5 ways to make your leadership development program succeed

Lavinia Mehedintu (00:00):
I think we are on the cusp of a revolution when it comes to leadership development. We’ve been talking so much about this idea of build it and they will come. It’s no longer the case. I think there’s a lot of power in actually bringing leaders to the same table and co-creating the whole experience with them.

Hannah Beaver (00:26):
You are listening to How to Make a Leader. A leadership development podcast from Big Think+, where we take the best ideas from the biggest minds in learning and development and distill them into actionable insights. I’m your host, Hanna Beaver.
Today’s guest is a self-professed learning nerd, and I’m professing her a leading voice in the learning and development space. As a former l and d manager, Lania has taken all of her experience and co-founded Offbeat a learning and development platform and fellowship program where l and d professionals come to learn and exchange information. Normally, Lavinia is based in Bucharest, but today I am very blessed to have her in front of me in London.

Lavinia Mehedintu (01:09):
So Lavinia, welcome. Yeah, thank you so much for having me, and I’m really excited to go deep into leadership today.

Hannah Beaver (01:17):
Great. Well, you as an L and D extraordinaire have your finger on the pulse of a little bit of everything I would say, but today we are focusing in on one particular thing, and that is the leadership development study that you’ve been running this year. So can you tell us a little bit more about

Lavinia Mehedintu (01:34):
It? Yeah, of course. So what happened is that when we looked into our community and what they’re interesting to learning more about, two topics kind of stood out. The first one is AI, and then it was like leadership development. So we were just wondering how people are designing their leadership development programs. So we said, okay, let’s talk to them and see what they say.

Hannah Beaver (02:00):
And who were you talking to? What types of questions were you asking? What did that look like?

Lavinia Mehedintu (02:04):
So we had two faces of the research. The first one was this really long survey that we had to put together just to make sure that we cover as much ground as possible. And then from that research we took participants and just asked them, Hey, would you like to come in to do an interview with us as well to make sure that we gather that qualitative part as well? So the second phase was a bunch of interviews with L and D professionals. Now we had 158 respondents to the research. Most of them come from the tech world, and the second biggest group was from financial services. And then in terms of company size, about 50% of our respondents come from companies with over 1000 employees. And then in terms of the questions we asked, we tried to go quite broad from trying to understand what L and D leaders think about the performance of their leadership teams and also if they are measuring the performance of leaders in any way. And then we went into how they’re designing their programs from the formats they’re using, the topics they’re approaching, the budgets they use for leadership, all the way to how they think their leadership development programs are performing and supporting their leaders.

Hannah Beaver (03:35):
And is it safe to assume this was pretty international in scope participants from Got it. Yeah. As you went into the study, would you say that there was one particular question that you’re looking to have answered, or was it more of just a holistic approach on the state of leadership development right now and what that can look like for next year?

Lavinia Mehedintu (03:52):
Yeah, it’s interesting because we didn’t have a particular question in mind, but we did end up with some specific bits, particularly about measurement that were quite surprising for us. And I think the first one was the fact that leadership development or leaders in general don’t have clear performance metrics, which was a bit surprising for us. We’re not measuring in any way how our leaders are performing. And the second one was the fact that L and DS don’t believe their leadership development programs are doing very well. I think we are on the cusp of a revolution when it comes to leadership development. And yeah, it’s going to be very interesting to see how that plays out in the future.

Hannah Beaver (04:39):
Touching on that a little bit, what would you say was the overall sentiment in the survey? What was the energy and the feels and the emotion that you’re feeling behind some of the responses?

Lavinia Mehedintu (04:48):
I think people are quite anxious about how things are playing out because what they’re saying about their leaders is that they are also overwhelmed, they’re stressed out, so it’s very hard for them to engage in behaviors that are naturally seen by us in L and d supporting our people in growing and supporting even our organizations in growing. So it looked really sad in some way for us. And then again, looking into leadership development, I think people see that we need some change in the way that we do leadership development because we knew from anecdotes that there’s a lot of investment in leadership development budgets wise and also manpower. But our question was, how come every year we need to invest so much? Because if you think about it, we should be kind of closing the gap every year, so the investment should be lower, right? And that doesn’t happen. So the question is, okay, then our leadership programs aren’t performing as well as they should, and people are sensing that. I think about 40% of them said they are somewhat happy with the performance of their programs, which is not that high.

Hannah Beaver (06:20):
I may not have seen the survey results just yet, but I do have access to the five recommendations that you’ve provided. So why don’t we start and just go through each one by one. So number one, the recommendation you had is strategy. So what are your recommendations around strategy for leadership development 2026?

Lavinia Mehedintu (06:38):
I think two things come to mind. The first one is this idea of aligning whatever you do for leadership development with the wider company strategy. If you are focusing on revenue growth, okay, make sure that you covered in some way or another that in your leadership development programs, if you are focusing on AI for example, that also needs to play out in leadership development, on profitability, whatever it is, you need to make sure you align your leadership enablement strategy even with the business strategy. And the second thing, because I mentioned ai, one of our respondents said something so interesting, the fact that in the future leaders and in general, not just leaders, everyone want to just manage people, they will also manage ai. So the question is how are we preparing first our leaders to work closer with this combination of teams that are human and machines as well? So these are the top things that come to mind.

Hannah Beaver (07:42):
I wanted to dig a little bit more into AI because I know this is the folks area for you right now, and also obviously a topic that’s being discussed widely. Where do you see the biggest capability gaps right now with our leadership? When it comes to ai?

Lavinia Mehedintu (07:58):
I think we’re kind of trying to use AI for everything. We’re very solution driven at the moment. And I also think it’s kind of normal because we’re on that moment of the change curve. But I think the fact that we can use AI for everything, it’s not quite true. So what I’m going to see in the future is that people will become a bit more problem focused when it comes to ai. So instead of just jumping at everything with ai, they will just take a break and think, map their workflows and try to figure out where does AI help and where should we still keep tasks and processes more human led? So I think that’s the biggest gap that I’m seeing at the moment. It’s just this chase of adopting AI for everything because everybody’s talking

Hannah Beaver (08:52):
About it. Got it. So thinking about AI when it comes to problems rather than being a part of every single solution and process that we have. Moving on to recommendation number two. What are your recommendations around architecture?

Lavinia Mehedintu (09:07):
Yeah. Yes. So I think one thing that stood out from our research was the fact that lots of companies are using these leadership principles to clarify what the role of the leader is within their companies. But then when we ask people how they’re using their leadership development principles in people processes like recruitment, performance reviews and so on, the answers were that, well, they’re not using them so much. So I think the first thing is if you choose to invest in that, you need to make sure that you also embed them into how you look at leadership throughout the people experience, I would say. So that’s the first thing. And then the second thing that comes to mind is about psychological safety. I think we talk quite a lot about the fact that leaders need to create these environments where psychological safety is a thing so that people speak up so that they’re more courageous and innovating and also failing. But what I feel is that nobody’s talking about the fact that we need to create a safe environment for the leaders as well, for them to be able to role model that in the future. So I think that’s another thing that we need to look carefully at how our very senior leaders are creating this safe environment for their direct

Hannah Beaver (10:37):
Reports. I guess on a similar theme, I noticed in your recommendation here, you talked about systems for collaboration. What does that look like in practice beyond collaborating over Slack or having a team offsite? What does that look like in more of an everyday type of sense?

Lavinia Mehedintu (10:54):
So the way that leadership development programs are set up right now is that we have these sessions. They can be about, I dunno, feedback, collaboration, so on, but they’re mostly focused on content. I think we need to use these spaces where we bring people together so that they can connect to each other on a more human level, and that they can get to network and get to know each other, and in the end, collaborate better as well. So I think that’s one way that we can do it, just don’t spend so much time around content and just spend time around creating connection in the sessions.

Hannah Beaver (11:33):
And I’m sure psychological safety goes hand in hand with that as well, a space where people feel that they’re able to share learnings, pain points.

Lavinia Mehedintu (11:42):
Exactly, exactly. And because we connect like that, I think it can have ripple effect in the way that leaders collaborate in organizations. One of the things that we’re seeing at the moment is that cross departmental collaboration is not doing very well. Everybody’s so focused on their own thing, and it’s hard for people to see the whole system. So yeah, I think just creating these spaces for connection, for networking, it would be really, really good for leaders.

Hannah Beaver (12:13):
And would that look like maybe a forum or in-person meets what I’m sure you have experience with offbeat in creating these types of communities? So if someone is listening and thinking, how do I go ahead and create that type of space? That sounds great. How do I do that? What would you suggest?

Lavinia Mehedintu (12:28):
I’ve seen both things play out even in leadership development, like online and live sessions. And to give you a very clear example, I was speaking to a community member last week and he was talking about how he created these peer learning groups in his company. They’re completely voluntarily, so people can just join if they want to. He doesn’t prepare any content. What he does as an L and D leader, he facilitates these sessions. So I think that’s how we can, we already have facilitation as a skill and we can actually put it to work, and then they just talk about the topics that are most interesting for them. It can be whatever they’re struggling with. So just facilitating these conversations and yeah, we can talk about frameworks. There’s a bunch of them, liberating structures, for example. I use them quite a lot in our work at Offbeat, and I totally advise people to look at how they could play

Hannah Beaver (13:24):
Out. Okay. Moving on to number three. What are your recommendations around design?

Lavinia Mehedintu (13:32):
One of the surprising things we learned in the research was that L and Ds don’t usually co-create these programs with leaders. Most of them, if they do it, most of them might send some surveys or they might have some interviews with leaders just asking them about what topics are top of mind for you. But I think there’s a lot of power in actually bringing leaders to the same table and co-creating the whole experience with them. And there’s this theory, like this bias, the IKEA effect, where if you build something yourself, there’s a better chance that you want just engage with it, but you’ll also promote it further. So I think that can activate the IKEA effect, and it can also reduce the gap between what we do in these sessions and what people really need because we’ve put them to work and we’ve gathered them around the same table. And that can be really, really easy. Just have a meeting, a session at the beginning of the year or every quarter and talk to your leaders and ask them what they need and not just that, have them play out with prototypes and just co-creating the entire journey with them, or at least talk to them in a way or another. Because again, what was surprising for us was that there was almost zero input from leaders

(15:07):
Into how l and d’s these programs. So that’s one of them. And the other recommendation that I would have is to kind of look at the leadership role a bit more like what it is, which is a very human role. It is about working with people and working with people. It’s tough

(15:27):
And it’s also very emotional. We tend to go into leadership development with very technical things, but the reality is, and I’ve experienced this myself transitioning into being a leader, is that you need to strip off of your former identity of individual contributor where you just had your goals and you just had to take care of yourself. When you become a leader, you’ll deal with all sorts of things that are human first, and leaders need support in dealing with that. And one of, just to give some concrete examples here, the l and d team working closely with HR business partners, they just offer this ongoing support at the beginning of a first time leader’s journey. Just come to us, let’s talk about what you’re dealing with. We’re here for you, and we’re here as a support system, so you’re not alone in this journey. That can feel like really, really overwhelming for leaders. So combining that technical support of how you do performance reviews, how you recruit someone and so on with this emotional support, I think it’s a way to move leadership development programs a bit further than they are at the moment.

Hannah Beaver (16:48):
I think it makes them more personal too. And then it’s you are more invested in seeing the outcome of the program if it feels more personal to Exactly.

Lavinia Mehedintu (16:56):
Yeah.

Hannah Beaver (16:57):
And then as we think about design, what do you have to say about different formats and the different elements that come to play there?

Lavinia Mehedintu (17:04):
Yeah, so what was not surprising for us was that people are kind of experimenting with all sorts of formats, like long sessions, short sessions, online, offline mentoring, coaching, whatever it is, people are trying things out. I think the first thing that comes to mind when it comes to formats is the question of which of these formats perform better. So I think everybody knows listening knows this Pareto principle, so most likely there’s a 20% that you do that gives the most impact to your leaders. And the question is, what is that 20%? And making sure that you scale it more than just having a bunch of formats that might end up overwhelming people more than helping them with choice overload. I don’t think there’s one format that’s going to work for everyone and all layers of leadership and so on. Yeah.

Hannah Beaver (18:08):
And can you share the format that’s the favorite of yours?

Lavinia Mehedintu (18:11):
Yeah, of course. It is like peer learning. I think just coming together and talking about our challenges and supporting each other with those challenges. And we’ve had a peer learning group that’s been meeting for the past, it’s been three years and a half now, I think in our community with two amazing ladies. And it’s been so powerful to get not just the technical support because we’re sharing frameworks and we’re sharing our experiences, but also the emotional support that I was talking about. Because you kind of all of a sudden realize that you’re not the only one that’s dealing with that, and you don’t feel alone. You feel encouraged. You just feel like, again, you have more courage to tackle these challenges. And again, I’ve seen some of our community members trying this out with their leaders. It’s not easy. I have to say, there are some specific components that need to be in place for a peer learning program to work, make it voluntarily, don’t push PL to join them and have champions. Make sure there’s always at least one member that’s going to be their cheerleading for the group. And then having facilitation, really good facilitation skills. I think that’s also really important.

Hannah Beaver (19:34):
We saw excellent facilitation skills in action at Offbeat Fest earlier this year where there were so many breakout groups with facilitators. And just on the other end of that, learning from peers about their things, they were interested in, things they were struggling with. I found that to be really, really valuable and something that just when you’re hearing from other humans about human problems and people are saying, Hey, I’m having this problem, and then three other people were saying, I am too. It’s just I found it. I agree. It’s just such a great way to learn and share. Okay. Moving on to number four. What is your recommendation around learning delivery?

Lavinia Mehedintu (20:13):
I think we don’t talk enough about the things that we’re doing in general in L and d, but for leadership development as well. And I think we’ve been talking so much about this idea of build it and they will come. It’s no longer the case. I think everybody’s so overwhelmed with all the things that they’re dealing with personally and professionally. Just the fact that you send an email announcing that there’s a leadership development program there, it’s not going to cut it. I think that’s very clear. And also the way that we are communicating our programs tends to be very solution focused. So just to give you an example, as a message, we have this amazing leadership development program that will speak less to people than making sure that you talk about their issues, right? Are you dealing with a lot of pressure? Do you have anxiety because there’s a difficult conversation coming up?

(21:13):
Make sure that you kind of switch that narrative from what you are offering to what they are dealing with. And I think the last thing that comes to mind about marketing is to make sure that we kind of use others to send our message and not talk about it ourselves as much. And I think this way better than myself. I bet it’s way, not necessarily easier, but more effective when a peer of yours or a friend of yours recommends a product than if the brand comes to you and recommends it. So it’s the same principle, principle applied in internal marketing. It’s

Hannah Beaver (22:00):
Champions.

Lavinia Mehedintu (22:01):
Exactly. Use those champions, use those participants that have good feedback for your programs to talk about them instead of you kind of talking about them all day.

Hannah Beaver (22:13):
I think it’s interesting to your first point around tailoring the experience to make it more personal. We’ve at least found in building our learning platform, we’ve changed some of the language. When the user logs in to access our lessons, rather than just focusing on emotional intelligence leadership principles, we now have a prompt at the top that says, I’m looking for help with, or it prompts you more emotionally to select that challenge or emotion or thing that you want to learn to make it personal to you and just see higher engagement that way too. So that was a really interesting point you made there. I know you work with a lot of firms and l and D teams improving their processes. I’m really curious if you have a success story to share around successful delivery or something that one of those clients did and you really saw the benefit of the way that they delivered their program.

Lavinia Mehedintu (23:03):
The success stories that I have in mind in general are those where people were clear that everybody’s here to learn no matter like their seniority and they’re titles. So again, one example that comes to mind, which for me, I have to admit, it was crazy with these peer learning groups. A community member invited their founders to these learning groups, and all of a sudden people were like, oh, so they are open to learn as well. They’re role modeling this behavior. And it was just so, so impressive. And again, it speaks a lot to these founders ways of thinking about learning and building your companies. And I think it’s the same for even in larger companies where it’s hard to reach the CEO and so on, but if you get those senior leaders involved, all of a sudden everyone else tends to be more open to learning. It’s first because they get to learn from them, but also just because they see that, oh, so they also need to learn. They also have struggles. Yeah, I think it speaks to psychological safety, what we were talking about earlier. It speaks to the fact that we need this growth mindset in our companies instead of just assuming the identity of our role somehow and feeling like, oh, I reached this level and there’s nothing else to be

Hannah Beaver (24:36):
Learned. When you see founders and executives really modeling that, it’s like, oh, this is the company I came to work for. These are the values that they put forth, and now here are the founders or the CEO or the executives modeling that. And I think that really closes a loop in why people probably chose to work at that company.

Lavinia Mehedintu (24:53):
Yeah, exactly.

Hannah Beaver (24:54):
Really great. Our final recommendation, I’m excited to hear more about this one, is what are your recommendations around measurement?

Lavinia Mehedintu (25:03):
I think the most basic recommendation is figure out a way to measure the performance of your leaders, because most of our respondents are not using any metrics.

(25:17):
So I think a good first step would be just to use maybe engagement questions from your engagement survey related to a goal setting or feedback or communication in your team. So just try to experiment as well with the different metrics and co-create those metrics with your leaders as well, because they might have really good input on how you could measure their performance. So just start from somewhere. I feel like that’s such a low hanging fruit. It’s really important to measure performance. And then also about this idea of democratizing data. Make sure that your leaders have access to data about their performance, and also support them in understanding that data and creating plans on how to improve. Because usually l and d lives in this tower, and we have our data there in different platforms, but we don’t share it with everyone else. And I think there’s so much potential that we’re missing from that. So yeah, these two things come to

Hannah Beaver (26:28):
Mind. I know we talked earlier about sentiment of the entire survey. I’m curious specifically around the sentiment from questions around measurement. What were you feeling from respondents in L and d right now?

Lavinia Mehedintu (26:40):
I think a lot of frustration about two things. One, that nobody seems to care about measuring the performance of leadership development programs apart from l and d. And it’s really hard when nobody else asks you, Hey, how are your programs doing if you’re so busy? And I know l and ds are so overwhelmed at the moment. It’s really hard just out of your own initiative to go and do that. Exactly. And

Hannah Beaver (27:11):
Prioritize something. Yeah,

Lavinia Mehedintu (27:13):
Exactly. So I think that’s one frustration. The other frustration is about how complex it actually is to measure things like behavior change and skill acquisition. And again, if you don’t have support in general in measuring these things, yeah, it’s really hard to dedicate quite a lot of your time in measuring these changes. But again, I think you just need to start from somewhere because if people see that, hey, we might be able to get some sort of data, they might start being interested in that. And I feel like lots of companies are now very data driven,

Hannah Beaver (27:55):
Especially with AI providing data that you didn’t have previously. Yeah,

Lavinia Mehedintu (27:58):
Yeah. And to your point, I think using AI in, of course, privacy compliant way, compliant way to look at your data, it’s also really, really good advice.

Hannah Beaver (28:14):
We did a prior episode with Eric Grant from Figma, and he had some really interesting insights to share too, just on as we think about AI or how as technology progresses to things like Slack that you may not have previously had access the data there. I remember him, as we talk about champions, sometimes all it can take is starting that conversation with the HR team and say, can you share the specific metrics you found from this? Or finding internal champions that way to share data. Yeah, Eric is

Lavinia Mehedintu (28:42):
One of my measurement gurus, so I would definitely take his advice.

Hannah Beaver (28:48):
Well, again, I asked this question around measurement specifically, but on all of these recommendations generally, what would you recommend to start thinking about leadership development in the upcoming year? And if you are building strategy right now, which I know a lot of teams are for the next year, what are some other things to think about?

Lavinia Mehedintu (29:06):
I would go into the wilderness of my organization and just talk to people. I would just try and figure out what are they complaining about, what their challenges are. And when I say this, I think there’s a really important one here to make the distinction between development and enablement because what I feel l and D teams are doing, they’re going out there and they’re asking about the skills or competencies or however they’re calling them, the skills that leaders need to develop. My question would be, what are your challenges? Because your challenges might not be about development. They might be about the processes, the people, processes that leaders need to deal with. They might be about the technology that leaders need to use, performance reviews and 360 feedback or whatever it is. They might be about networking with other leaders. As I was sharing earlier, leaders might not feel like they’re connected to other leaders. They might feel like they don’t understand the company strategy. So it’s really hard for them to kind of share it with the whole team. So I think just rephrasing this question from what are the skills that you need to grow into, what are your biggest challenges? And just letting leaders somehow, it’s like therapy, just letting leaders complain about things because that will give you a really good sense of where you need to invest as well.

Hannah Beaver (30:43):
Given that this is the how to Make a Leader podcast, what is the best piece of leadership advice that you’ve ever received?

Lavinia Mehedintu (30:50):
I think

Hannah Beaver (30:51):
It was

Lavinia Mehedintu (30:52):
A go to therapy. I love it because when I became a leader, I was struggling quite a lot. And I think it’s interesting because I truly believe coaching couldn’t help me at that point. I think it was therapy that I needed to do to figure out my inner workings, what is stopping me from becoming the leader that I was envisioning. So yeah, that’s definitely the best one.

Hannah Beaver (31:20):
I like that. And last question for you. I have read that you’re a bookworm. So what is on your bookshelf right now, and do you have any recommendations around books? It doesn’t have to be business focused. It could be a personal focus too, but I’m

Lavinia Mehedintu (31:34):
Just curious to hear. Yeah, so I’m currently reading Why Nations Fail. I think it’s just such a good book for two things. First to understand what’s happening in the world right now, and secondly, to kind of have a broader overview that goes beyond your life. I think at least in my network, people are quite low at the moment going struggling with their mental health and everything politically and economically that’s happening. And this book just gave me such a powerful understanding of the fact that we only see what’s happening in our lifetime, but if we look beyond, these things have happened over and over again, and it’s just a cycle, and it’s just about how can we be resilient in these times. So that’s definitely a book that I would recommend, and Oh, I am a booker. When you ask this question and then your mind comes back, I always

Hannah Beaver (32:42):
Say, I forget the covers of the book that I’m reading, especially if I’m reading it kind of digitally. People like, what are you reading? I’m like, well, I’m not looking at the cover every

Lavinia Mehedintu (32:49):
Day. So I can’t remember. Well, actually, I have another recommendation, and it’s not about the specific book, but something that I found myself doing over and over again a couple of years back was just trying to read all of these smart books that people are recommending, which is, it’s awesome. It’s really good to read those books as well. But you have your guilty pleasures as well, and I feel like you need right now. We really need to decompress at times. So just don’t shy away from engaging into those guilty pleasures as well when it comes to books. Yeah,

Hannah Beaver (33:24):
I love that. Well, this has been an amazing conversation. I’d love to have it in person with you. It’s just been a great experience. So thank you so much, Lavinia, and I’m sure we’ll chat again soon. Thank you for having me. Of course. Thanks so much for listening. As always, if you enjoyed what you heard today, we’d invite you to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. To hear more from Lavinia, I’d recommend you follow her on LinkedIn, check out the offbeat website, or even check out the upcoming conference that Offbeat is hosting, this upcoming May in London. We’ll be back next month and every month with more insights from another L and D leader. We’ll catch you next time as we learn how to make a leader.

Most leadership development programs look good on paper but fall short in practice. Leaders often miss the real support, core skills, and clear metrics they need to succeed.

Over the last few months, Lavinia Mehedințu, co-founder of Offbeat, spoke with over 150 L&D professionals to understand what’s working, what’s not, and how people feel about leadership development heading into 2026.

In this episode, she breaks down the findings and shares five recommendations for improving your leadership development programs. Her insights focus on what leaders truly need: practical support, clearer measures of success, and more opportunities to learn from one another.

You’ll learn:

• What’s missing from our leadership development programs 
• Program cocreation and the “IKEA effect”
• The most effective learning modality (hint: it’s peer learning)
• How to measure leadership performance with confidence

Things to listen for:
(00:00) Introducing Lavinia Mehedințu
(01:17) What 158 L&D professionals revealed about the state of leadership development
(03:52) Clear performance metrics: the challenge
(07:42) The gaps in how leaders use AI
(10:54) Creating systems that support collaboration
(13:32) Co‑creation and the ‘IKEA effect’
(18:11) Why peer learning remains a powerful tool
(20:13) How delivery and communication shape adoption
(25:03) A simple first step for measuring leadership performance
(29:06) Where L&D teams should focus next year
(30:50) Leadership advice and book recommendations

About Lavinia Mehedintu:

Lavinia Mehedintu has been designing learning experiences and career development programs for the past 11 years both in the corporate world and in higher education. As a Co-Founder and Learning Architect at Offbeat, she’s applying adult learning principles so that learning & people professionals can connect, collaborate, and grow. She’s passionate about social learning, behavior change, and technology and constantly puts in the work to bring these three together to drive innovation in the learning & development space.

To learn more about Lavinia, check out her LinkedIn and Offbeat’s website. Check out their upcoming conference, Offbeat Fest in London in May 2026.