Developing Leaders at Every Level: A Complete Organizational Guide

DDI’s Global Leadership Forecast, one of the most comprehensive leadership research studies conducted annually, found that 77% of organizations report a leadership gap. Nearly eight in ten organizations believe they don’t have enough leaders, at enough levels, with enough capability to meet the demands ahead.

Here is what makes that statistic particularly striking: most of those same organizations have active leadership development programs. They are investing in leadership development. They are simply investing in it wrong, concentrating resources at the top of the organization, designing programs for the leaders they already have rather than the leaders they urgently need, and treating leadership development as a perk for the high-performing few rather than a responsibility owed to the entire organization.

The organizations that close the leadership gap, that build genuine, sustainable leadership bench strength, do something fundamentally different. They treat leadership not as a title that some people earn, but as a behavior that every person in the organization can practice. And they build development systems that honor that premise at every level of the ladder.

This guide is for the leaders and L&D professionals responsible for building those systems. It covers the what, the why, and, most practically, the how of developing leaders at every level of your organization, drawing on the best available research and the applied experience of The Leadership Laboratory across hundreds of organizational engagements.

The premise that makes everything else in this guide work is also the premise that most organizational development systems don’t actually believe, despite claiming to: leadership is a behavior, not a position.

Positional leadership, the model where leadership development begins when someone gets a management title, is built on a category error. It confuses the authority to lead with the capacity to lead. It assumes that the behaviors of leadership (influencing, developing others, communicating vision, building trust, making values-based decisions) should only be practiced by people with a certain job title. And it means that organizations are developing management authority while neglecting leadership capacity, a distinction with significant performance consequences.

Research by Gallup finds that organizations with strong leadership cultures at all levels achieve 37% higher revenue per employee compared to those where leadership development is concentrated at senior levels. The mechanism is straightforward: when everyone in an organization understands what leadership behavior looks like and is actively practicing it, the aggregate organizational capability is dramatically higher than when that capability is concentrated in a small subset of people with management titles.

At The Leadership Laboratory, we frame this as “everyone is a leader”, not as a motivational platitude, but as an organizational design principle. The individual contributor who takes ownership of a problem that isn’t technically in their job description is exercising leadership. The team member who names the tension in a meeting that everyone else is avoiding is exercising leadership. Building development systems that recognize and grow that capacity at every level is what closes the leadership gap.

Most organizations operate a position-based talent strategy: identify who is in (or is likely to be promoted into) leadership positions, and develop those people. The rest wait their turn.

A skills-based talent strategy inverts this logic: identify the leadership behaviors that drive organizational performance, develop those behaviors deliberately across the entire organization, and let capability, rather than position, determine who is ready for expanded responsibility.

The difference in outcomes is significant. Skills-based approaches surface leaders that position-based systems miss entirely, the high-potential individual contributor who hasn’t been noticed because she isn’t politically visible, the team member from an underrepresented background who hasn’t had access to the informal mentorship networks that position-based systems depend on.

Practically, shifting to a skills-based approach requires three things: a clear and specific definition of what leadership behaviors look like at each level of the organization; development systems that build those behaviors through experience rather than just through training; and talent decisions (promotion, advancement, stretch assignment) that are explicitly made on behavioral evidence rather than positional tenure.

The 70/20/10 learning and development model was developed by researchers at the Center for Creative Leadership in the 1980s through a study of how effective executives reported they had developed their capabilities. The findings were clear and have been validated repeatedly since: 70% of leadership development happens through on-the-job experience; 20% through social learning (coaching, mentoring, peer feedback, observation of other leaders); and 10% through formal training (workshops, courses, programs).

The implication for L&D investment is significant. Most organizational L&D budgets are allocated in almost exactly the opposite proportion, heavily concentrated in formal training, with much less systematic investment in the experiential and social dimensions that produce the majority of actual development. The result is technically trained leaders who lack the behavioral capability that can only be built through practice.

The Leadership Laboratory was founded on the conviction that this gap between formal training and experiential learning is exactly where leadership development loses most of its value, and exactly where improv-based, facilitated workshop methodology adds the most. Our approach is designed to be the experiential 70%, accelerated and structured: real practice, real feedback, real relationship-building, in conditions that develop the adaptive behaviors that no lecture-based training can produce.

The practical implication for every L&D leader: audit your current development portfolio against the 70/20/10 framework. Where is your investment concentrated? What would shift if you deliberately designed for the experiential 70% rather than defaulting to the formal 10%?

Leadership development at the individual contributor level is where most organizations have the largest untapped opportunity, and the most significant return on investment. The behaviors developed here, influence without authority, self-awareness, communication, accountability, and the capacity to navigate ambiguity, are the exact behaviors that predict who will be ready for leadership roles before those roles are offered.

Development at this tier should focus on: stretch assignments that put individual contributors in situations requiring cross-functional influence; peer mentoring structures that create reciprocal development without positional hierarchy; facilitated workshops that build self-awareness and adaptive communication in experiential rather than lecture-based formats; and explicit recognition of leadership behaviors exhibited without formal authority.

The key shift for organizational leaders: stop waiting for people to demonstrate leadership readiness after they get the title. Create the conditions in which they can demonstrate it before.

The transition from individual contributor to people leader is the most consequential and most under-supported transition in most organizational career paths. Research consistently shows that the majority of new managers are promoted based on individual performance, the best salesperson becomes the sales manager, the best engineer becomes the engineering lead, with little to no development investment in the fundamentally different skills that people leadership requires.

The result is predictable and costly: new managers who are technically excellent and interpersonally underdeveloped, who default to managing tasks because that’s what made them successful, who struggle to delegate because they can do the work better themselves, and who create exactly the bottlenecks and disengagement that their organizations were hoping leadership would prevent.

Development at this tier should focus on the mindset shift from individual performance to team performance; the practical skills of delegation, feedback, and difficult conversations; and the self-awareness to recognize which old habits, the ones that made them successful as individual contributors, are now leadership liabilities.

The Leadership Laboratory’s emerging leader programs are built specifically around this transition, using improv-based exercises that surface the default behaviors new leaders bring and create the experiential contrast needed to build new ones.

Mid-level managers are simultaneously the most under-developed and most organizationally consequential leadership tier in most organizations. They are the people who translate organizational strategy into team behavior, who determine, more than any other tier, whether what the senior leadership team intends is actually what the front-line team does.

They are also, in most organizations, the people who receive the least deliberate development investment. Senior leaders get executive coaching and leadership retreats. Emerging leaders get new manager training. Mid-level managers often get neither, they are assumed to be capable because they have been promoted, and are left to develop through the unstructured experience of doing their jobs.

Development at this tier should address the skills that have the highest organizational leverage: coaching (shifting from directing to developing); strategic thinking (connecting their team’s work to organizational priorities rather than just functional ones); delegation (building team capability rather than managing workload); and the courageous conversations that most mid-level managers consistently avoid.

The transition from leading a function to leading an organization is, like the transition from individual contributor to manager, far more significant than most senior leaders anticipate, and far less supported than the stakes warrant.

Senior leaders are typically promoted because they are excellent functional leaders. They know their domain, they deliver results, they manage their teams well. What they are now required to do is qualitatively different: lead across functions they don’t control, build culture rather than just performance, make decisions with incomplete information at organizational rather than functional scope, and model the behaviors, transparency, vulnerability, collaborative leadership, that will propagate through every level below them.

Development at this tier should focus on cross-functional influence, organizational design literacy, executive presence, and the self-awareness to recognize the ways in which functional excellence can become an organizational liability when it tips into protective territory-holding or functional bias in resource allocation decisions.

The most important leadership development work that happens at the executive level is not competency-building, executives have demonstrated significant competency to reach their positions. The most important work is awareness: of the disproportionate impact of their behaviors on organizational culture, of the blind spots that come with positional power and reduced honest feedback, and of the gap between the leader they intend to be and the leader their organization experiences them as being.

Executive development is most effective when it combines honest external perspective (coaching, 360 feedback, peer learning cohorts with leaders outside the organization) with deliberate experiential practice of the specific behaviors, vulnerability, intellectual curiosity, collaborative decision-making, that executive power tends to erode.

The most important thing an executive leader can do for the leadership development culture of their organization is to model it visibly: seeking feedback, admitting uncertainty, recognizing and developing the leaders below them, and treating their own development as an ongoing practice rather than a completed achievement.

Most organizations operate succession planning: identifying specific people who could fill specific senior roles if they became vacant. It is a risk management exercise, and it is not without value. But it is also, structurally, reactive. It identifies successors for roles rather than developing capabilities for the organization. It tends to concentrate attention on a small number of high-potential individuals rather than building leadership bench strength across the organization. And it tends to produce candidates who are development-ready, in the sense that they are aware of their candidacy, but not necessarily development-complete.

Progression planning is the proactive alternative. Rather than asking “who could fill this role?” it asks “who is ready to take on expanded responsibility, and what do they need to develop to be genuinely prepared for it?” Rather than developing a short list of named successors, it builds a deep bench of leaders at every level who are continuously developing the capabilities that the organization needs.

The “two-in-a-box” principle is central to The Leadership Laboratory’s progression planning framework: every leader in the organization should be able to name two people who are actively developing toward the capability to take on an expanded version of their current responsibilities. Not necessarily their exact role, but the next level of leadership challenge. This creates continuous upward movement in the pipeline rather than periodic succession-crisis-driven development sprints.

The shift from succession to progression also changes the L&D conversation: from “who do we need to develop?” to “what capabilities do we need everywhere, and how do we build them systematically?”.

The Leadership Laboratory designs and facilitates leadership development programs for organizations at every tier of the leadership ladder, from individual contributor workshops to senior executive peer cohorts, and we build all of them on the same foundational conviction: leadership capability is developed through doing, not through hearing.

Our improv-based methodology is not a gimmick. It is a deliberate design choice grounded in the research on how behavioral change actually happens: through practice in conditions of genuine engagement, with immediate feedback, in relationship with other people. Improv exercises create those conditions more reliably than any lecture-based format available, and they produce behavioral insights that participants consistently report as the most transferable of any professional development experience they have had.

We work with organizations to design progression planning frameworks, build leadership development cultures, and create the specific programs, emerging leader cohorts, mid-level manager workshops, senior team retreats, executive coaching partnerships, that move people through the leadership ladder with genuine capability rather than just tenure.

If you are ready to build the kind of leadership bench strength that sustains organizational performance through disruption, transition, and growth, we’d like to be part of how you do it.

The leadership development question most organizations ask is: “Who are our future leaders, and how do we develop them?” It is a reasonable question. It is not, however, the most important one.

The most important question is: “What would it look like if every person in this organization was developing their leadership capacity right now, in the role they’re currently in, at the level they’re currently at, in the team they’re currently part of?”

That question produces a different organizational posture. It invests in the individual contributor who hasn’t been identified as high-potential yet. It develops the mid-level manager who has been left to figure it out on their own. It builds the leadership culture that makes it possible for the right leaders to emerge rather than just the most visible ones.

The organizations that build genuine leadership bench strength are the ones that answer this question seriously. They treat leadership development as an organizational-wide responsibility, invest in it at every level, and build the systems, progression planning, experiential development, feedback culture, that make it continuous rather than episodic.

The return on that investment is not just a stronger leadership pipeline. It is an organization with the collective human capability to navigate whatever change, disruption, and opportunity the next decade brings.

Developing leaders at every level requires four things: a clear definition of what leadership behaviors look like at each level (not just at the top); development systems designed around the 70/20/10 model, with heavy emphasis on experiential and social learning; talent decisions based on behavioral evidence rather than positional tenure; and a cultural premise, reinforced by language, recognition, and leadership modeling, that leadership is a behavior everyone can practice, not a status that some people earn.

The 70/20/10 model, developed through research at the Center for Creative Leadership, describes how leadership capabilities are actually built: 70% through on-the-job experience (stretch assignments, challenging projects, new responsibilities); 20% through social learning (coaching, mentoring, peer feedback, observing and working alongside other leaders); and 10% through formal training (courses, workshops, programs). Most organizational L&D budgets are allocated in almost the reverse proportion, which explains why so many technically trained leaders still lack behavioral leadership capability.

Succession planning is reactive: it identifies specific individuals as candidates for specific roles in the event those roles become vacant. Progression planning is proactive: it builds leadership capability continuously across the entire organization, creating a deep bench rather than a short list. The Leadership Laboratory’s progression planning framework centers on the ‘two-in-a-box’ principle, every leader should be developing two people who are building toward expanded responsibility, which creates continuous upward movement rather than crisis-driven development sprints.

A leadership development culture requires five organizational conditions: leadership is treated as a behavior available to everyone, not a status reserved for those with certain titles; development is continuous and embedded in daily work, not episodic and extracted into programs; feedback is a cultural norm at every level; leaders are explicitly responsible, and held accountable, for developing other leaders; and experiential learning (practice, stretch, coaching) makes up the majority of L&D investment rather than formal training alone.