Why Your Leadership Development Program Isn't Working - Even If You've Asked All 13 of Google's Questions
- ינון עמית
- Jun 6
- 5 min read
Updated: Jul 10
Dr. Yinnon Dryzin-Amit | PublicWise
Every year I meet managers who've completed a high-end leadership development program - three days offsite, a great facilitator, experiential format, personal feedback - and six months later, when I ask them what changed, they look at me with the exact same expression. Not shame. Not anger. Something closer to bewilderment.
"Yinnon, I came back different. The organization didn't."
This isn't a failure of the manager. It isn't a failure of the program. It's a failure of a question nobody asked.
If this question follows you - you might be ready for Leadership Distilled.
2009: Google Asks the Questions Nobody Asked about Leadership Development
In 2009, Google's analytics team launched an experiment the company itself wasn't sure about. The question on the table was almost uncomfortably direct:
Do managers even matter?
Google - a company that believed talented engineers managed themselves - quietly suspected it could do away with the management layer entirely. The data pointed to a sharp answer: managers matter enormously. Productivity, retention, sense of belonging, team output - all of it predicted by management quality, and in particular by the quality of the direct manager.
What Google did next is what turned Project Oxygen into an international benchmark:
it didn't settle for principles. It built 13 precise questions - questions managers could ask themselves, and employees could use to rate their managers.
Does my manager give me practical feedback?
Does my manager listen?
Does my manager believe in my abilities even in moments when I don't believe in myself?
13 questions.
Analysis across millions of employees.
A genuine research achievement.
So what's the problem?
The 14th Question Google Forgot to Ask
Take Ronen. Experienced, talented, respected. Sent to a three-day leadership program. By day three, he understands something he hadn't before - about himself, his team, the way he makes decisions under pressure. He comes back with a new language and a genuine desire to change.
Tuesday morning. His first meeting back. His boss requests a detailed status report on every single employee. A colleague interrupts him twice in five minutes. The policies he wanted to change are still in place, and nobody has asked him to change them.
Ronen didn't fail. The organization simply didn't change.
Six weeks later, Ronen operates exactly as he did before the program. Not because he isn't serious - but because the system around him never prepared the ground for change.
Google asked "What does a good manager do?" - a great question.
What Google didn't ask was: "Is the organization ready to receive what the manager brings back?"
That is the 14th question. And it matters more than all the others combined.
What I Discovered When I Looked at the Data
When I worked as a senior executive in a complex public-sector organization - a system under constant pressure, deeply conservative, with over 6,000 employees - I encountered this pattern again and again.
Managers who came back from programs transformed, but a system that wasn't ready for them. Over time, as we developed processes that didn't just train managers but also prepared the organization to receive them, we saw that change took hold in an entirely different way.
When I returned to study it, the data confirmed what I'd seen in the field.
Research I published in The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science examined a single question:
When do leadership development programs generate real organizational change -
and when don't they?
The finding points to an answer most organizations don't really want to hear:
leadership development programs generate real organizational change only when accompanied by a parallel organizational development process.
Not before. Not after. In parallel.
Why?
Because real change doesn't happen only in the manager's head. It happens at a level that's hard to see: in who assigns work, in who decides what gets rewarded and what gets sanctioned, in the unspoken expectation that repeats itself in every leadership meeting.
These aren't things a single manager can change alone.
These are things the organization needs to decide to change.
Three Things Successful Organizations Do Differently
Working with complex organizations - from the public sector to professional services - I've seen three consistent differences between an organization whose investment in leadership development produces real change and one that produces temporary satisfaction.
The first is what I call the return mechanism. An organization that understands the 14th question doesn't send a manager to a program and wait for them to come back.
It asks: who in the organization will support this manager the moment they return?
Not a mentor who gives advice - but a senior person who invests political capital on their behalf. Someone who opens doors, makes recommendations, positions them in front of opportunities that wouldn't have come otherwise. The difference isn't semantic - it's the difference between a manager trying to change inside a frozen system and a manager who has someone actively working for them within that system.
The second is the timeline. A leadership program of three days, three weeks, even three months - isn't enough. Not because the content isn't good, but because deep organizational change requires time.
Organizations that see measurable results work with a horizon of at least one year, with components that feed into each other along the way.
The third is genuine disruption. Not a day-and-a-half retreat with a comfortable hotel room. A real break from the pace of daily execution, from the noise, from the identity the organization has come to expect from this manager. Some organizations invest in an experience that takes the manager completely out of their usual context — into an unfamiliar environment, without the organizational safety net. Something happens there that is difficult to recreate in any conference room.
Managers who've gone through an experience like this don't come back just with new tools. They come back with a different relationship to power, to responsibility, and to the question of what they're there to change. And that is what enables them to stand up to organizational inertia - not just for the first week.
In 2026, the Paradox Became Urgent
Artificial intelligence doesn't solve this problem - it accelerates it. An organization that adopts AI tools without its leadership being ready to absorb the pace of change doesn't become more efficient. It fails faster.
Three Questions Worth Asking Before Signing Off on a Budget
If you're about to approve a leadership development program - whether you're a CHRO, a CEO, or a manager looking to recommend one - ask three questions before you sign.
What will change in the organization when the managers return? Not "what will they learn" - what will the system do differently?
Does each manager being sent to the program have a senior person who will invest in them when they return - not give advice, but act on their behalf?
Is the organization ready for someone who comes back different?
If you can't answer "yes" to all three - the program you're about to approve will generate satisfaction. Not change.
Want to explore how to build a leadership development program that actually works?
Want to find out if your organization is ready?
If this question follows you - you might be ready for Leadership Distilled.
Dr. Yinnon Dryzin-Amit is the founder of PublicWise, former Senior Division Head for Systemic Organizational Development at the Israel Courts Authority, and a lecturer in the MA program in the Department of Sociology at the University of Haifa. His research has been published in PLOS ONE, Journal of General Management, and The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science.
References
Dryzin-Amit, Y., Vashdi, D. R., & Vigoda-Gadot, E. (2022). The publicness enigma: Can perceived publicness predict employees' formal and prosocial behavior across sectors? PLOS ONE, 17(2), Article e0262253. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0262253
Dryzin-Amit, Y., Vashdi, D. R., & Vigoda-Gadot, E. (2024). Unveiling the spirit of publicness: Conceptualization and validation of a publicness perceptions scale. Journal of General Management. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/03063070241258806
Dryzin-Amit, Y. (2025). OD consulting as a catalyst for change. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/00218863251376151
Garvin, D. A. (2013). How Google sold its engineers on management. Harvard Business Review, 91(12), 74–82. https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=45892
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