Most organizations value their leaders and invest in developing them. The harder question is whether those investments are building the leadership capability the future business will actually require.

In 2025, U.S. organizations spent an estimated $102.8 billion on training, with management and supervisory training accounting for 13 percent of training budgets—tied for the largest share. Separately, a broad global leadership survey of nearly 11,000 corporate leaders identified setting strategy and managing change as their two greatest skill gaps—yet only 22 percent of HR teams reported prioritizing those capabilities.

Why is it consistently a challenge to keep leadership development focused on what the business needs most from its leaders?

Part of the answer sits upstream of leadership development itself. Leadership programs take their cues from the leadership model underneath them—the organization’s point of view about what good leadership looks like and what leaders need to do to create value. When that point of view no longer gives leaders enough guidance for the work in front of them, the effects tend to surface in recognizable ways:

• Leaders are unclear about what matters most as the strategy or business changes.
• Different leaders interpret “good leadership” differently, creating uneven expectations across teams and functions.
• Leaders at different levels are held to broadly similar expectations even though the complexity and contribution of their work are very different.
• Development starts to feel generic—leaders can identify many things they could improve but have less clarity about which capabilities will matter most for the future business and the needs of their role.

These are not necessarily signs of a bad leadership model. They are signs that the model may no longer provide enough guidance for the leadership the business now needs.

Leadership models accumulate history. Competencies are added or removed as strategies, markets, cultures, and leadership priorities change. Each decision may make sense at the time, and many of those expectations become deeply embedded in assessment, development, performance, talent, and succession processes.

Over time, however, the model can become a collection of things good leaders should be able to do rather than a clear point of view about the leadership capability the business most needs.

That is when two questions become especially important:

Does our leadership model reflect where the business is going, the stakeholders it must serve, and the value it needs to create? And do the leadership capabilities we emphasize actually help produce those outcomes?

A comprehensive model can still miss the strategy

Our Leadership Code research has long suggested that roughly 60–70 percent of what effective leaders need to do is foundational—requirements that apply across businesses and geographies. Our recent research continues to reinforce the durability of these foundational skills.  The remaining 30–40 percent reflects what differentiates leadership in a particular organization. Those differentiators should reflect its strategy, customers and other stakeholders, culture, and sources of competitive advantage.

The core requirements of good leadership do not need to be reinvented every time the strategy changes. What may need to change is which capabilities deserve greater emphasis, what those capabilities require in this business, and how they translate into the work of leaders at different levels.

A leadership model can be well designed and research-based, contain many of the right behaviors, and yet no longer give enough weight or precision to the capabilities the future strategy will require.

A model can therefore remain fundamentally sound and still become strategically out of date.

Consistency matters, but it is only as good as the logic being reinforced. An organization can use its leadership model consistently across development, assessment, talent, and succession and still reinforce expectations that no longer fit the future strategy.

A leadership model is a hypothesis. It represents a reasoned view of what leaders need to do—and what customers, employees, investors, and other stakeholders should experience differently when they do it well. Senior leaders should be able to explain that logic and, where possible, test it.

Figure 1: An effective leadership model reflects the leadership capability the future business requires:

The model is not the whole leadership system, but it supplies the logic the system should reinforce.

In our work with organizations navigating faster strategy cycles, shifting customer expectations, new business models, and technology-driven changes in work, four pressure points keep surfacing.

Four pressure points facing leadership models today

Pressure point 1: Strategy now moves on a faster clock than leadership models do

Leadership models take real work to build. Once an organization has aligned executives, defined the behaviors, rebuilt assessments, and embedded the model into development and talent processes, few are eager to reopen it.

Meanwhile, markets, customer expectations, business models, and technology keep moving. A model can still look current on paper even after the business it was designed to support has moved on.

The model usually does not need to be rebuilt every year. But we do recommend revisiting the business case for leadership when the business changes materially—for example, with a new strategy, acquisition, customer promise, operating model, or technology that changes the work itself.

At these moments, the key questions are:

• Where is the organization trying to create value next?
• What do customers and other stakeholders need to experience?
• Which leadership capability will that future require?
• What, if anything, should leaders do differently?

Pressure point 2: A shared model still needs behavioral precision

An effective enterprise leadership model creates useful consistency but does not imply that the same behavior looks identical everywhere.

Consider strategic thinking. A first-line leader connects the team’s priorities to broader direction. A mid-level leader translates strategy across functions or divisions through integrated choices. At the executive level, the work expands to shaping enterprise direction over a multi-year horizon and making tradeoffs whose effects may not be visible for years.

The capability may sound the same at a high level, but the contribution and complexity of the work are not.

In our client work, we translate enterprise leadership expectations by considering how the contribution changes by level, what our Leadership Code research shows high performers do differently, and where the work carries disproportionate strategic value.

For CHROs and senior talent leaders, this is as much a strategy question as a development question: where will greater clarity in leadership expectations most affect strategy execution, customer value, or enterprise risk?