Organisations invest millions in leadership development programmes. They send high-potential employees to business schools, hire executive coaches, and design competency frameworks that span dozens of pages. Then they wonder why leadership quality remains stubbornly unchanged.
Athalie Williams has spent three decades observing this pattern. As former Chief People Officer at BHP and Chief HR Officer at BT Group (British Telecommunications), she’s led the redesign of leadership development systems across organisations employing more than 100,000 people. Her conclusion is direct: most leadership development programmes are solving the wrong problem.
“Organisations treat leadership as an individual capability issue when it’s actually a systems design issue,” Williams explains. “They invest in developing better leaders whilst leaving intact the conditions that prevent leadership from emerging.”
The Individual Capability Myth
The conventional approach follows predictable logic: identify leadership gaps, design programmes to close those gaps, send people through training, and expect improved leadership to follow. This model assumes leadership resides primarily in individuals and can be enhanced through skill-building.
Williams challenges this fundamentally. “Leadership doesn’t exist in isolation, it’s enabled or constrained by organisational context. You can develop someone’s strategic thinking, executive presence, and decision-making capability, but if they return to an environment that punishes risk-taking, rewards conformity, and reinforces hierarchy, that development won’t translate into different leadership behaviour.”
This explains why leadership programmes often feel impactful in the moment but produce limited organisational change. Participants gain insight, build networks, and return motivated to lead differently. Then they encounter organisational reality: unclear decision rights, competing priorities, cultures that say they want bold leadership whilst penalising deviation from norms.
Williams calls this “frustrated capability”: leaders who understand what good leadership looks like but lack the organisational conditions to practise it.
What Context Leadership Requires
If leadership is as much about context as capability, what organisational conditions enable it to emerge? Williams identifies several critical elements:
Clarity of decision rights. Leaders need to understand which decisions they own, which require consultation, and which belong elsewhere. Ambiguity about authority doesn’t create empowerment, it creates paralysis.
Tolerance for productive failure. Organisations that punish mistakes make risk-averse leaders, regardless of what development programmes teach. The question isn’t whether failure occurs but how it’s treated when it does.
Alignment on priorities. When leaders receive competing signals about what matters most, they default to managing perception rather than driving outcomes.
Permission to challenge. Hierarchical cultures that expect deference whilst demanding initiative create impossible tension.
“At BHP, we embedded culture as a key enabler of business results,” Williams notes. “We shifted from an annual engagement survey to one every 100 days, coupled with leader dashboards and analytics support to drive faster local action. The point wasn’t just measuring culture, it was creating the conditions where leaders could see issues clearly and act on them quickly.”
The Programme Design Error
Most leadership programmes suffer from a structural flaw: they’re designed by HR or learning functions with limited input from the leaders who will need to support participant development after programmes end.
This creates programmes that look impressive on paper but lack integration with how work actually gets done. Participants learn frameworks that don’t map to organisational processes, develop capabilities their managers don’t understand how to leverage, and return with enthusiasm their teams aren’t equipped to channel productively.
Williams advocates involving line leaders in programme design from the outset. What challenges do they need their people to solve? What capabilities would make the biggest difference to team performance? What organisational constraints prevent good leadership from emerging? These questions should shape programme content more than abstract competency frameworks.
The Coaching Paradox
Executive coaching has become standard practice, yet Williams observes a paradox: coaching often focuses on helping leaders adapt to organisational reality rather than questioning whether that reality serves the organisation well.
“I work one-on-one with executives to unlock insight, alignment, and personal effectiveness, particularly when stepping up into new roles or during periods of change or challenge,” Williams explains. “But effective coaching shouldn’t just help someone operate better within existing constraints, it should help them recognise which constraints are legitimate and which need challenging.”
This distinction matters because organisations often hire coaches to “fix” leaders who are actually responding rationally to dysfunctional systems. A leader struggling with influence might lack political acumen, or they might be operating in an organisation where influence depends more on proximity to power than quality of thinking.
What Actually Changes Leadership Quality
Williams’ experience suggests that leadership quality improves most reliably when organisations address three elements simultaneously:
Individual capability development through targeted learning that connects to real organisational challenges, not abstract competencies.
Systemic enablement by removing barriers that prevent good leadership from emerging: unclear decision rights, misaligned incentives, cultures that punish reasonable risk-taking.
Leadership accountability where senior leaders are measured not just on their own leadership but on their effectiveness in developing leadership capability across their teams.
“At BHP, we tied gender balance targets to managers’ bonus and performance outcomes,” Williams recalls. “We didn’t just set aspirations, we made it clear that leaders were accountable for creating balanced teams through balanced hiring and attrition. That accountability changed behaviour faster than any development programme could.”
The Board’s Role
Boards typically review leadership development as an HR programme update: participation numbers, satisfaction scores, perhaps advancement rates. Williams argues this misses the strategic question boards should ask: are we creating the organisational conditions that enable leadership at every level?
This shifts board oversight from programme evaluation to systems assessment. It requires examining whether organisational culture, decision-making processes, and incentive structures support or constrain leadership development.
“Boards should look for signals beyond programme metrics,” Williams suggests. “Are leaders being promoted based on conformity or capability? Do people feel safe challenging senior decisions? Are mistakes treated as learning opportunities or career risks? These indicators reveal more about leadership development effectiveness than programme completion rates.”
The Alternative Approach
What would leadership development look like if organisations accepted that context matters as much as capability? Williams’ experience suggests several practical shifts:
Start with organisational diagnosis, not competency gaps. What prevents good leadership from emerging? Address those barriers first, then develop capability to leverage the space created.
Design development around real organisational challenges, not generic frameworks. If leaders struggle with cross-functional collaboration, fix the organisational structures and incentives that make collaboration difficult.
Measure leadership development by organisational outcomes, not programme satisfaction. Are decisions being made faster? Is innovation increasing? Are diverse perspectives being heard?
Hold senior leaders accountable for creating developmental conditions, not just identifying high-potential talent.
The Trap and the Exit
The leadership development trap is believing that better programmes will create better leaders. They won’t, at least not without addressing the organisational conditions that determine whether developed capability can be deployed.
Williams summarises the challenge directly: “Organisations say they want bold, strategic, innovative leaders. Then they create environments where boldness is punished, strategic thinking is overwhelmed by short-term demands, and innovation means incremental improvement rather than genuine experimentation. No development programme can overcome that contradiction.”
The exit from this trap requires honesty about whether organisations genuinely want different leadership or simply want current leaders to perform better within existing constraints. If the answer is genuinely different leadership, the work extends far beyond programme design to organisational redesign.
For boards and executives serious about leadership development, Williams offers straightforward guidance: “Before investing in another programme, ask whether your organisation actually enables leadership to emerge. If the answer is unclear, start there. The most sophisticated development programme in the world won’t overcome a system designed to constrain leadership rather than enable it.”
