But how much of that investment can they confidently connect to better business performance?
It's a question that Leaders should be asking more often.
Because whilst leadership development is widely recognised as important, demonstrating its commercial value remains a challenge for many organisations.
Organisations often measure participation, collect feedback or assess leaders using myers briggs, hogan360s or other descriptive assessments and track engagement scores. And whilst these measures have their place, they don't necessarily tell us whether the organisation is performing any better as a result.
Are decisions being made faster? Are teams becoming more effective? Is productivity improving? Are talented people staying longer? Is the business generating greater value?
These are the questions that connect leadership development to organisational performance.
And they're the questions leaders need to become much better at answering.
Most organisations wouldn't invest in a new technology platform, operational process or strategic initiative without some expectation of a commercial return.
They establish objectives, identify measures of success and monitor whether the investment is delivering what they hoped.
Yet leadership development is often treated differently.
Success can become defined by how many people attended, how satisfied participants were or whether leaders demonstrated an improvement in a particular competency.
And while it’s not wrong to measure these aspects it creates an incomplete picture.
A leader might leave a development programme feeling more confident, more self-aware and better equipped to manage their team.
That's valuable progress but what happens next?
Does their increased confidence translate into better decisions? Does greater self-awareness improve relationships? Does their team become more productive, more engaged or more capable of solving problems independently?
And ultimately, does any of this contribute to improved organisational results?
Leadership development creates its greatest value when individual growth also translates into collective capability and better business performance.
If we only measure what happens to the individual, we risk overlooking the wider impact of their development.
One of the most important shifts organisations can make is to stop thinking about leadership development as a standalone activity.
Leadership doesn't happen in isolation.
The way leaders think, behave, communicate and make decisions influences how their teams operate, how effectively functions collaborate and how the wider organisation responds to challenges.
A leader who struggles to delegate might unintentionally create bottlenecks.
A leadership team that cannot navigate disagreement effectively might delay important strategic decisions.
An organisation where people are reluctant to challenge authority might miss opportunities for innovation or fail to identify emerging risks.
These challenges can appear operational, cultural or commercial.
But their underlying causes may be developmental.
Which means improving leadership capability can influence performance far beyond the leaders themselves.
At Complete, this is a fundamental part of how we approach development.
We look beyond simply describing an individual like traditional assessments. We instead focus on understanding what needs to develop to help leaders and teams handle greater complexity, overcome challenges and improve performance.
Awareness alone doesn't transform an organisation.
What matters is what people become capable of doing differently as a result.
There isn't a single measure that captures the full value of leadership development. Organisations are complex systems, and performance is influenced by multiple interconnected factors.
But that doesn't mean leadership's contribution is impossible to measure. It means we need to build a more complete picture.
So, let’s look at three areas that offer a useful starting point.
Looking at revenue per employee can provide one indication of how effectively an organisation is converting its collective capability into commercial results.
When leaders become more effective at setting direction, removing obstacles, developing talent and enabling their teams, the benefits may eventually be reflected in productivity and financial performance.
But revenue per employee is only one part of the picture.
Depending on the organisation, profitability, margin improvement, customer retention or revenue growth may be more meaningful.
The important question is whether leadership development is contributing to the commercial priorities that matter most to the business.
And if performance improves, can we understand the role that better leadership played in making that possible?
Consider how much organisational time is lost through slow decision-making, unnecessary escalation, ineffective meetings or poor collaboration.
These challenges rarely appear as a line item, but their impact can be considerable.
A useful measure might be the time it takes to complete a critical business process. Perhaps it's moving from customer enquiry to contract approval, launching a new product or resolving an operational issue.
If leaders develop their ability to make decisions, build trust, clarify accountability and work more effectively across organisational boundaries, those processes may become faster and more efficient.
Measuring changes in cycle time, alongside quality and other operational indicators, can help reveal whether that increased capability is making a difference.
The misinterpretation is that often we ask if people are working harder. But in reality we should be considering if the organisation is becoming better at working together.
The cost of ineffective leadership isn't always immediately visible.
Sometimes it appears through disengagement, persistent conflict, absenteeism or the loss of valuable employees.
Regretted attrition, the departure of people an organisation would have preferred to retain, can be a particularly useful measure despite it being painful for the organisation.
Losing an experienced employee can mean losing valuable knowledge, relationships and capability. Replacing that person takes time and resources. It can also place additional pressure on the people who remain.
Of course, people leave organisations for many reasons, and not all are within a leader's control. But the quality of leadership can shape whether people feel supported, challenged, trusted and able to grow.
Understanding changes in regretted attrition, alongside engagement, internal mobility and team effectiveness, can offer valuable insight into the broader impact of leadership development.
One of the reasons organisations struggle to demonstrate leadership ROI is that they start thinking about measurement too late.
A development programme is commissioned, leaders participate, feedback is collected. And only afterwards does someone ask what commercial value it delivered.
By that point, establishing a credible connection between the investment and the outcomes can be difficult.
At Complete this is why we usually start with defining the business challenge. Something like:
From there, organisations can establish a baseline.
If slow decision-making is holding back a business function, understand the current process and where delays occur.
If employee retention is a priority, examine the existing patterns and the factors influencing them.
If productivity needs to improve, identify the measures that best reflect productive performance in that particular context.
Then connect the developmental journey to support the outcomes you want to see.
Monitor what changes as leaders and teams develop. Look for improvements in capability, behaviour and business results. Review the evidence regularly and adapt the approach where necessary. And importantly, recognise that correlation isn't always causation.
An improvement in revenue might reflect market conditions, pricing changes or investment elsewhere in the organisation.
A reduction in employee turnover might be influenced by external labour market conditions.
This doesn't invalidate the measurement. It simply means we need to be thoughtful about what the evidence does and doesn't tell us. The objective isn't to claim that leadership development is responsible for every positive result.
It's to build a credible understanding of where development is contributing to better organisational performance.
There's another important consideration when thinking about the ROI of leadership development at scale.
Developing one leader will create meaningful value. But what happens when an entire leadership team develops together?
When teams improve their ability to make decisions collectively, resolve disagreements, build trust and align around shared priorities, the impact can extend across the organisation. Dependencies can reduce, collaboration can improve, accountability becomes clearer. And problems that previously required constant senior intervention may begin to be resolved much closer to where they occur.
This is where leadership development becomes part of the opportunity for organisational transformation rather than simply an individual learning experience.
At Complete, our work with leadership teams and individual executives has demonstrated how substantial the commercial returns from development can be.
We've seen client outcomes reporting returns exceeding 100 times the investment in team development and more than 50 times in individual coaching.
These are examples of what can be achieved in particular client contexts, rather than returns every organisation should expect. But they challenge an important assumption.
Leadership development doesn't have to be viewed simply as a cost associated with supporting people. When it's focused on the right challenges, supported by meaningful measurement and translated into better organisational performance, it can become a significant source of commercial value.
And the opportunity to create that value increases when organisations move beyond developing leaders individually and begin developing the collective capability of their teams.
The most effective approach to measuring leadership development isn't to reduce everything to a single financial figure. Nor is it to abandon commercial measurement because human development is complex.
It's to bring the two together.
By understanding how leaders are developing, how their teams are changing or what it means for the organisation's ability to perform requires us to look at both the visible outcomes of leadership and the less visible capabilities that produce them.
Better thinking. Greater emotional regulation. More sophisticated decision-making. Stronger relationships. Improved collaboration.
All capabilities that matter in leadership. So they greatly influence how effectively organisations execute strategy, respond to change, develop talent and create commercial value.
At Complete, we believe that as organisations grow in complexity, the capability of their leaders must develop with them.
And when we measure that development alongside meaningful business outcomes, we can make better decisions about where to invest, what to develop and how to sustain progress.
Leadership development should never be measured by participation alone. Its value becomes clear when we connect the growth of our people to the performance of our organisations.
And the organisations that learn to make that connection will be better placed to turn leadership development into lasting competitive advantage.