> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.meaninglabs.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Appropriateness Gap - URL: https://www.meaninglabs.io/the-appropriateness-gap/ - Published: 2026-08-12T16:24:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-25T18:50:02.000Z - Description: Leadership development works. But its gains fade quickly—and reach senior leaders least. The problem is not effectiveness. It is appropriateness. - Author: Ryan Stoll, PhD - Tags: Perspective, Leadership ### ***Why the leaders with the most organizational leverage get the least from leadership development*** --- Billions of dollars are spent annually on leadership development, from promising new leaders to established executives. Half a dozen meta-analyses (see, for example, Avolio et al., 2009; Collins & Holton, 2004; Lacerenza et al., 2017), representing more than 250 studies, find significant gains in both individual performance and organizational benefit. The aggregate effect sizes are medium to large, roughly d = 0.60 to 0.82 depending on the focal outcome, research design, and study context. (An effect size — Cohen's d — expresses how large a change is relative to normal variation in the outcome. By convention, 0.2 is small, 0.5 is medium, and 0.8 is large.) We reviewed 112 papers and included 36 in a preliminary, informal meta-analysis covering the empirical and grey literatures — informal in the strict sense: the pooling was not preregistered and the weighting reflects our judgment. The estimates in this piece come from that synthesis. Where a figure carries a citation, it is from the published source; where it does not, it is ours: directional, not precise. So leadership development works. That much is settled. But two caveats sit underneath that conclusion, and together they reveal a paradox: the leaders with the most organizational leverage get the least from leadership development — and the least durable version of it. ## Caveat One: The Gains Decay The effect sizes reported across individual studies, randomized trials, and meta-analyses have largely been captured within one to six months of program completion. What we know about leadership development outcomes is, by and large, what we know about short-term outcomes. In the smaller subset of studies with follow-up at nine months or more, program effects decay by 60 to 90 percent — enough to shift a measured change from significant to not. The decay itself is unsurprising. It is the typical trajectory of structured behavior-change interventions across many fields: regression toward baseline once the intensive intervention ends. What attenuates the decay is ongoing reinforcement — booster sessions and follow-on investment. Extrapolate to leadership development and those medium-to-large effect sizes will likely have decayed by 60 percent or more a year later unless paired with ongoing reinforcement. This need not diminish the value of these programs. But the changes being reported are short-term change, not sustained change. ## Caveat Two: Senior Leaders Benefit Least The story changes when you break effectiveness out by leader level. Lower-level, early-stage leaders consistently see more benefit from these programs than senior leaders do. This holds for how much they learn, and especially for how much transfers into their day-to-day role. Lower-level leaders learn about twice as much, and transfer (the degree to which what is learned is applied on the job) roughly five times as much as their senior counterparts. In our synthesis, the split is stark: effects around d = 0.82 for lower-level leaders — the top of the published range — and roughly d = 0.31 for senior leaders, well below its floor. This is not to say the senior leader learns nothing. But it suggests a ceiling effect inherent to existing programs when applied to senior leaders. By the time a leader reaches that level, they have accumulated most of the skills and frameworks these programs are designed to teach. Relative to a new leader, they have room to gain only a fraction of new knowledge. The differential is not about effectiveness. It is about appropriateness. Call this the appropriateness gap. Decay hits both groups, but lower-level leaders can absorb it. An effect size of 0.82 that decays by 60 percent still leaves something substantive. An effect size of 0.31 that decays by the same proportion approaches statistical noise. Senior leaders have no buffer. They have entrenched models and entrenched ways of being, and under pressure they revert to them. A lower-level leader may not yet have the experience or mental models to fall back on, so what the program taught proves genuinely useful, even under stress. ## The Most Leverage, the Least Return Senior leaders carry more network leverage and influence within an organizational system. More scope, more span, more pull, more responsibility. They touch more of the organization. Investments in their development therefore have unusual reach: even small gains at that level propagate far beyond the individual change. And so the gap. Billions spent. Programs that do yield real returns. But those returns are driven primarily by the junior leaders who needed the skills most and had the most room to grow. The senior leaders — the ones with the most leverage, whose development could ripple the furthest — are the leaders these programs help least, and whose gains are most likely to decay to nothing. If every intervention for senior leaders — formal training, coaching, 360-degree feedback, action learning, mentoring, self-directed development — converges on the same pattern: that the longer you lead and the more experience you accumulate, the less relevant this developmental work becomes... then what do we do? How do we keep growing senior leaders to the benefit of their team, their division, and their company? ## The Inversion: Gains That Grow Instead of Decay Nearly all the development studied in these meta-analyses and trials is additive and instructional: horizontal development, in the field's term (Petrie, 2014). It transfers content from a source (a curriculum, a coach, a mentor, a feedback report, a peer) to a recipient; the mechanism is acquisition. The leader ends with more than they started with. A smaller literature studies vertical development, which works instead with what is already present in the leader — accumulated experience, existing patterns, the implicit assumptions through which they make sense of their role and the world — and reorganizes it (Mezirow, 1991; McCauley et al., 2006). The leader ends with the same material, integrated more coherently, operating at a different level of complexity. Examine that vertical literature — as our review did — and you find a striking inversion. Vertical development is less effective for lower-level leaders and more effective for senior leaders, the exact inverse of horizontal development. And the inversion is not symmetric: the gap favoring vertical development for senior leaders is larger than the gap favoring horizontal development for junior ones. Not only that. Short-term vertical development effects exceed those of even the best horizontal modalities for senior leaders — coaching and formal skills training. And the trajectories differ. Vertical development outcomes do not decay over time; they improve. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/54/fc/54fcd284-2509-426e-bc4f-a8a023204fcf/content/images/2026/08/data-src-image-a4a8103f-152e-4561-99d5-f99d988039ae.png) **Figure 1\.* Effect sizes by leader level, mode of development, and time horizon. Estimates derived from our preliminary synthesis of the empirical and grey literatures. The figure shows the inversion alongside the time dimension. All four lines start at zero pre-intervention. Both horizontal trajectories rise at the short-term assessment and decay at long-term follow-up. Both vertical trajectories rise and keep rising. The single highest point on the chart at long-term follow-up is vertical development for senior leaders — even though that trajectory started below horizontal development for lower-level leaders at the short-term mark. The curves move in opposite directions, and the one that appreciates eventually surpasses the one that decays. This is a known pattern in the broader behavior-change literature. Treatment-style interventions produce strong short-term effects that decay toward baseline: gold-standard cognitive-behavioral treatment for anxiety, for example, sees its effects fall by half or more within a year. Prevention-style interventions — which enhance strengths already present rather than reducing a deficit — show the inverse: a smaller initial effect that grows as gains consolidate. Horizontal development behaves like treatment. Vertical development behaves like prevention. The mechanism is straightforward. A transformation in perspective, even a partial one, is a structural change in how a leader processes complexity, not a skill that decays without practice. You do not forget a shift in meaning-making the way you forget a feedback model. And at the senior level, those shifts cascade through the organization: better strategic decisions, healthier culture, improved retention, stronger subordinate development. Those downstream effects take months to manifest — which is why the 12-month effect should exceed the 6-month effect, not trail it. ## What Senior Leaders Need Cannot Be Installed Mode is half the answer to why senior leaders are underserved. The other half is what they need developed. Not all leadership outcomes are the same kind of thing. We distinguish two classes. Installable outcomes are discrete, definable capabilities that can be specified in advance, taught, and assessed against an external standard: communication skills, structured feedback, performance reviews. Emergent outcomes are functions inherent to a human being: resilience, curiosity, creativity, adaptability, sound judgment under pressure. These are capacities the leader already possesses; something in the context, the role, or the leader's own accumulated patterns interferes with their expression — blocks it outright, distorts it, attenuates it. They cannot be specified in advance or transferred between people. They have to be uncovered, unblocked, and harnessed from within. Follow the logic of Caveat Two and the connection to seniority is direct. A senior leader has already accumulated the installable skills; that is what the ceiling effect means. What remains undeveloped at that level is almost entirely emergent — and for a senior leader, the work context and their role within it may be precisely what blocks those capacities from emerging. Emergent outcomes are also exactly what organizations now say they need. In the World Economic Forum's *Future of Jobs Report 2025*, seven in ten employers name analytical thinking as essential (World Economic Forum, 2025). Immediately behind it sit resilience, flexibility, and agility, then leadership and social influence. Creative thinking, curiosity, and empathy rank among the fastest-rising skills to 2030\. Gallup, Deloitte, and McKinsey workforce surveys converge on the same cluster. Yet the vast majority of programs target installable outcomes — communication models and feedback frameworks — because those are what can be specified, demonstrated, and assessed, and what the field can measure and hold itself accountable for. What is demanded is largely emergent. What is supplied is largely installable. The cost of that mismatch shows up in the data wherever installation has been aimed at an emergent target. A network meta-analysis of 492 implicit bias studies with over 87,000 participants found that brief interventions can shift implicit measures somewhat (d < 0.30) but produce only trivial changes in actual behavior (Forscher et al., 2019). The Vanhove et al. (2016) meta-analysis of 37 workplace resilience training studies found small effects (d = 0.21) that fade at follow-up. The intervention can install knowledge about resilience or models of creativity, but not the underlying capacities themselves. Those have to emerge from within, and an installation-based intervention is not built to produce emergence. This is not a failure of execution. It is a failure of fit — and the fit problem generalizes. Emergent outcomes resist direct influence. A program aimed at resilience can install knowledge about resilience; the capacity itself moves only when what blocks, distorts, or attenuates it is worked with instead. Whatever reaches an emergent outcome reaches it indirectly. The vertical literature points the other way: short-term effects around d = 0.50, by our estimate, that appreciate rather than decay. Vertical development is the best-evidenced instance of that indirection: it aims at what is in the way, and the capacity, already present, does the rest. Triangulate across these literatures and vertical development aimed at emergent outcomes appears to produce short-term effects roughly twice the size of horizontal development aimed at the same outcomes, with the gap widening as one trajectory appreciates and the other decays. The vertical literature is small, and no study compares the two modes head to head; this is triangulation. But the pattern is consistent across literatures, and the difference in trajectory — one appreciates, one decays — is categorical. ## The Same Request, Two Different Problems Consider a leader who reports needing to improve their delegation. If that leader is early in their career and genuinely lacks the skills — how to scope a task, match it to the right person, set expectations, check in without micromanaging — horizontal development installs those skills directly, and it works. Acquisition matches the target. (Vertical development can eventually produce the same skills as a byproduct, but it is the long way around.) The senior version of the same request is a different thing entirely. The leader knows how to delegate — has known for years. The typical intervention layers more content on top: a new delegation framework, a workshop on trust-building, a 360-degree feedback report highlighting the gap. The leader nods, agrees with the feedback, and continues not delegating. This is where most senior-leader delegation interventions live, and where most short-term gains decay back to baseline. What is actually in the way is a competing commitment (Kegan & Lahey, 2009) or underlying assumption: that relinquishing control will produce substandard work, that being indispensable justifies their position, that their value as a leader is tied to being the one who does it all. Vertical development aimed at that obstruction does not teach delegation. It surfaces what is in the way of delegation, so that the capacity — already there — can emerge. And notice what else that one assumption was holding back: subordinate growth, succession, the leader's own strategic attention. Obstructions rarely gate a single capacity; work the obstruction, and more than delegation moves. The diagnostic question is "what kind of thing is missing, and what is the appropriate way to develop it?" The same presenting problem, in different leaders, can correctly call for different interventions. ## Closing the Gap Means Working Indirectly One gap runs through everything above. Organizations are demanding emergent outcomes — creativity, resilience, adaptability, decision-making under pressure — from their most senior leaders, and the field is supplying direct interventions: programs named for the outcome, coaching aimed straight at it. But emergent outcomes resist direct influence. You cannot install curiosity in a way that benefits the workplace. You cannot install resilience in a way that benefits the organization. You cannot aim a program at innovation and produce innovative advantage. These capacities move only indirectly, through work on what interferes with them. So the question is one of appropriateness and fit. **This is the appropriateness gap.** Billions are spent each year on leadership development that produces real but short-term gains for junior leaders and small, decaying gains for the senior leaders who carry the most organizational leverage. The senior leaders are not getting less because the programs are failing. They are getting less because the programs were never designed to produce what those leaders actually need. The mode and the target are misaligned, and no amount of additional content closes that gap. Closing it requires working indirectly — and the best current evidence for what that looks like is vertical development. --- ## References Avolio, B. J., Reichard, R. J., Hannah, S. T., Walumbwa, F. O., & Chan, A. (2009). A meta-analytic review of leadership impact research: Experimental and quasi-experimental studies. *The Leadership Quarterly.* Collins, D. B., & Holton, E. F. (2004). The effectiveness of managerial leadership development programs: A meta-analysis of studies from 1982 to 2001\. *Human Resource Development Quarterly.* Forscher, P. S., Lai, C. K., Axt, J. R., Ebersole, C. R., Herman, M., Devine, P. G., & Nosek, B. A. (2019). A meta-analysis of procedures to change implicit measures. *Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.* Kegan, R., & Lahey, L. L. 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(2025). *The future of jobs report 2025.* World Economic Forum.