Why Management Development Needs Better Working Conditions

Organisations have been investing in management development for decades. Books, programmes, frameworks, coaching, away days. The appetite for the next approach never seems to diminish. Neither does the gap it is trying to close.

The field keeps producing new approaches, and perhaps the right one has not made it into the room yet.

But what if the approach is not the problem?

The manager who completes the programme is often genuinely different. The insight is real. The intention is real. Then they walk back into the position, and the position does what it always does.

It pulls from above and below at the same time. It asks for clarity while creating ambiguity. It asks for presence while consuming attention. It asks for judgement at exactly the moment capacity has already been spent.

That does not mean development is pointless. It means capability is only part of the picture.

A great deal of management development is designed around the question: how do we build a more capable person?

That matters. But there is another question that usually comes first: is the person we already have in a position to bring what they actually have?

Those are not competing questions. They are sequential ones. And many organisations are still answering the second with the tool designed for the first.

That gap shows up quietly. The commitment to protect capacity arrives as well-meaning language. The demand that consumes it arrives as reality. Workload will be managed. Space will be created. The conditions will improve. The intention is often genuine. But the decision that would make it real — what this additional demand requires in time, resource, trade-offs, and attention — is harder than the commitment itself. So the demand lands, the resource question does not get answered, and the gap widens.

Managers learn to operate inside that gap.

Over time, many become highly skilled at maintaining the appearance of capability. The meeting attended. The feedback given. The question answered. The observable form of capable management continues, even when the substance behind it is under increasing strain. That performance is not dishonesty. It is often what organisational life quietly requires. But it consumes the very resource good judgement depends on.

That is one reason so much well-designed development fails to hold. Not because the content was poor. Not because the participants were resistant. But because the conditions of application were never properly addressed.

I learned this early.

At the start of my career, I worked alongside a more experienced consultant. We came out of a meeting full of plans, energy and genuine ambition. Someone asked about the budget. There was not one. Outside in the corridor, my colleague smiled — not unkindly. He had seen it before.

That moment stayed with me because it revealed something that shows up again and again in organisations: the distance between having the pieces and creating the conditions for them to work. Most programmes are built as though that distance is small. In practice, it often has to be navigated.

You learn that by staying inside organisations long enough to see what holds and what quietly falls away. You learn timing — when the organisation is ready to hear something it could not hear six months earlier. You learn the difference between a yes that will hold and one that will evaporate under pressure. You learn where progress is actually possible. A development programme can support that learning, but it cannot substitute for the conditions that make it usable.

That became especially clear in a workshop I recently designed.

The initial proposal was fairly conventional. It assumed that managers needed better tools, better reflection, better development inputs. By the end of the design process, the workshop looked very different. The shift came from asking two questions much earlier and much more honestly than most programmes do:

What position are our managers actually in?
And what does development need to start from to reach them there?

Once those questions were taken seriously, the design changed. Less emphasis on ideal behaviours in ideal conditions. More emphasis on the actual pressures managers were navigating, the judgements they were already making under strain, and the organisational realities shaping what they could and could not apply. The point was no longer to assume readiness. It was to design from where they really were.

This is also why I find the distinction between resilience and navigation useful.

Building resilience matters. Strengthening someone’s internal resources matters. But the manager’s problem is not always a lack of inner resource. Often it is that the terrain itself is active. Demand lands without resource. Ambiguity arrives without cover. Judgement is required after capacity has already been drained. In that kind of position, development cannot only focus on helping someone absorb more. It also has to help them read the ground they are actually on.

That is where management development becomes more useful: not when it assumes the conditions are already in place, but when it starts from the fact that they often are not.

The question worth asking is not simply which approach to try next.

It is this:

What conditions would need to be in place for the last one to have held?