THE GROWTH EDGE
The Leadership Edge
Development Insights for Leaders Who Do the Work
May 2026 • Issue #2
A leader I’ve coached for the better part of a year recently told me something that’s stuck with me. She said the hardest part of her development hasn’t been the new skills. It’s been catching herself in old patterns fast enough to choose differently. The Hogan Cautious score she’d dismissed as “that’s just being thorough” turned out to be the reason her team was waiting on decisions she could have made in October. Seeing it on a report didn’t change anything. Catching it happening, in real time, three or four times a month — that started to.
That’s the work most leadership development misses. Awareness is cheap. The harder thing is the loop between noticing and acting differently, repeated until it becomes the default. Two of last month’s posts circle that loop from different angles. One looks at why most leadership development programs don’t produce that kind of change. The other is a practical guide to the assessments we use to make the patterns visible enough to act on.
The research this month carries the same theme. DDI’s data shows leaders are increasingly stressed and increasingly unprepared to lead change — not because they lack capability, but because the gap between intellectual understanding and emotional capacity widens under pressure. If you’ve ever known the right thing to do in a hard conversation and then heard yourself say something else entirely, that gap is what we’re talking about.
What We Published Last Month
Why Most Leadership Development Fails — And What Works Instead
Companies spend roughly $60 billion a year on leadership development, and most of it doesn’t transfer back to the job. This post diagnoses why — the workshop-without-application problem, the assessment-without-integration problem, the coaching-without-accountability problem — and walks through what actually produces behavior change. Spoiler: it’s not another two-day program. It’s the slower, less impressive thing of practicing one capability over months, with feedback, in the actual context where you need to use it.
Read it: Why Most Leadership Development Fails →
Assessments as Mirrors and Maps: A Practical Guide to Leadership Assessments
If you’ve ever wondered which assessment to actually take — or which one your coach should be using with you — this is the guide. It walks through Hogan, EQ-i 2.0, CliftonStrengths, DiSC, TKI, and 360° feedback: what each one uniquely reveals, when it’s the right tool, and what it can’t tell you. The point is to help you choose with intention rather than collecting reports that gather dust. Assessments are mirrors and maps; they’re useful only if you’re willing to look at what they reflect.
Read it: Assessments as Mirrors and Maps →
Worth Knowing: What the Research Is Saying
DDI, Global Leadership Forecast 2025. 71% of leaders report increased stress in their roles, and 40% of those stressed leaders are considering leaving leadership entirely. Trust in immediate managers has fallen to 29% — a 37% decline since 2022. High-potential individual contributors are now 3.7x more likely to leave within a year if their manager doesn’t regularly create growth opportunities for them.
There are two things buried in those numbers worth sitting with. First, the leaders most likely to leave are the ones already feeling the strain — the people you’d most want to keep. Second, the trust deficit isn’t a generational complaint about authority; it’s a measurable gap in how leaders are showing up. Neither of those gets fixed by a wellness perk or a values poster. They get worked on the way any other capability gets worked on: with honest feedback, real practice, and someone holding you accountable to behaviors you said you wanted to change.
DDI, January 2026 Change Leadership Analysis. Only 18% of leaders feel personally prepared to lead through change — down from 25% five years ago. Across more than 100,000 leaders assessed, only 8% of executives are strong at leading change. The behaviors leaders struggle with most aren’t strategic; they’re emotional. Just 1% of executives are strong at visibly rewarding the new behaviors they’re asking for, and only 11% are strong at addressing resistance without taking it personally.
This lines up with what shows up in coaching every week. Leaders know what change requires intellectually. The capability gap is in the moments — staying curious instead of defensive when someone pushes back, holding the new behavior visible enough that the team trusts it’s not a phase, naming what’s hard about the transition out loud. That’s emotional capacity, not strategy. And like any capacity, it gets built through repetition under load, not through a workshop.
Gallup, 2026 State of the Global Workplace. Manager engagement has fallen nine points since 2022, with the steepest drop occurring among managers under 35 and women managers. The bright spot: in best-practice organizations, 79% of managers are engaged — nearly four times the global average. Manager training alone moves wellbeing from 28% to 50%, and the gain is even larger when there’s someone actively encouraging ongoing development.
If you’re a manager reading this, the takeaway isn’t that you should feel better about being depleted. It’s that the depletion is largely structural and largely fixable — but rarely fixed by individual willpower. The leaders I see make the most progress are the ones who treat their own development as part of the job rather than something to fit in around it. They protect time for it. They get the assessments. They use a coach. They ask their team for feedback they can actually use. Engagement, in the end, is downstream of agency, and agency comes from doing the work.
Resource Spotlight
The Leadership Assessment Guide. If this month’s research and the assessments post got you thinking, this is the practical companion. A side-by-side comparison of the assessments we use most — Hogan, EQ-i 2.0, CliftonStrengths, DiSC, TKI, 360° feedback, and others — with use case guidance for individuals, teams, and organizations. Written by someone certified in 15+ tools, not a vendor. The goal is helping you pick the right one, not selling a specific one.
Get the Leadership Assessment Guide →
Curious what assessment-driven development would look like for you?
Discovery calls are free, 30 minutes, and there’s no pitch — just an honest conversation about where you are, what you’re working on, and whether structured coaching or assessment work would help you get there.