the OHSU Foundation, and Dr. Kecia Kelly at Legacy Health.
Because each of them — in very different ways — showed me what it actually looks like to build an environment where people don't just perform.
They grow.
And that distinction matters more than most organizations realize.
Leaders do the self-awareness work. They get clearer on who they are and how they show up. And then they walk back into the same systems. The same structures. The same approach to developing the people around them.
And nothing changes.
Not because the leader didn't grow.
But because the ecosystem didn't.
Which begs the question: Why does leadership development fail?
Not sometimes.
But so often.
Organizations spend billions of dollars every year on leadership training.
And yet the challenges that show up on engagement surveys, retention data, and culture assessments look remarkably similar year after year.
Same breakdowns in trust.
Same accountability gaps.
Same communication failures.
So what's happening?
I believe — and my conversations this season confirmed — that the answer is both simple and uncomfortable.
Leadership development fails when it's treated as an event.
And it works when it becomes part of the system.
Let me show you what I mean.
In Carla Jeter’s episode she shared the founder’s guiding principle that drives her work and how people lead at Delta.
She said, when CE Woolman built Delta Air Lines, he said everything we do can be duplicated, except our people.
Our wifi. Our service. Our systems. Our routes.
All of it can be copied.
But what cannot be duplicated is our people.
And it's the reason that at Delta, developing people isn't a program that runs alongside the business.
It is the business.
Carla who is the Senior Manager of Brand Experience at Delta, lives at the intersection of that premise every single day.
Her job is to translate strategy into what frontline employees actually do — at the gate, on the jetway, in the air — when the pressure is on and every interaction matters.
And what she's learned in here role is a critical aspect of leadership development and something few leaders invest in and that’s your frontline employees don't just deliver your brand. They are your brand.
Every decision they make under pressure — every moment of clarity or confusion, ownership or disengagement — is a direct reflection of the ecosystem the leader built around them.
Which means if you want to know whether your leadership development is working, you don't look at the training completion rates. You look at what your people do when no one is watching.
So how does Delta build that?
Carla said you want to design with. Not for.
Meaning, when you design with your people and not for your people, you tend to have an output that truly meets their needs.
And Delta has built an entire system around that principle.
They call it Listen, Act, Listen.
Not a one-time survey.
Not an annual engagement score.
A continuous loop.
First, they gather input. Surveys, job shadows, direct listening — genuinely trying to understand what employees are experiencing, what they need, what's working and what isn't.
Then they act. They review the feedback, prioritize what matters most, take meaningful action, and are transparent about what's feasible now and what trade-offs exist.
And then — and this is critical — they go back.
They check in. They ask, did we translate what you were telling us accurately? Does this meet your needs? Is this what you meant?
This is an important step because, sometimes what employees say is not actually what they mean.
And only by going back — by closing the loop — do you actually find out whether you got it right.
That requires of a considerable amount humility on the part of the leader.
The willingness to say: we tried something, and we're not sure we got it right. So you tell us.
That requires consistency.
Not one listening session before a big initiative, but a permanent practice of being in dialogue with your people.
And I've seen what happens when that loop doesn't close.
Leaders invest in listening — they do the survey, they hold the town hall, they gather the feedback — and then act on it once and move on.
Employees become more cynical after that process than they were before it. Not because the leader didn't care. But because the loop never closed.
People shared something real — what's not working, what they need — and then heard nothing back. And silence in those moments communicates something very specific.
It says: your input was a formality, not a real invitation.
That's not a listening problem. That's a system design problem. And it's entirely within a leader's control to fix.
And as Carla put it, you want to respect the whole person — not just the output.
She also mentioned that recognition matters.
Not as a nicety.
But as a system.
Specific recognition. Intentional recognition. Recognition that tells people exactly what they did and why it mattered.
But I think the word recognition actually undersells what Carla is describing.
What she's really talking about is appreciation.
And there's a difference.
Recognition acknowledges performance. Appreciation acknowledges the person.
One says: you hit the mark. The other says: I see you, I value you, and what you contribute matters here.
That distinction is everything — because people can feel the difference between the two instantly.
When people feel truly seen — when they know their contribution registers not just as output but as something that matters — they bring more of themselves to the work.
That's when recognition becomes appreciation. And appreciation is what builds the kind of loyalty and ownership that no bonus or benefit can replicate.
And that’s how you build an ecosystem where leadership development doesn't just happen in a classroom.
It happens every single day.
In every interaction.
In every moment a leader chooses to design with their people instead of for them.
And designing with your people isn't just a feedback strategy. As Kate Azizi showed me, it's an entire leadership operating system.
Kate Azizi, the President of the OHSU Foundation, told us in her interview the difference between telling people they're empowered — and actually building the conditions that make empowerment real.
For Kate, empowerment isn't a speech you give.
It isn't a value you put on a wall.
It's a series of very deliberate, very consistent decisions about how you show up — every day, in every interaction — that either build trust or quietly erode it.
And that's exactly what most leadership development programs miss. They focus on what leaders learn in a room. Kate focuses on what leaders do when they leave it. That's the difference between development as an event and development as a system.
And she is intentional about every one of her people.
Let me start with how she delegates.
Kate told me directly: when it comes to her team, she tells them explicitly — I want you to make these decisions. Not implicitly. Not by stepping back and hoping they figure it out.
Explicitly.
She knows she doesn't have the expertise her AVP of Advancement Services has in data management. She doesn't have the experience her CFO has in finance. And rather than pretending otherwise — rather than inserting herself into decisions that belong to them — she turns to them and says: this is yours.
She gives them the authority to do their work and trust them to get it done.
In my work with leaders, one of the most common empowerment failures I see isn't leaders who refuse to delegate. It's leaders who delegate the task but not the authority. They hand something off and then hover. They ask for updates constantly. They revise the work before it goes out. And what they communicate — without ever saying it — is: I don't actually trust you to do this.
The task moved. The ownership didn't.
Kate does something different. She delegates the decision itself. And that distinction — between delegating a task and delegating a decision — is one of the most important shifts a leader can make in building a genuinely empowered ecosystem.
But she also knows that empowerment without support is just abandonment.
So when her team comes to her with questions, her first response is almost always the same:
What do you think?
Not because she doesn't have an answer.
Because she knows that the leader who always provides the answer is also always the ceiling.
When you consistently answer your own team's questions for them, you train them to stop thinking independently. You become the solution to every problem — which means nothing moves without you. And at scale, that's not leadership. That's a bottleneck wearing a title.
The coaching question — what do you think? — does something the directive answer never can. It builds the muscle. It signals trust. And over time it creates a team that brings you solutions instead of problems.
This practice builds critical thinking, high-performance, and organizational capability.
But she goes further still.
If someone comes to her with a conflict about a colleague, she sends them back with this question:
Did you talk to that person directly?
Go to the source first. Come to me if you've already tried that and it didn't resolve.
I love this practice because it addresses something I see quietly undermining cultures everywhere. When leaders become the default mediator for every interpersonal friction — when people learn that the path to resolution runs through the boss — you inadvertently create a culture of escalation. People stop working things out laterally. They stop building the relationship skills that healthy teams require. And the leader ends up spending an enormous amount of time and energy managing dynamics that the team should be managing themselves.
Holding people accountable for their own relationships isn't cold or mean. It's developmental. It's saying: I trust you to handle this. And that trust — consistently communicated — is how you build a team that can function without you in the room.
And then there's how Kate stays connected at scale.
Every Friday she writes a personal email to her entire foundation team. Not a newsletter. Not a company announcement. A genuine note — what she's been working on, what's on her mind, what the team is navigating together.
Every other week she sends a version to her board.
When I heard this I thought about how many leaders struggle with what I call the visibility gap — the growing distance between senior leadership and the rest of the organization that develops almost invisibly as a leader's responsibilities expand. People stop seeing the leader. They stop knowing what the leader is thinking. And into that silence they pour their own interpretations — assumptions about priorities, about culture, about whether leadership actually cares.
Kate's Friday email doesn't just communicate information.
It closes the visibility gap.
It says consistently, week after week: I see you, I'm thinking about you, and I'm willing to be in dialogue — not just when there's a problem.
That's a trust-building system. And like all the best systems, it works because it's consistent.
And perhaps most powerfully — Kate promotes from within her own talent pool.
That practice connects to what I’ve been preaching to organizations which is retention is the new recruitment.
For too long organizations have treated recruiting and retaining talent as two separate strategies — two different budgets, two different teams, two different problems. But what our work with leaders has shown us consistently is that they are two sides of the same coin. And the coin is culture.
When you invest in developing your people — when you give them real growth opportunities, real ownership, real pathways forward — you don't just retain them. You create something magnetic. People don't just want to stay. They become your strongest advocates and your most committed contributors.
But here's where most organizations get it wrong.
They invest in the development and forget to build the pathways.
They send people to programs, assign stretch projects, invest in coaching — and then have nothing internally to offer when that person is ready for the next level. And their best people, hungry for growth and not finding it inside, go find it somewhere else.
Taking everything you invested in them with them.
That's not a recruiting problem.
That's a leadership development problem masquerading as a recruiting problem.
And it's one of the most expensive invisible costs in organizations today.
Kate understands this intuitively. Promoting from within isn't just a feel-good practice for her. It's a signal — sent consistently, over time — that development here is real. That growth here is possible. That if you invest in this organization, this organization will invest back in you.
That signal is what turns a team into an ecosystem.
And an ecosystem, unlike a program, doesn't stop developing people when the workshop ends.
It develops people every single day.
And Kate showed me exactly what that looks like.
Her team created the Bolder Award entirely on their own. Painted rocks. A recognition ritual for bold moves. A living symbol of the culture she set in motion.
She didn't design it.
She created the conditions for it.
And her team brought it to life.
You know you've built a genuine ecosystem — not just a well-managed team — when your people start building the culture themselves. When they internalize the values so deeply that they begin expressing them in ways you never scripted.
That's not something you can manufacture.
But it is something you can cultivate.
And it starts with the daily, deliberate, consistent decisions a leader makes — about who gets heard, who gets trusted, who gets developed, and who gets a pathway forward.
That's what Kate has been doing from the very beginning.
And that's what actually works.
Not the program. Not the training day. Not the framework on the slide.
The daily, consistent, intentional decisions that build the environment where people can grow.
That's the ecosystem. And that's where leadership development either lives or dies.
Ok, so let me tell you about the question that changed everything at Legacy Health.
Because it wasn't a complicated question.
It wasn't a strategic initiative with a 40-page deck behind it.
It was five words.
What if we grew our own?
Legacy Health was facing what every major health system in the country is facing right now — a critical nursing shortage. The default response in most organizations is to compete harder for the same shrinking pool of available talent. Recruit more aggressively. Offer bigger signing bonuses. Poach from competitors.
Dr. Kecia Kelly and her team asked a different question entirely.
And that question was what if we grew our own. It was the difference between treating leadership development as a transaction and treating it as a system.
Here's what they did.
They redesigned their nurse residency program from the ground up.
Previously they were onboarding 35 nurses twice a year through a traditional preceptor model — experienced nurses working directly alongside new ones.
But they identified a problem.
The nurses coming in weren't struggling with clinical knowledge.
They were struggling with what it actually means to show up in healthcare.
Dr. Kelly described them as having grown up in a virtual world. Afraid of their shadow, she said. Needing to learn not just the technical skills of nursing but the human reality of what it means to work in a high-stakes care environment.
A training program couldn't fix that.
A preceptor model alone couldn't fix that.
So they built something different.
They created a coaching layer — separate from the clinical preceptors — entirely dedicated to helping new nurses navigate that transition. Some were nurses returning from light duty. Some came out of retirement. But all of them had one job: spend six weeks helping these nurses understand what it means to be in healthcare.
Not teaching them nursing.
Teaching them how to be in the work.
To me, this illustrates something profound about why most leadership development fails.
We design programs for the skills people are supposed to have.
But we rarely design systems for the humans they actually are. A true people-forward program.
Legacy didn't just add training. They looked at who was actually walking through the door — what those people needed, where they were starting from, what was getting in the way — and they built a system around that reality.
That's not a training philosophy.
That's a leadership philosophy.
And the results speak for themselves.
They went from onboarding 35 nurses twice a year to onboarding upwards of 100 nurses multiple times a year.
A 300% increase in capacity.
And a two-year retention rate of 93%. In an industry where the national average hovers between 20 and 24%.
Now think about what that means financially.
Healthcare turnover is estimated to cost between $40,000 and $60,000 per nurse when you factor in recruitment, onboarding, and lost productivity.
At 93% retention Legacy isn't just developing nurses better.
They're protecting an enormous investment.
That's the return on system design - a people-forward design.
But the nursing model is only part of the story. Because Dr. Kelly didn't just build a system for developing frontline nurses. She built a philosophy for developing everyone around her.
She described herself as a master delegator.
But she was careful to make a distinction. That she delegates responsibility. But she never delegates accountability.
And when she empowers leaders in her organization she steps into the role of executive sponsor.
Not manager. Not controller. Not approver.
Sponsor.
Her job in that role is specific.
Elevate the work.
Remove barriers.
Provide resources.
And coach leaders as they develop their own solutions.
I want to really highlight what she shared here, because what Dr. Kelly is describing is a development system.
Every time she steps back and asks her team — what do you see, what solutions do you have — she is creating a development opportunity that no classroom can replicate.
She did it with the nursing team.
She did it with pharmacy.
She gave her pharmacy leaders a clear challenge — find ways to increase revenue and improve operational performance — and then she got out of the way.
These were scientists. Operators. People who knew their field deeply.
And when given the space and the trust to lead the solution, they transformed the business.
Retail pharmacy had been losing three million dollars a year.
Within a few years the team had redesigned operations to generate close to forty million.
That is not a training outcome.
That is what happens when a leader builds an ecosystem where people are trusted with real ownership of real problems.
There’s an important principle you can draw from here and that’s leadership development doesn't fail because organizations don't invest enough in programs. It fails because organizations invest in programs instead of systems.
Programs have start dates and end dates.
Systems are ongoing.
Programs deliver content.
Systems create conditions.
Programs tell people what good leadership looks like.
Systems give people the experience of actually doing it.
Dr. Kelly didn't send her pharmacy team to a leadership course on revenue generation.
She gave them the problem.
She gave them the ownership.
She gave them the support.
And she trusted them to grow into the challenge.
That's not a program.
That's a system.
And it's what actually works.
So here's the question I want to leave you with.
Not, what leadership training should we offer?
But, have we built the conditions where development can actually take root?
That's not a training question.
That's a leadership question.
And it's the most important one you can ask.
It's also why at our firm, Carol Parker Walsh Consulting Group, we've never been big believers in one-and-done leadership programs.
What we build are People-Forward Leadership systems.
Yes, they include training and skill building.
But they're designed to expand over time — creating behavioral change, shifting mindsets, and building a new way of thinking and working that becomes part of how the organization actually operates.
That's not a training initiative.
That's a culture change initiative.
And the organizations that commit to that work see results that a single workshop simply cannot produce.
We've seen it with our clients — work that has earned us three Brandon Hall Group HCM Excellence Awards for its measurable impact on performance, retention, and culture.
Not because we delivered great content.
But because we built systems that gave that content somewhere to live and grow.
That's what actually works.
If this episode resonated share it with a leader who needs to hear it. And if you're finding value in the People-Forward Leadership Podcast please take a moment to leave us a five-star rating — it helps other leaders find us and that's exactly the community we're building here.
In our next episode we're going somewhere a little less comfortable — the leadership tensions no one talks about. The ones that show up not in strategy sessions but in the hard moments when everything is competing at once.
Until next time, keep leading people forward.
I'll see you soon.
