As an HR leader, you're expected to be the most human person in the business and the most commercial one. Often in the same meeting. AI strategy, retention, the budget, the manager conversation you keep meaning to have. It all lands on your desk, and most of it pulls against the rest.
Many CHROs I speak to are carrying some version of this and a significant share of that load traces back to one source: leadership development that hasn't landed. When leaders don't develop, the consequences don't just stay with them - they actually travel up. You as the HR leader then inherit the culture problems, the retention gaps, the performance conversations that should have happened six months ago.
Most organisations are stuck at the same point…
They've built competency frameworks, run workshops, sent senior people to business school, and rolled out 360 tools. This is all valuable but also incomplete. The gap lies between intellectual understanding and actual behaviour under pressure, which doesn't close through more information alone. It closes through sustained work on the conditions that produced the behaviour in the first place. This is a harder thing to design for, and it takes longer, which creates its own set of pressures for HR teams.
Meanwhile, the people responsible for developing those leaders — you, CHROs — are themselves stretched across competing priorities that rarely point in the same direction.
...but some are also getting it right
The companies and HR leaders making genuine progress on this tend to share a way of thinking about development that differs in a few important respects from the conventional approach.
1 . The first difference is that they've moved away from treating leadership development as an event and rather as something that gets embedded into the weekly rhythm of work. This means combining structured programmes with coaching, building peer learning into how teams operate, and creating the kind of psychological safety that allows leaders to acknowledge what they're finding difficult without that acknowledgement being used against them.
Organisations that embed development and culture into employees' day-to-day work see up to a 34% increase in employee performance (Gartner HR Report 2026).
2. The second difference is investment across the full pipeline rather than just at the top. Organisations that focus their development resources exclusively on senior leaders often find themselves with a strong executive layer sitting above a middle management population that is underdeveloped and overstretched. It's usually that middle layer of the team leaders and frontline managers closest to the majority of employees that has the greatest collective impact on culture, retention, and day-to-day performance.
Developing first-time managers well and continuing to invest in them as they take on more complexity tends to produce compounding returns that are difficult to see in a single budget cycle but are significant over time.
3. The third difference is taking the emotional and relational dimensions of leadership seriously as a capability domain rather than treating them as personal qualities that people either have or don't. Resilience, for instance, is often spoken about as though it's a fixed trait but it's better understood as a set of skills and practices that can be developed deliberately, and that look meaningfully different at different levels of the organisation.
A team leader's resilience is largely about managing their own responses under pressure; a senior leader's resilience increasingly involves creating the conditions for their team's collective resilience. Similarly, the ability to coach rather than just direct is genuinely learnable, but it requires a particular kind of investment that goes beyond explaining what coaching is and why it matters.
The programmes and services we offer at LeadMe Academy are built around the core belief that real behavioural change happens over time, through sustained work on mindset and habits. So whether it's developing your first-time managers, building resilience across the middle layer, or embedding coaching capability into your leadership culture, we work alongside you to help drive this.
The best CHROs we know aren't pulled in fewer directions than everyone else, they've just found better ways to make sure leadership development isn't the thing that falls through the cracks when everything else pulls stronger.
Onward and upward,
Jackie
