And the consulting industry has been very comfortable letting you believe otherwise.
Let me say the quiet part out loud.
Most execution programs don’t fail because you picked the wrong framework. They fail because nobody bothered to develop the leaders who are supposed to run it.
You hired smart people. You bought the methodology. You ran the offsite. And still, strategic results stalls, OKRs collect dust, and everyone’s too busy performing, running the business, to notice they’ve stopped improving. That’s definitely not a framework problem. That’s a leadership development problem dressed up as a strategy problem.
“If you focus only on performing, your performance suffers.”
Eduardo Briceño, The Performance Paradox
Eduardo Briceño calls it the Performance Paradox. Most organisations are trapped in chronic performance cycles. Executing relentlessly, never truly stopping to see if they can get better at the thing they’re executing. The more they perform, the less they invest in improving how they lead. And the gap compounds quietly, invisibly, until we see execution breaking down. I see it often..
The Data Is an Indictment
The numbers on leadership development are not just disappointing. They are structurally damning.
| 75% | of organisations rate their leadership development programs as not effective, despite significant investment |
| ~80% | of companies report a leadership development gap. Fewer than 5% have implemented training at all levels |
| 71% | of employees do not trust their leaders’ capability to take the organisation to the next level |
| 18% | of organisations say their leaders are “very effective” at achieving business goals |
| 26% | of managers have never received any management training. Zero. None. |
Important caveat: This data drawn from DDI’s Global Leadership Forecast (13,695 leaders, 1,556 organisations across 50+ countries) and McKinsey research — skews toward large enterprises. Companies big enough to have dedicated L&D teams and HR functions. Companies that are, by definition, more resourced than the average scale-up.
In scale-ups, the problem doesn’t get smaller. It gets invisible.
The Scale-Up Blind Spot
Large organisations at least have the infrastructure to recognise the gap. They have CHROs, L&D budgets, and development frameworks. They’re failing anyway, but they’re at least aware of the problem.
In scale-ups on the other hand, the leadership development conversation often never happens at all. Founder teams are completely in execution mode. Leadership teams are assembled fast, promoted faster, and thrown straight into the deep end of performance. There is not really structured time to reflect, never mind the investment in improving how they lead, and no true external accountability to make it happen.
The result? Strategy execution stalls, or achieving the necessary goals take exponentially longer, not because the strategy was wrong. Not because the strategy was poorly translated into OKRs. Not because the framework was the wrong choice. But because the leaders running the organisation never upgraded the capability to carry it.
You can’t install execution capability on top of underdeveloped leaders and expect it to stick.
Frameworks are scalable. Billable. Repeatable. Leadership development is messy, slow, and deeply human. So guess which one gets sold by most consultants.
What This Actually Looks Like in Practice
I see three patterns repeatedly in the scale-ups I work with:
- Leaders who are technically brilliant but the last time they were developed as leaders is, well…..quite some time back. They’ve been promoted purely on performance, not potential. They’re executing from habit and urgency, not from a conscious leadership model.
- Leadership teams that are, at its core, misaligned. Not on strategy, but on how they work together. Individual performance is high and celebrated. Collective performance is mediocre. Nobody has ever named it, or had the time to name it, let alone worked on it.
- Frameworks are implemented without a proper design and the organisational health foundation to support them. The OKR adoption is dropped into the teams that don’t have the psychological safety to have the necessary candid conversations about progress, learnings and accountability. Working Genius introduced into a team that hasn’t done the trust work. These tools fail gloriously, and the methodology gets blamed.
None of these are framework problems. All of them are leadership development problems.
Do we Know What Leadership Development Means?
Here’s the deeper problem. The conversation about leadership development is, for the most part, stuck in the dark ages.
Most organisations think development means training. A workshop. A course. A 360 evaluation nobody truly reads, let alone do something with it. Just tick the (performance requirement) box, back to work. One day a year, if the budget survives the next cost-cutting round.
But we’ve known for decades that a single training event changes almost nothing. Neuroscience is unambiguous: behaviour change requires repetition, reflection, and sustained habit forming over time. Not one event. Not one offsite. Not one well-intentioned afternoon with a facilitator.
A training day is not development. It’s an introduction. Development is what happens every day after that.
Look at how professional athletes approach performance. Yes, they have structured training sessions. But elite performance is built on far more than that: nutrition, sleep, recovery, mental conditioning, deliberate practice that consistently stretches beyond the comfort zone. No serious athlete believes one training camp makes them better. They understand that development is a lifestyle, not an event.
Leadership is no different.
Real leadership development includes how leaders invest in their own mind-expansion, the books, the conversations, the thinking and journaling time that most leaders never protect. It includes how they look after themselves, sleep, fitness, recovery, the relationships outside work that keep them grounded and sane. And it includes how willing they are to stretch beyond their comfort zone consistently, not just when forced by a crisis. These are not soft extras or lifestyle bonuses. They are the actual substance of leadership development. The workshop is just the door. What matters is what happens after you walk through it.
And yet. The most common response when this comes up?
“I hear you. But it’s not my focus right now. We’re so busy.”
Which is, of course, precisely the Performance Paradox in action. Too busy performing to invest in getting better at performing. The cycle is a self fulfilling prophecy.
But here’s what makes it a culture problem, not just a personal one: in most scale-ups, busyness is a status symbol. Being slammed is worn as a badge of honour. Leaders who protect time for thinking, reading, recovery, or reflection are quietly judged as not committed enough. The culture actively punishes the behaviours that would make everyone exponentially better and happier humans.
That culture starts at the top. And it can only change at the top.
The franWorks Position
I built franWorks on one belief: organisational health must come before execution frameworks. Not alongside. Before.
That means doing the messy, human work first, building trust, aligning the leadership team, and developing the capability to lead and communicate before asking that team to execute a strategy. It means treating leaders like athletes who need structured training implementation time, not just more performance reps.
It also means being honest about what consulting often sells versus what organisations actually need. Frameworks are easier to package. Leadership development is harder to scope, much slower to show results, and requires real will of behavioural change. Most organisations default to the framework because it feels more concrete.
That’s exactly why execution keeps failing at the same rate.
Build organisational execution capability that outlasts any consultant. Not dependency. Capability.
That’s not a tagline. It’s a design principle. Every engagement I run is structured so that when I leave, the capability stays. The leaders are better. The team works differently. The framework has roots.
Because a framework without developed leaders is just wallpaper.
Two questions. Answer them honestly.
- When did your leadership team last have structured, protected time, not just a meeting, not a workshop, not a strategy offsite, to deliberately reflect and improve how they lead?
- And when did you last invest in your own development, not a course ticked off a list, but real stretching? The sleep, the thinking time, the reading, the honest reflection on your own leadership?
If you’re not sure of the answers, those are the answers.
Being busy is not a strategy. It’s a symptom.
BEFORE YOU MOVE ON
Pick one of the two questions above. Sit with it for 24 hours.
Then decide whether a conversation with franWorks is worth having.
hello@fran-works.com
Photo: Dan Weyman / Unsplash.
