What I keep running into with leadership development
I've been trying to work out for years why leadership development spend so often goes quiet. Not fails, exactly. Goes quiet.
Because the programs themselves are usually fine - situational leadership, feedback frameworks, the five behaviours. The models are sound and most of the people teaching them know what they're doing.
Everyone leaves understanding them. Attendance is excellent, the scores are lovely.
And then I'll be in a room with the same leaders six months later, and very little has actually changed in how they lead.
That gap between knowing it and doing it is where the money goes, I think. Quietly. Every year.
What I keep arriving at is that leadership isn't really a body of knowledge. Or it is, but that isn't the part that's hard.
The hard part is a handful of things you do when it's awkward.
Reading resistance in the room without dismissing it. Deciding when half the information is missing and the clock is running. Handing another function the thing they need when nobody's watching and it costs you something.
None of that is framework recall. All of it is a skill, and skills need reps - which is the bit I can't get around.
A slide has never given anybody a rep. Which isn't the slide's fault, really. It's just not what a slide is for.
What actually becomes visible in a game
A serious game is a simulation with teeth. A designed situation, a running clock, other people with their own agendas, and consequences that turn up whether or not anyone was ready.
Then a debrief that says out loud what just happened.
The reason I like it for a leadership cohort is that nobody has to report on themselves. You just see it. Everyone in the room sees it at the same time.
- Who decides cleanly and keeps the team moving - and who holds every decision until it feels safe, which usually means until it's late.
- Who reads the team as a system - and who plays their own scorecard brilliantly while the group loses the round.
- Who leads through a change they didn't choose - and who goes quiet in a way that's easy to miss until much later.
- Who hears the quiet person with the answer - and who talks straight over the one piece of information that would have saved them.
None of which is a character flaw, by the way. Most of it is a habit that worked somewhere else, in a job where it was genuinely the right call. The game just puts it somewhere it doesn't work.
The debrief names those behaviours specifically, in the language of your leaders' actual week. That recognition is the transfer, not the game. The game is only the most honest way I know to get to it.
Put leaders under pressure. Watch what they really do. Say it back to them, kindly and specifically.
That's most of it, honestly. The design work is all in making the pressure the right kind.
Which game I'd pick, and why
I match the game to the behaviour you're trying to build, rather than to a theme.
- Sticky Fingers - emergent leadership, collaboration and information-sharing under pressure. Scales to a full cohort. 12-150 people.
- Ripple Effect - reading a team as a system, cross-functional trust, and the cost of everyone optimising their own patch. 16-60 people.
- Planetfall - learning agility, and adapting when the evidence contradicts the plan. Up to 20 people.
- Bloom - influence without authority, and stakeholder relationships.
- Chaos in the Kitchen - senior decision-making when the conditions keep shifting.
If you'd rather get the full picture first, start with experiential leadership development, or the complete guide to serious games for leadership development.
Why I run every session myself
The person who designed the game runs it. That's the part I'm not willing to change.
Watching your leaders act under the game's pressure, and then debriefing the specific behaviour I saw - that isn't something I can hand to somebody with a script. No associate delivery, no licensed hand-off.
It also keeps the debrief fast, concrete and named, which is the only register I've found that holds a room full of senior people with targets waiting for them outside.
Proof
I've been designing and running these since 2019, for a Fortune-100 organisation and for fast-growing companies, with leaders across five countries.
One of those Fortune-100 programs ran six session-days and scored 8.82/10 average satisfaction across 113 respondents.
Then they came back for a second, different program - which is probably the more useful number of the two.
What you get
- A pre-session discovery call and brief, calibrated to your leaders' level and your real situation
- The facilitated game session (half-day or full-day), run by me, the designer
- An EPPA debrief, built to make behaviour visible and name it clearly
- A written behaviour summary afterwards, ready to hand to a CHRO or leadership team
- A committed action plan from every person in the room
And a promise, which I mean literally. If the session doesn't surface at least three named leadership behaviour patterns worth changing, I'll redesign the next one at no cost. You shouldn't pay for a session that showed you nothing.
Pricing
Programs start at ₹50,000 for a group of 15-25 participants. The final number depends on group size, seniority, location, and whether it's a single batch or several.
Send me a note and I'll get you a quote within 24 hours of a discovery call.
One honest thing about the calendar. I only take two or three programs a month, mostly because I run all of them myself. So it does fill up, and I'd rather tell you that now than in October.
If it sounds like it might fit, come and have a look at the calendar. Worst case, we have a conversation and you come out of it with a clearer brief.
Book a discovery call WhatsApp Arvindh
Frequently asked questions
What makes a leadership development program actually work?
Practice, rather than lecture. Leadership is a behaviour, and you can't really develop a behaviour nobody can see. So it works when it puts leaders in a situation that surfaces how they actually decide under pressure, and then debriefs that specifically. Another framework deck doesn't do it - not because the frameworks are wrong, but because knowing them was never the missing piece.
How long is a leadership development program?
Half-day or full-day facilitated sessions, and multi-batch programs when the population is bigger. The right length depends on how many leaders, how senior they are, and how much behaviour you actually need to shift. I'd rather run one session that lands than four that get diarised and quietly forgotten.
Who runs the sessions?
I do. I design every game and facilitate every session myself - no associate delivery, no licensed hand-off. The value is in reading the room live and running the debrief that ties the game to your leaders' real work, and that isn't something I can write down and hand over.
Related
- Experiential leadership development
- Leadership skills training
- First-time manager guide
- The complete guide to serious games for leadership development
- AI Bootcamp for Teams, if what your leaders actually need next is to get useful with AI
- Every program I run, in one place
With love from Bengaluru, this is Arvindh saying over and out.