20+ years in Leadership Development. One pattern wastes most of it.

Companies cut people first and protect development programs longest. The math has not added up for a long time.

A company has a hard quarter. The CFO calls for cost cuts. The first cut is people. The second cut is the development budget. The leadership program designed years ago, rerun every year, costing six figures each cycle, gets paused. Nobody on the executive team can say what changed in the business because of it. Nobody asks.

A quarter later, the company hires new leaders to replace the ones who left. Some will fail in their new roles. Some will be cut in the next round. The cycle continues.

This is the pattern I have been watching for 20+ years, inside global companies across financial services, retail, pharma, hospitality, technology, consumer goods, and a long list of smaller organizations. The names change. The math repeats. People go first. Programs and vendors go last. Nobody calculates what the programs returned.

I think this is irresponsible.

The usual excuses do not hold up. Not the economy. Not AI. Not the pace of change. Watch what happens in any company when the cuts come. The marketing budget gets defended line by line. Every dollar fights for itself with a CAC number behind it. The leadership development budget gets cut by spreadsheet, without a question asked. Same finance team. Same hard quarter. Different treatment. The difference is what each budget can prove about itself. The question worth sitting with is what it would take for leadership development to occupy the same category. Equally defended. Equally measured. Equally tied to the survival of the business. It is not even close.

Three things separate them. A baseline. A measurement plan. Accountability for what comes out. Marketing has all three on every campaign. Leadership development has none of them on months of investment.

This is not because measurement is impossible. It is because nobody insists on it.

Some will say measurement is cold. They will say leadership development is about people, and people are not numbers. I do not think these are opposing demands. Running a business is not charity. Even charity has to show what its investment returned. The harshest outcomes for people come from the refusal to measure, not from the discipline of measuring.

My background is not HR or L&D. I came up in management and operations, across retail, hospitality, and business consulting. I have carried P&L responsibility. I have managed teams against the numbers I had to deliver. When I moved into leadership development, I brought the operational instinct with me. Every engagement I have built with the freedom to design it starts with a business outcome, not a program design. Every one is tracked against that outcome.

That instinct is what I keep finding missing in this industry. The industry was built around design, facilitation, coaching, and the craft of working with people. It was not built to sit across from a CEO and say, "If we do this work and it does not move these three numbers in this many months, we should stop."

I am willing to say that. I think more of us should.

I am not writing this from outside the system. I have been in those rooms. I have designed those programs. I have run sessions I knew would not move the business, because the budget was approved, the calendar was set, and the deliverable was promised. Corporate work has its own pull. The culture, the structure, the priorities all push toward delivering what was agreed, not what would work. That was not the work I believed in. The freedom to step outside that pull is what makes this article possible. It is also what makes Leap Catalyst possible.

Here is what I believe, after 20+ years of watching the pattern repeat.

Leadership development that runs separate from the work stays separate from the work. Leaders leave the room, return to their inbox, and nothing changes. The development happened. People felt inspired. They learned something. They had fun. The business did not move. The investment did not return.

There are consequences. They arrive on the next quarter's report. The business misses its numbers. Costs get cut. People get cut. The next round goes harder than the last one. The fun does not survive the spreadsheet.

Real development happens when the development is the work itself. When the leadership team is working on the strategic priority the business needs them to deliver, and the development is built into how they work on it together, the development and the business result arrive in the same room at the same time.

This is the posture I have built Leap Catalyst around. Hold leaders accountable for results, not attendance. Start with business outcomes, not program design. Track progress against a baseline at every phase, not just at the end. Push every engagement to ROI, even when it means asking the client to share data they are not used to sharing.

That is not a method. That is a posture. It is what 20+ years of bringing business thinking to leadership development taught me, and what most of this industry forgot.

The companies that figure this out will spend less on leadership development and get more from it. The companies that do not will keep paying for activity, keep losing the same people every cycle, and keep wondering why the next program does not move the business.

I know which side I want to be on.

The mind behind this:

Dorothy Tsui is the Director and Founder of Leap Catalyst. 20+ years as a consultant and coach in people and organization development, after coming up on the business side where result measurement was not optional. She has a sharp eye for the absurd and a low tolerance for fluff. Her clients get straight talk and results they can defend.

Find out whether your organization's leadership development investment is set up to produce results: leapcatalyst.co/invest