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The gap in leadership you cannot train your way out of

Capability analysis is right to insist on evidence. It just must start one question earlier.

Most of the requests that reach me arrive with the answer already attached. A director tells me her supervisors need communication training. A chief tells me his lieutenants need a class on accountability.

What each of them is really telling me is that something isn’t working, and training is the nearest lever within reach. I understand the instinct: training is fast, visible, and gives everyone something to point at while the real problem keeps running. It is also the reason so much money gets spent on programs that leave the original condition exactly where they found it.

Richard Shadforth, who runs TrainingIQ in Australia, framed this well in a recent piece: a capability gap should be demonstrated rather than assumed. He puts three questions in a deliberate order.

Only then do you choose a response, and that response may be supervision, clearer expectations, or better systems rather than anything that happens in a classroom.

He is right, and the second question is where organizations get caught. A training request, a single incident, or a manager’s frustration all signal that something is wrong. None of them tells you what people actually cannot do, how large the shortfall is, or why it exists.

Observation, operational data, work samples, incident trends, and the candid read of the people closest to the work will. In my experience, evidence gathered honestly delivers an uncomfortable answer far more often than a convenient one, which is precisely why it is worth gathering.

Here is where my own experience and work pick up the sequence. All three questions quietly assume the right person is sitting in the seat. When the capability in question is leadership, that is the assumption most likely to be wrong, and the one almost nobody audits.

The pattern behind those numbers is familiar to anyone who has watched it happen: we take the strongest individual contributor, hand them a team as a reward, and call it a promotion. Research on sales organizations published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics found exactly that, with the best salespeople the most likely to be promoted and their new teams performing measurably worse afterward.

When that is the situation, no amount of training repairs it, because nothing is broken in the way the training assumes.

So before I design anything, I ask a fourth question alongside the other three. Did we select this person for the work of leading people, or did we hand them the role as payment for work of an entirely different kind?

In The People-Leader Imperative, I work that question three ways. I test whether the person genuinely understands the leadership job, wants it rather than tolerates it, and has the capacity to carry it. I locate the pipeline passage they are actually standing in, since moving from doing the work to leading the people who do the work is a change of job and not a change of title. And I write Key Responsibility Areas (KRAs) stating what the leadership role is accountable for producing, rather than restating the technical results that got them noticed.

Once that is clear, the response sorts itself quickly. Sometimes the person is right for the seat and genuinely needs development, and now we know what kind and can measure whether it landed. Sometimes the capability is there, but the conditions are not, and the honest answer is a change to structure, expectations, or yes, even the leader above them. And sometimes we put a superb specialist in a role we never designed for them, in which case the kindest and cheapest move is a different path that still honors what they do brilliantly.

If the first three are answered with real evidence and the fourth still comes back yes, I can build you something worth the money, and we will both know what it is meant to change. If the fourth comes back no, we have a different conversation ahead of us, and it is cheaper and considerably kinder to have it now than eighteen months from now.