"I Was Dreading Coming to Your Sessions" (And What That Reveals About Leadership Development)
I've heard it so many times I started getting a complex.
"I was dreading coming to your sessions."
Not "I wasn't sure." Not "I almost skipped it." Dread.
Every time I wrap up my core leadership development program, someone pulls me aside to say it. And I've had to sit with that word for a long time.
Because dread isn't just discomfort. Dread means you've lived something before. Something unpleasant, unhelpful, time-consuming…and nothing changed. You walked out the same way you walked in, except now you're a little more cynical and a little more behind on your actual work.
That's what most leadership development has done to people. And I get it.
The Real Problem Isn't Boring Facilitation
Most leadership development is designed around content. Far too many facilitators fall in love with their own material and the sound of their own voice, and never stop to think about what the people in the room actually need.
One of my clients put it bluntly: the program they went through felt like the facilitator had Googled "leadership curriculum," taken the top result, and copy-pasted it into a session. Clinical. Surface-level. Generic.
And it's not just boring. It's solving the wrong problem.
When someone struggles to give hard feedback, we teach them a feedback model. When a team isn't executing, we hand them a delegation framework. When leaders avoid difficult conversations, we give them a script.
But if it were truly a skill issue, it would have been solved by now. You can Google how to give feedback. You can read a book on delegation. The information is everywhere.
The problem isn't that leaders don't know what to do. It's that they're still asking themselves whether it's even their job to do it.
That's an identity problem. Not a skill problem.
The Question Nobody Asks
The leaders who walk into my sessions dreading it aren't dreading learning. They're dreading another session that has nothing to do with their actual life.
They're sitting on real problems — relationships that are fracturing, teams that aren't performing, decisions that keep them up at night — and they've been conditioned to expect that none of it will get addressed.
So when I walk into a room, I ask myself: am I actually solving something that's keeping someone here up at night? Because if I'm not, I'm just adding to the dread.
What Actually Breaks the Cycle
I tell my clients: "I'm the egg breaker. You're the omelet maker."
What I mean is: I broach the hard topic. I say the difficult thing. I push for the transformation that everyone in the room knows needs to happen but nobody has been willing to name.
That's my job.
Then you get to make the omelet. When the session is done, you're left to do the work. You make it happen. I'm there to support your change, but the change itself belongs to you.
True transformation happens outside of our time together.
In practice, that looks like this:
Treating every participant as the expert on their own experience. They're living it. I'm not. So we start there.
Connecting the surface problem to the real one. What looks like a communication issue is usually a leader who hasn't accepted that hard conversations are their responsibility. What looks like a performance problem is usually a leader still operating like a high-performing individual contributor instead of someone responsible for developing others.
Creating space for peer-to-peer learning. When leaders realize the person sitting next to them is wrestling with the same thing, something shifts. They stop feeling uniquely stuck.
Requiring a specific behavior change commitment between sessions. Not "I'll try to communicate better" but something concrete and trackable. Real change happens in the Monday morning moments, not the training room.
By the second session, I can feel the room change. People stop waiting for the catch. They start engaging like this might actually matter.
The Standard Is Too Low
People don't dread things they've found valuable. They dread things that have let them down over and over again.
The bar for leadership development has gotten so low that "at least it wasn't a waste of time" counts as a win. Your leaders deserve better than that. So do you.
What Transformation-Focused Development Looks Like
Real leadership development should address:
Identity before skills - helping leaders embrace who they need to become
Real problems - the issues actually keeping them up at night
Peer learning - connecting leaders who face similar challenges
Concrete commitments - specific, trackable behavior changes
Ongoing application - transformation that happens outside the training room
Ready for Leadership Development That People Don't Dread?
If you're realizing the development your leaders have had so far has been more training than transformation, contact me to discuss what real transformation-focused leadership development could look like for your team.