Leadership development can introduce new ways to coach, delegate, handle difficult conversations and lead through uncertainty. But eventually, participants return to their regular work, where the same deadlines, responsibilities and established habits are waiting for them.

Consider a leader who leaves a development program wanting to coach rather than immediately solve problems for their team. They understand the value of asking better questions and giving employees room to find their own answers.

Back at work, a team member needs help with an urgent issue. A decision is overdue, and stepping in with the answer feels like the fastest way forward.

The leader hasn't necessarily forgotten what they learned. They're trying to apply a new behavior in an environment where their old habits still work.

This is the challenge of leadership development learning transfer: helping people apply what they've learned in a program to the situations they encounter at work, and continue using those skills over time.

The training itself is only part of that process. What happens afterward deserves just as much attention.

Give learning somewhere to go

Leadership programs often end with broad development goals. Someone wants to become a better coach, communicate more effectively or delegate more responsibility. Those are worthwhile ambitions, but they don't always give participants much direction when they're back at work.

A better starting point is to connect one specific behavior to an upcoming opportunity to practice it.

For the leader working on coaching skills, that might mean choosing their next one-on-one conversation and making a conscious effort to ask questions before offering solutions. Rather than telling the employee what to do, they might ask what they've already tried, which options they're considering and what support would help them move forward.

Afterward, the leader could ask whether the conversation helped the employee think through the problem independently. At their next check-in with a coach or peer from the program, they could discuss what worked, where they fell back into old habits and what they'd change next time.

The development comes from connecting those experiences. Someone learns a behavior, tries it under real conditions, gets another perspective and makes an adjustment before trying again.

A 2026 review published in Academy of Management Learning & Education examines why leadership programs often struggle to produce lasting behavior change. The researchers emphasize deliberate practice, including opportunities to develop skills under conditions that reflect the pressure and complexity of real work.

Formal development provides an important foundation. Workshops, simulations and coaching sessions give leaders time to understand unfamiliar concepts, rehearse behaviors and receive feedback before applying them in situations with real consequences.

But experience alone doesn't guarantee development. Someone can spend years handling familiar challenges without necessarily changing how they lead. What matters is having something specific to practice, enough support to try it and a reason to reflect on what happened.

That doesn't always require creating another assignment. Often, the next meeting, project or difficult conversation already provides a place to begin.

Build support into the work people return to

Practicing a new behavior once is rarely enough. People need opportunities to try it again, adjust their approach and receive feedback as they go.

The environment around them plays an important role.

A participant's manager can help by understanding what they're working on, identifying opportunities to apply it and checking in on what they've learned. Peers from the development program can provide another perspective, especially when they're navigating similar challenges in different parts of the organization.

Research supports the value of that support. A workplace-training study involving 541 employees found that supervisor and peer support were associated with training transfer and knowledge sharing. Learning may begin in a formal program, but applying it is influenced by the relationships and working conditions people return to.

We've approached this connection between learning and work in our own projects.

For S&P Global's Talent & Leadership Development, Fluence helped create learning experiences that connected leadership expectations to practical application. Its CEO Leadership program brought senior executives together around real strategic challenges, supported by assessment, coaching, peer feedback and reflection.

Fluence developed a 43-page Action Learning Guide to support participants as they worked through those challenges between sessions. A companion workbook carried learning activities and reflection throughout the program.

These materials helped connect the formal development experience to the work participants were doing between sessions, rather than expecting the learning to happen entirely in the room.

The same principle applies to less complex development programs.

Someone preparing for a difficult conversation may benefit from a short scenario or conversation guide. A leader practicing delegation might need a quick reference before assigning responsibility. Others may benefit from follow-up questions that help them reflect on what happened after trying a new approach.

These are practical ways to support learning after the original training moment.

When participants understand the material but struggle to use it afterward, the gap may be in the support surrounding the program. That's where our Training and Learning Content work can help. We develop scenarios, guides, job aids and follow-up resources that people can return to as they apply new skills, rather than expecting everything to be remembered from the initial session.

Of course, resources can't resolve every obstacle. If leaders are encouraged to delegate but consistently rewarded for personally solving every urgent problem, the organization's expectations may be working against the development.

In those situations, the challenge isn't necessarily more training. It's understanding what makes the desired behavior difficult to sustain.

Look for evidence that the behavior is changing

Leadership development is relatively easy to measure while a program is running. Attendance, completion rates, assessments and participant feedback can all provide useful information about the learning experience.

They tell us much less about whether people are doing anything differently afterward.

To understand whether leadership development is sticking, organizations need to follow the learning back into work.

That starts by checking whether participants had opportunities to apply what they learned. Did they try the behavior? What happened? What feedback did they receive? What changed when they tried again?

For the leader practicing coaching, the evidence might come from a follow-up conversation or feedback from the employees involved. Are they making more decisions independently? Is the leader giving them more room to work through problems? Where are old habits still showing up?

Those observations don't always require a formal evaluation process. Manager conversations, peer discussions and short reflections can reveal whether a behavior is being practiced and what support might still be needed.

The feedback is useful for HR and learning teams, too.

Participants may understand the material but lack opportunities to use it. Their managers may not know what they're trying to develop. Follow-up resources may be missing, or existing workplace expectations may be reinforcing the opposite behavior.

Each of those findings suggests a different improvement to the development experience.

Organizations don't need to extend every leadership program indefinitely. They do need to consider what participants will return to, where they'll have opportunities to apply what they've learned and how they'll know whether those behaviors are taking hold.

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