The key to successful leadership development and transformation? Context First

Consider this scenario.

Your Leaders walk into work on a Monday morning to find an email announcing that you and your colleagues must attend a leadership development course the following Friday. How would you react?

“Wow, what a great opportunity! This comes at just the right time for me.”
“Brilliant—a cushy day on Friday and an early finish!”
“Eek! This is terrifying. What does this mean, and how will I be judged?”

The phrase “leadership development” can spark many different reactions, from nervousness to resistance, at every organisational level. With Josh Bersin reporting that just 12% of companies excel with their leadership development programs, the relevance of context cannot be overstated. Without proper context, even the best-designed programs can fall flat.

What’s typical in your organisation? Depending on your answer, understanding this context is key to unlocking real change, making the content of this blog life-changing for you. We’ll uncover why context is critical to leadership development and how it can transform how people view and benefit from it.

Discover solutions to help frame leadership development in an engaging and relevant way so it sparks genuine interest and lasting impact.

Why context matters in leadership development

When you hear the word "context," what comes to mind? For us, it represents the crucial information needed to fully grasp the scope, relevance, and meaning of something – be it a decision, conversation, or piece of information.

But why is context so important when it comes to leadership development?

Well, without it, leadership development programs can feel worthless, forced, and generic. At LIW, we create tailored programs for our clients, making sure the context is clear and the learning aligns with their leaders' specific needs.

A one-size-fits-all program leads to employees jumping to conclusions, fearing performance issues, questioning their leadership skills, or dreading uncomfortable activities. This mindset is formed before they even understand the program, based on their perceptions and past experiences.

Because many leadership programs are introduced without clear reasoning, participants may question their relevance or feel disengaged. And when they do attend, they may not understand the value and switch off.

Let’s face it, translating learning into real business impact is challenging enough. Without proper context, many off-the-shelf leadership programs struggle to make a real difference.

The issue with many leadership development programs

Well-designed leadership programs can make a big difference in performance. In fact, top leaders are 800% more productive than others. Yet, only 10% of CEOs believe these programs actually work.

How come?

Most leadership development programs have a key flaw – not necessarily in the content (which can be pretty good), but in how that content is structured. What we call the "learning journey" and have a missing key ingredient.

Typically, many programs are ordered around content linked first to the individual, then to the team, and finally to the broader system perspective.

But this rarely works because:

It’s either too overwhelming to make progress or too disconnected from real, daily challenges at work.
The content feels abstract, making it hard to apply to your job. In fact, 75% of leadership development professionals estimate that less than half of what they train gets applied on the job.
Participants in these programs are often asked to be open about their flaws and shortcomings without a strong reason. If we want people to engage and enjoy learning, we must create the desire to contribute to something bigger than themselves.

And the underlying key issue we observe is that these programs often lack context. Rather than focusing on real-world business outcomes that participants need to achieve, the real power lies in linking leadership to the organisations purpose and objectives.

Take a retail company, for example, where managers were sent to a leadership workshop. The program started with three days focused on “individuals” with leadership theories and personality tests. Managers spent time learning about their strengths and weaknesses and what makes a good leader. Participants left the workshop smiling with ticks on the happy sheet and hi fives !

That’s all well and good. But when they return to work, managers still faced the same problems – production delays, team issues, and poor performance. Very quickly, their resolve to apply their self-development from the program dissipated, as a result little changed. Without having a broader context, and aligning to that as an individual, the inner motivation to think differently, take ownership, and accountability to lead in a different way is likely to be missing.

From a program design perspective, understanding the context is crucial. It helps a skilled facilitator go beyond surface-level understanding and connect the learning and skills to the challenges and opportunities a leader faces in their context, back in the real world. Connecting ALL the dots makes the training highly relevant and impactful.

And, from a program design point of view, clearly understood context is key to building the nuanced perspective and emphasis a skilled facilitator will employ to help a leader relate what they are learning and the skills they are developing specifically to address opportunities and challenges that exist for them, in their context, back in the real world.

So, what would have worked better?

Context first!

We’ve found that people are much more willing to engage, be open, experiment and reflect on their actions when they know the context for any development. Like anything in life, it's hard to put in the effort when the reason is unclear.

How does context first work? What does it look like?

As you can see, when we overlook context, efforts often fall short or miss the mark entirely. For the best results, it's important to consider the context from three angles: individual, team, and the broader business perspective.

1. Individual context

Let’s look at Kodak, once a leading American company known for pioneering photography and film. Kodak's downfall happened because it failed to adapt to digital photography, even though it invented the digital camera in 1975.

Instead of focusing on the future of digital, Kodak stuck to its traditional film business to protect its profits. This delay allowed other companies like Sony and Canon to take the lead in digital cameras. By the time Kodak tried to catch up, it was too late, and they couldn't recover. So, because its leaders didn’t understand the context (the ‘why’), it all went wrong.

People only fully commit to change when they understand the whole picture—that includes where they’re starting from, why the action matters, what they want to achieve, and how they’ll personally fit in with wider goals.

Using Kodak’s example, to transform and adapt, individuals need to understand the ‘why’ and what’s happening in the market to play an active role in transforming the business.

2. Team context

Many organisations nowadays have a shared vision. But having a shared vision is just the beginning of effective teamwork. Understanding the market factors that drove the need and the steps that led to its creation is all about understanding the context.

When teams grasp why the vision was developed, identify the driving forces behind it, and know what they hope to achieve, it sets the framework for effective change. And that change can happen rapidly. Teams rely less on managers, operate independently, and make better decisions.

This context gives the change meaning, making it easier for team members to align their personal actions and goals with it. When teams grasp the entire context together, they are more likely to commit and actively contribute to making change happen, rather than complaining the ‘the goal posts have been moved again’.

3. Business context

At the organisational level, companies often try to transform how they operate. However, when things don’t go as planned, people tend to cling to old habits, which can prevent progress.

Using Kodak again, its leaders needed to understand the context behind their losses and grasp what was happening in the market to make well-thought-out decisions that support changes.

The company had a unique opportunity to pivot, adapt, and stay competitive. Instead, they clung to old habits and had a ‘we always do it this way’ attitude. By having an open mindset to learning and seeing experimentation as an opportunity rather than a threat, the company could have been steered toward successful transformation.

Just imagine for a moment that top executives had realised the company needed to change direction and, with this insight, decided leadership was the key to making it happen.

The leadership development program they then commissioned would have welcomed confused participants asking themselves, ‘Why are we doing this? Things are going great,’ and ‘I’m hitting my numbers. I must be doing a pretty good job!’?

The program would have helped people see the bigger picture (the context) and that the company needed a major shift to stay competitive. The hard truth is that these leaders were crucial to making that happen. This kind of context is what sets a leadership development program apart from a gen

Context done well

Fully and deeply understanding the context builds engagement and motivation, leading to better results. Here’s a simple way to think about why this occurs. When context is done well it generates three things, desire, belief and purpose:

Generate desire

Being part of something exciting and revolutionary that an organisation is trying to do creates desire,

When change is framed in a way that highlights its relevance and impact, it sparks desire and genuine interest. This approach ensures that employees don’t just go with the flow without any great desire but understand the value it generates and the relevance to their role. This creates a sense of urgency, energy and commitment.

Referring back to Kodak, the company needed to build excitement and the belief that it would be part of something exciting and revolutionary. If the context had been clear enough, it would have generated desire.

Create real belief

What’s interesting is that people understand the value of context through their own experiences. You’ve probably experienced times when everything just clicked, and your team performed at its best—often during a crisis.

If you’ve heard your employees say, “We’re amazing in a crisis!” have you paused and wondered why that is? How can teams achieve incredible results and pull off the impossible under pressure yet struggle to maintain that same energy when things are calm?

The answer lies in context.

When leadership development, models, practices, and tools align with and support what you're trying to achieve, the change process is easier and more realistic, creating a sense of genuine belief. Individuals also need to believe that their efforts will lead to meaningful results. People need to believe what they’re doing will actually make a difference. This clear context drives motivation to tackle challenges head-on and get great results even under pressure.

What’s more, when everyone is sharply focused on what they need to achieve to get through and why, they all believe they're in it together. There's a shared belief that success is not only possible but inevitable.

It’s distressing how often we hear participants comment that a development program was much better than they expected and that they thought it was going to be pointless. If only time had been taken to engage those individuals in advance, allowing them to create context, perhaps they would have doubled or even tripled the value, giving them a much higher chance of translating their learning to application. Rather than spending a significant portion of the program quietly wishing they were not there or even outwardly opposing the content and experience - Andy Chevis, Head of Design and Research at LIW

Add a balanced amount of pressure

Suppose a team is told to join a leadership training program for a new company-wide initiative. Although the message is clear that attending the training is now a key performance indicator and failure to comply could affect their standing in the company, the team feels intense pressure to participate. This pressure often leads employees to join not out of genuine interest but out of fear of negative consequences.

Such external pressure can cause employees to approach the training with a sense of obligation and begrudging compliance rather than enthusiasm, reducing its impact and the return on investment. Additionally, while a certain level of pressure can motivate employees to perform well, excessive pressure can lead to burnout.

People need more than just a desire to improve to make fundamental changes. Looking at Kodak, applying the right pressure—by clearly explaining that the company needed to shift to stay relevant or face failure—could have made a real difference. Emphasising that everyone was in it together and needed to act to survive would have provided the necessary context for lasting change.

Creating the right balance of pressure can drive performance and action without causing undue stress. Without these elements, it’s hard to stay motivated and committed.

Context first: the key to successful leadership development and transformation

Transformation isn’t just about simply rolling out new leadership development strategies; to be effective it’s about understanding and providing the context, the reasons behind those strategies.

As we've seen with the Kodak example, failing to grasp the broader context (aka the why) can lead to missed chances , frustration, wasted energy and stagnation.

To succeed in transformation, organisations must understand the reasons behind changes, recognise the driving forces, and empower their people with genuine desire, belief, and the right balance of pressure to drive lasting change.

We’re on a mission to improve people's work experiences because we know that understanding the context makes a difference.. We’d love to discuss how context can affect leadership development and work satisfaction. Contact us today.

Further reading: