The Real Reason Your Company's Leadership Pipeline is Broken

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I'm sitting in yet another "succession planning" meeting where three middle managers are arguing about whether Jenkins from accounting has "leadership potential." Jenkins, for the record, still prints emails and asks his PA to scan them back into his computer.

This is Australia's leadership crisis in a nutshell.

After seventeen years of watching companies fumble their way through leadership development, I've come to one inescapable conclusion: most organisations aren't developing leaders. They're playing an expensive game of dress-ups with people who'll never actually lead anything meaningful.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Leadership Development

Here's what nobody wants to admit - your leadership pipeline isn't broken because you're not spending enough money on it. It's broken because you're fundamentally misunderstanding what leadership actually is.

I was guilty of this myself back in 2009. Spent three months designing this elaborate leadership program for a Brisbane manufacturing company. Psychometric tests, 360-degree feedback, outdoor team-building exercises where grown adults had to trust-fall into each other's arms. The works.

Know what happened? The best natural leader in the company - a shift supervisor named Michelle who could get anyone to run through brick walls for her - never made it past the first assessment. Why? Because she didn't tick the boxes we'd created for what a "leader" should look like on paper.

Meanwhile, we fast-tracked three people who looked fantastic in presentations but couldn't motivate a drowning person to grab a life ring.

That's when I realised we're not developing leaders. We're manufacturing managers.

The Clone Factory Problem

Walk into any major corporation in Sydney or Melbourne and you'll see the same phenomenon: leaders who all sound the same, think the same, and ultimately deliver the same mediocre results. It's like someone's running a photocopier in HR.

These aren't accidents. They're the predictable outcome of leadership development programs that prioritise conformity over capability. We take people with unique strengths and perspectives, then spend two years teaching them to speak in corporate buzzwords and avoid taking any real risks.

I remember sitting in a emotional intelligence training session where the facilitator spent forty minutes explaining why leaders need to "leverage synergistic solutions to optimise stakeholder engagement." The bloke next to me was frantically taking notes. I wanted to stand up and shout: "Just talk to people like they're human beings!"

But here's the thing - that training was actually brilliant at what it was designed to do. Not develop leaders, but create compliant managers who wouldn't rock the boat or challenge the status quo.

What Real Leadership Development Looks Like

Authentic leadership development starts with a radical idea: not everyone should be a leader, and that's perfectly fine.

Some of your best people are technical specialists who'd rather solve complex problems than manage team dynamics. Others are natural collaborators who make everyone around them better without needing formal authority. These people are invaluable. Stop trying to turn them into something they're not.

For those who genuinely have leadership potential, stop focusing on what they can't do and start amplifying what they can. I've seen too many programs that spend 80% of their time addressing "development areas" and 20% building on strengths. That's backwards.

The best leader I ever worked with was a woman named Sarah who ran operations for a logistics company in Perth. Sarah couldn't give a polished presentation to save her life. Stumbled over words, forgot key points, the lot. But put her in front of her team during a crisis and she was pure magic. She saw problems before they happened, made decisions with incomplete information, and somehow convinced everyone that impossible deadlines were just challenging puzzles to solve.

A traditional leadership program would have spent months trying to fix Sarah's presentation skills. Instead, her company built her development around situational leadership and crisis management. They gave her more complex operational challenges and paired her with a communications specialist for the formal stuff.

Result? She turned that division from a cost centre into their most profitable unit within eighteen months.

The Missing Ingredient: Real Responsibility

Here's where most leadership pipelines fall apart completely - they treat leadership development like it's some kind of academic exercise. People attend workshops, complete assessments, maybe get assigned a mentor who sees them for coffee once a month.

But leadership isn't theoretical. It's not something you learn in a classroom.

Real leadership development happens when you give people genuine responsibility for outcomes that matter. Not project management. Not "stretch assignments" that everyone knows are just makework. Actual responsibility where failure has real consequences and success creates real value.

I worked with a tech company in Adelaide that figured this out beautifully. Instead of sending their high-potential people to external programs, they created what they called "ownership projects." Each person got full responsibility for a specific business challenge - reducing customer churn, improving supplier relationships, launching a new service line.

No safety nets. No co-leads. No committees.

Just: "Here's the problem, here's your budget, here's your timeline. Figure it out."

Some people failed spectacularly. That was valuable information. Others thrived in ways that surprised everyone, including themselves. The ones who succeeded didn't just solve the immediate problem - they developed the confidence and capability to take on bigger challenges.

Why Your Current Approach Creates Followers, Not Leaders

Most leadership development programs are designed by people who've never actually led anything themselves. They're built around theoretical frameworks and best practices that sound impressive in boardrooms but collapse under real-world pressure.

These programs teach people to follow processes, not think independently. They emphasise consensus-building over decision-making. They reward people for having the right conversations rather than achieving the right outcomes.

Worse still, they create artificial hierarchies based on program completion rather than demonstrated capability. I can't count how many times I've seen someone get promoted because they finished their "leadership journey" while more capable people got overlooked because they didn't fit the program criteria.

It's like promoting people to senior lifeguard positions based on their ability to describe swimming techniques rather than their ability to actually save drowning people.

The result? You get leaders who are brilliant at talking about leadership but struggle with actually leading.

The Australian Context: Why We're Particularly Bad at This

Australia has a unique cultural challenge when it comes to leadership development. We're suspicious of authority figures who take themselves too seriously, but we're also uncomfortable with direct conflict and honest feedback.

This creates leadership programs that are polite, non-confrontational, and completely divorced from the reality of what leadership actually requires. We spend more time teaching people how to avoid difficult conversations than how to navigate them effectively.

I remember facilitating a conflict resolution training session where participants spent two hours discussing the importance of "creating safe spaces for dialogue" but couldn't bring themselves to directly address the fact that one team member was consistently undermining their manager.

The cultural tendency to "not make waves" means our leadership development often produces people who are excellent at managing up and sideways but terrible at managing down. They know how to look like leaders to their bosses but can't actually influence their teams to achieve anything meaningful.

What Actually Works: Lessons from Companies Getting It Right

The organisations that develop genuine leaders share some common characteristics:

They start with brutal honesty about what leadership actually requires in their specific context. A leader in emergency services needs different capabilities than a leader in financial services. Stop pretending one-size-fits-all programs make sense.

They create real consequences for both success and failure. People learn to lead by experiencing the full weight of responsibility, not by attending workshops about responsibility.

They measure results, not activities. Instead of tracking how many people completed leadership modules, they track whether those people actually improved business outcomes.

They accept that some people will fail, and they use those failures as learning opportunities rather than trying to prevent them from happening.

Most importantly, they recognise that leadership development is never finished. The moment you think you've "developed" someone into a leader is probably the moment they stop growing.

The Future of Leadership Development

The companies that thrive over the next decade will be the ones that abandon the industrial approach to leadership development and embrace something more organic and responsive.

This means smaller cohorts, more personalised development paths, and much more emphasis on real-world application. It means accepting that not everyone needs to be developed in the same way or at the same pace.

It also means getting comfortable with the idea that some of your best leaders might not look like traditional leaders at all. The future belongs to people who can navigate complexity, build genuine relationships, and create value in uncertain environments. These capabilities don't always come in conventional packages.

Your leadership pipeline isn't broken because you're not investing enough resources. It's broken because you're investing in the wrong things. Stop trying to manufacture leaders and start creating conditions where real leadership can emerge.

The difference between those two approaches will determine whether your organisation develops people who can actually lead or just people who know how to talk about leadership at dinner parties.

And frankly, if Jenkins from accounting is still printing emails, he's probably not your succession planning priority anyway.