The Fundamental Problem with Leadership and Management Development

By Jon Billsberry

People in leadership and management roles make decisions based on their own assumptions about what effective leadership and management look like. These assumptions shape how they delegate, motivate, listen, control, trust, reward, challenge, include, and intervene. Most of the time, these assumptions operate silently. Managers simply feel they are “doing what works,” “being decisive,” “protecting standards,” “supporting the team,” or “holding people accountable.”

Yet behind these everyday judgements sit powerful personal theories of leadership and management. A manager who believes that good leadership means being in control will behave differently from one who believes it means creating space for others to act. A manager who believes people are mainly motivated by pressure, incentives, or fear of failure will make different choices from one who believes people are motivated by autonomy, purpose, or belonging.

These personal theories may never be named as such, written down, or discussed in a development programme, but they guide action all the same. Indeed, they may matter most when the situation is difficult. Under pressure, people rarely reach first for the leadership model they learned on a course. They reach for what feels natural.

Organisations invest in leadership and management development because they want to influence these everyday patterns of judgement and behaviour. They want people in leadership roles to delegate more effectively, listen more carefully, empower others, manage conflict better, build trust, or lead change. In other words, they want people to act differently in the moments when their existing assumptions might otherwise take over. The usual response is to introduce new models, frameworks, tools, or competencies through training courses and development programmes.

These ideas may be useful, but they are often taught as if they can stand apart from the personal theories managers already use to make sense of their work. The result is that participants may leave a programme with new language but return to work guided by the same underlying beliefs about what effective management requires.

The Theories Managers Use

Research on implicit theories helps us understand this problem. Implicit theories are the often-unspoken beliefs people use to make sense of the world around them. In leadership and management, they include assumptions about what authority should look like, what motivates people, how trust is earned, when control is necessary, and what good performance requires. These beliefs matter because they shape how people interpret new ideas before those ideas ever influence practice.

Recognising the role of implicit theories challenges a common assumption in leadership and management development: that expert knowledge can be passed on to participants and then straightforwardly applied at work. Development does not work like depositing knowledge into an empty account. People receive new ideas through the theories they already live by. A framework about empowerment, for example, will mean something different to a manager whose working theory is “good managers stay in control” than to one whose theory is “good managers create conditions for others to act.”

This shifts the purpose of development. The starting point should not be the new models or theories, but the manager’s existing way of making sense of leadership and management. Development becomes more powerful when people are helped to make their implicit theories visible, examine where they came from, explore their impact on actions and reactions, and discover what they make possible or impossible.

Once people understand the theories they are already using, new ideas can be introduced differently: not as abstract prescriptions, but as useful resources for questioning, stretching, or revising their own personal theories.

Development as Self-Awareness, Not Reinvention

This approach makes leadership and management development more practical, not less. Instead of asking people to absorb another model, it asks them to examine the moments when their own judgement takes over. What did they notice? What did they ignore? Why did one response feel obvious and another feel risky, weak, unfair, or unnecessary? These questions bring development closer to the real situations in which leadership and management are enacted.

It also changes the ambition of development. The aim is not to turn people into someone else, but to help them see themselves more clearly in action. This includes understanding how others experience their behaviour, how their decisions affect the work around them, and where their usual responses may need reconsidering.

Useful approaches might include critical incident reflection, feedback from colleagues, facilitated discussion of real decisions, and exercises that ask managers to trace why certain actions felt obvious at the time. These methods bring development closer to the moments where leadership and management actually happen: in judgement, interaction, response, and consequence.

What Can Managers and Organisations Do Today?

The key lesson is that leadership and management development should begin with the theories people already use, not the theories organisations want them to adopt. Managers should ask themselves what their decisions reveal about their assumptions concerning control, trust, motivation, authority, and responsibility.

Organisations should design development around real decisions, feedback, reflection, and dialogue, rather than relying only on imported models or competency frameworks.

The aim is not to produce a different person, but to help people recognise their default assumptions and act with more choice when those assumptions may not serve them well.

Would you like to read further?

Billsberry, J. (2026). Teaching the person, not the topic: An implicit theory approach to management education.

Schyns, B., Kiefer, T., Kerschreiter, R., & Tymon, A. (2011). Teaching implicit leadership theories to develop leaders and leadership: How and why it can make a difference.

Author

Jon Billsberry is an adjunct professor in the Olga Tennison Autism Research Centre at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, and an Honorary Research Fellow at Eva Burrows College, which is part of the University of Divinity in Australia. His research focuses on organisational fit and misfit, neurodiversity and neuroinclusion, socially constructed approaches to leadership, implicit leadership theory, and management education.