Leadership Development Must Focus On Capacities

Neena Newberry is the CEO of Newberry Solutions and creator of the New Lens leadership development platform.

How many leaders at your company really drive results? Harvard Business Publishing Corporate Learning recently posed this question in a survey of L&D/HR professionals and functional leaders. Their answers were dismaying. Only 53% of respondents said their organization’s leaders are very effective.

That’s a clarion call to reimagine leadership development. And I agree with the Harvard report about what the starting point should be: Leadership today means more than having the right skills. It requires new and deeper capacities. This, in turn, means a big shift in how we think about development.

Let’s explore why this shift is so crucial and how leadership development programs must evolve.

The Rising Pressure On Today’s Leaders

If you’ve been in the professional world for at least a decade, you’ve experienced seismic changes in what organizations expect from leaders. DDI’s “Global Leadership Forecast 2025” sums up the situation well: “Leaders must be agile—able to navigate rapid change, pivot strategies, and guide their teams through it—plus foster growth, drive innovation, and build genuine human connection. And they must do this while delivering business results.”

That’s a lot of pressure. We can see the effects of this pressure in how leaders are doing (as the Harvard survey proves), and in how they’re feeling, with stress and burnout on the rise.

In my own work, I’ve found that organizations are aware of this leadership crisis and know that they must address it. But the ways leadership development must change are much bigger than you might realize.

Why Many Leaders Are Unprepared

Many leaders didn’t start their careers seeking the roles they now hold. Instead, they’re what I call “accidental managers.” They became leaders based on the organization’s needs, not based on their own training or ambitions. But even professionals who did intend to move into leadership now find that they’re ill-equipped for today’s demands.

Right now, you might be thinking something like this: “Ah, so we should offer more leadership development!” But more training alone won’t solve this problem.

Yes, some organizations do need more development. But almost all organizations need a different approach to leadership development that addresses what the role of a leader really looks like today.

Development For A Complex Profession

So just how different are we talking? The Harvard report makes the case that we must now think about leadership as a profession, with all the complexity of fields like law and medicine. If that’s true (and I believe it is), effective leadership requires more than the occasional workshop about giving feedback or resolving conflict.

Instead, the report argues that leaders “need to build capacities as well as skills.” Think of it this way. The skills a leader uses change over time. For example, six years ago, we didn’t know how important it would be for leaders to know how to manage hybrid teams. But the capacities—things like navigating complexity or pivoting based on new information—that underlie skills are more consistent.

The Harvard report effectively explains the difference between skills by using an example from sports. Soccer great Lionel Messi has skills like passing and free-kicking. His capacities—endurance, balance, agility—allow him to execute those skills.

Putting It All Into Practice

How can you develop your own “Lionel Messis”? Here’s what I’ve learned from implementing my company’s tech-based approach to building capacities at our client organizations.

• Focus on key capacities. Keeping pace with rapid technology changes is on everyone’s mind right now. But don’t let those concerns take over your development programs. Yes, your leaders need AI skills. But they also need the capacities that will help your organization optimize AI—things like big-picture thinking and the ability to coach others to succeed with AI.

• Emphasize learning in the flow of work. Capacity building happens when leaders put themselves to the test through real experiences. I’m not saying cancel all your offsites or conference trips. Just make sure that there are also ways your leaders can learn something new and then immediately see what happens when they put it into practice. In the Harvard survey, 45% of respondents said they plan to use more on-the-job learning through projects this year.

• Follow action with reflection. This works hand in hand with learning in the flow of work. After your leaders try something new, their learning will deepen when they discuss how it went with someone they trust, whether that’s their manager, a mentor, a coach or their cohort in a peer learning program.

Moving Forward

No matter what field your company is in, the demands you face will keep evolving. And your approach to leadership development must evolve right alongside them. We don’t know what’s next, but we do know what capacities allow us to weather any challenge. Organizations that invest in these capacities will be best positioned for whatever the future brings.

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