Traditional leadership training is broken. Workforce development, and leadership development in particular, is still organized around a behaviorism theory of learning (Marsick, 1998). In today’s knowledge economy, work is more complex and the behaviorism training of the past no longer creates the kind of impact organizations need to succeed today (Marsick, 1998).

Despite the fact that the global investment in leadership development exceeds $3.5 Billion dollars annually (Randstad Risemart, 2020), the majority of the leadership programs fail to deliver the desired results (Feser et al., 2017).

The presenters have designed and implemented an innovative leadership development course incorporating microlearning, reflection, and coaching into a year-long program. This program allows the leader to stay involved with their teams, learning, reflecting, and immediately putting the learning into action.

Initial results show that the transformation with both individual leaders and their respective organizations is promising. This presentation will talk about the problems of the current leadership development training, how the presenters used the research to create a different type of course, and the three critical elements needed for leadership transformation based on the results of the training so far.

Presenters: