Why Leadership Development Fails the C-Suite
Built for younger brains, today’s programs miss the richest stage of leadership.
On the supply side, firms built defensibility on what scales. But scale hollows out where reflection, trust, and courage can’t be mass-produced. (The Scalability Trap)
On the demand side, CHROs avoid the highest stakes purchases. Playing safe in the middle while the very top goes untouched. (The Buyer’s Paradox)
At the system level, frameworks that worked mid-career are still being applied at midlife. A misfit that collapses under seasoned executives. (The Systemic Farce)
And beneath it all, a mindset lingers that sees midlife as decline instead of leadership’s richest stage. Weakening the C-suite at the moment it matters most. (The Twilight Fallacy)
Taken together, these also point to opportunities: if we dare to rethink supply, demand, systems, and mindsets, we can unlock a stage of leadership more powerful than anything that came before.
For leadership development firms, scalable is starting to look replaceable.
Korn Ferry: Executive Search fell ~10% in North America, while Consulting and Digital grew ~3%. Their scalable IP fueled profitability for years—but now looks fragile as AI replicates content and procurement slows demand.
FranklinCovey: Their subscription model grew modestly (+4% in FY’24) but is slipping quarter to quarter. “Habits” and “tips” are the easiest things for AI to spin out.
Learning Technologies Group: Revenue rose 3%, almost entirely from a single acquisition. Their new strategy leans on outsourcing and scale—precisely what’s most exposed to procurement freezes and commoditization.
Different models, same reckoning.
Leadership development has been built on what scales: frameworks, subscriptions, outsourcing. But what scales most easily is now the most vulnerable to AI and procurement pressure.
And it’s not just the big firms. Coaching faces the same squeeze: short sessions, canned frameworks, tactical skills, platform delivery through BetterUp, CoachHub, MindGym. Heavy in process, stripped of depth and courage. Designed to scale, easily replaced by AI.
Good enough for early career managers. Infantilizing for senior executives.
The choice is stark:
Double down on scale—cut headcount and costs to protect margins, risk commoditization.
Or abandon the scale game to do bespoke redesign at every engagement—messy, unscalable, but the only place where impact at the top happens (ironically, the first thing leadership firms cut.)
For senior executives buying this work, what looks safe and efficient may now deliver the least value where you need it most. A distraction from the deeper, more courageous work that transforms leaders, cultures, and enterprises.
And for coaches and facilitators, the only defensible craft is what can’t be scaled: trust deep enough to name what others avoid, reflection that cuts past frameworks, and the courage to sit with identity and legacy—and the grief of letting go—when the room would rather move on.
Work that doesn’t scale, and never should.
“My boss could use some coaching. I heard the execs are getting coached… but if they are, it doesn’t show.” — Director-level manager
Beneath words like these is a truth everyone in HR already knows: whatever happens at the top cascades down. It can amplify change in the middle, or erase it.
In The Scalability Trap, we looked at how big leadership development firms built defensibility on scale — and how that very scale is now being commoditized by AI and squeezed by procurement. But the supply-side reckoning has a mirror. For senior executives making these decisions, the market feels just as fragile.
Adequacy below.
For managers and mid-layers, there’s no shortage of options. Platforms, frameworks, subscriptions, internal academies and now AI, make leadership development cheaper, faster, and more available than ever. For buyers, it’s safe. Predictable. Easy to defend in front of a board.
Fragmentation above.
At the C-suite, it’s the opposite. Big firms stretch mid-level content upward and call it senior work. Boutiques deliver moments of brilliance but vary wildly in quality. Internal coaches rarely get real traction with the most senior leaders. For CHROs and CEOs, purchases at the top feel risky: high stakes, hard to compare, no standard of trust. Often, it just doesn’t happen.
Hence the paradox.
Work at the top is decisive, but safer to ignore. It’s easier to invest in the middle than to commission work that would mean asking your peers, or even your CEO, to change. And when responsibility sits with someone reporting into the CHRO, it’s even harder.
So what might emerge from this tension?
New credentials of trust for top team work? Not accreditations or frameworks, but markers that a team has actually shifted because of the work.
Independent rating systems for top-tier interventions? The way capital markets rate bonds or investors rate funds. Or like Michelin Stars for fine dining.
Guild-like networks of leadership development firms? That vouch for craft and protect standards the way professions once did?
Or entirely new leadership forms? That don’t look like “programs” at all — but residencies, long-form dialogues, or collective labs where senior leaders reshape themselves together.
Solving the buyer’s paradox isn’t about process or budget. It’s about daring to imagine forms of leadership development we haven’t seen yet.
Your 28-year-old son moves back home. Someone hands you a brochure: “Learn to parent with confidence!” Ridiculous? That’s how leadership development often feels at the top.
Misplaced. Blind to who you’ve become and the challenges you now face. Like resisting the urge to tell your son how to get his startup funded so he can afford his own place.
Leadership development runs on a one-playbook-for-all mindset, with a young-manager default setting. Personal development plans, ‘Start–Stop–Continue’ trackers, tidy five-step lists.
Logical mid-career. To a seasoned executive, they feel like a Dr. Spock manual on how to raise your peers.
Want a quick test? Drop your next run sheet into ChatGPT and ask: “On a scale of 1–10, how much does this sound like it’s for senior executives at midlife versus younger managers?”
We’ve looked at leadership development from both sides of the market:
On the supply side, firms built defensibility on scale, but what scales most easily now feels empty in the C-suite. (The Scalability Trap)
On the demand side, CHROs tend to avoid the top, investing safely in the middle where options are plentiful and predictable, leaving senior leaders absent from the very work that matters most. (The Buyer’s Paradox).
Different problems. Same cause: An unconscious assumption that what worked for younger leaders still works at midlife.
That’s the farce. Systems built for one stage, still applied at another. The opportunity is to upgrade our assumptions so the next stage of leadership can emerge.
It’s the same with parenting: when your children grew up, what assumptions did you let go of? What kind of support do you wish you had? That’s the kind of support leadership systems could provide—turning midlife into the richest stage of leadership.
Curious, what assumptions do you see still being applied to seasoned executives that no longer fit?
The ExCo blind spot: leaders in their fifties and sixties treated as fading adults—just as teenagers were once treated as immature adults, until the discovery of adolescence reshaped society.
I can’t shake the feeling that what adolescence was to the 20th century, midlife may be to the 21st. And I love being at this edge.
A century ago, falling child mortality created a surge of surviving teenagers. Adolescence appeared, and changed everything. The U.S. expanded schooling and built the world’s most educated workforce. France delayed until 1959, leaving a generation underprepared and helping fuel the 1968 uprisings. Forward-looking firms mechanized and adapted, while coal mines clung to child labor and collapsed. Levi’s and Pepsi built the “teen economy,” while Sears and others dismissed it until they scrambled to catch up.
Now the same demographic engine is reshaping adulthood.
Careers no longer peak at forty. Leadership ripens through the fifties and sixties, with millions living vibrantly into their eighties and beyond. Neuroscience confirms what many of us sense: the midlife brain is less about speed and recall, and more about integration, paradox, and connecting dots—precisely the strengths complex organizations most need.
Yet executives in their fifties and sixties are still treated as if they’re running out of steam, succession cases to be managed rather than leaders entering their most valuable chapter.
That’s the fallacy.
Too much energy grooming successors, and too little unleashing the power of the team already in place.
Once you see midlife not as decline but as the next great growth stage, you cannot unsee it. And just as it became unthinkable to treat teenagers as small adults, it will soon be unthinkable to treat fifty-year-olds as simply older adults wrapping up their careers.
The richest work of our lives may still lie ahead. I’m eager to be part of creating it. I feel like I’m just getting started.