Many businesses are facing a frustrating disconnect: Employee engagement is still falling, even as organizations continue to invest in leadership development and look for new ways to help leaders become more effective in today’s increasingly complex workplace.
According to Gallup’s March 2026 workplace data survey, more than half of employees are dissatisfied enough with their current jobs to be looking for new roles, even though landing a new job is especially difficult.
Notably, for the first time since Gallup began tracking the metric, the number of workers who report struggling in their lives has outpaced those who are thriving.
To combat this, companies are investing time and money into leadership development. However, many aren’t seeing the return they expect, either in business outcomes or in increased employee engagement and thriving. The problem isn’t necessarily the training itself. Leaders are struggling to integrate and apply what they learned when they return from training and face the day-to-day situations of work.
The Cost of Frictionless Insights
Leadership training and professional development are more accessible today than ever. Artificial intelligence (AI) has only accelerated this trend, making insight almost frictionless. It can provide answers, frameworks, and suggested language in seconds, but it cannot do the human work of implementation, application, and learning. Real, applied learning requires productive friction to be effective. We grow through the friction of implementation and practice.
With AI, leaders at every level in companies of every size can generate a comprehensive framework for conflict resolution, emotional intelligence, or change management, receiving plausible insights in response to a simple prompt.
Leaders are inundated with insights but starved for practical strategies to put them into action. They need structured opportunities to test, apply, reflect on, and refine those ideas in the actual conditions where leadership is required.
We have abundant language and best practices at our fingertips, but knowing what to do and when to do it is not the same as having the capacity to do it under pressure in a difficult work situation.
That’s why leaders often leave an off-site seminar or finish an online module ready to lead better than ever. However, when they return to work and face the same familiar challenges, the new information from the most recent training can feel impossible to apply.
The team’s day-to-day experience remains unchanged, and dissatisfaction persists when employees feel the disconnect between what the organization preaches and how leadership shows up.
Moving Toward Practice-Based Talent Development
To be sure, leaders need training and development. We all do. But we need to shift our focus from simply acquiring knowledge to integrating and applying it.
Practice-based talent development centers learning within the flow of real work, making everyday leadership challenges the curriculum that drives leadership development. Now, moments that were just interruptions or frustrations can become the conditions in which leadership grows and flourishes.
One of the most effective ways organizations can operationalize this practice-based approach is through Action Learning Sets.
Action Learning Sets are a structured method that brings together small groups of leaders to work on current, real-world organizational challenges rather than hypothetical case studies. They create a space where learning and application happen simultaneously, closely connecting insights and behavior, theory and action. Rather than relying on an AI-generated answer or a static textbook solution, participants engage directly with the messy reality of their current work alongside other professionals.
Together, these groups use structured questioning, shared perspectives, and intentional reflection to deepen their thinking and decide on an action plan they can immediately use to solve real problems.
These groups also are trained in how to work this way. Action Learning Sets do not replace traditional leadership development sessions; they build on them. It’s not one or the other, it’s about building on and integrating new tools and ideas. They give leaders a structured place to apply the tools, frameworks, and ideas they have learned to the actual challenges they encounter at work.
Steps to Get Started
For Learning and Development (L&D) professionals looking to integrate this practice, consider these steps to get started.
- Keep groups small and cross-functional: Limit sets to four to six leaders from different departments to break down silos and introduce fresh perspectives.
- Focus on current tensions: Avoid hypothetical scenarios or past mistakes. The group must focus on an active, unresolved problem the leader is currently responsible for solving.
- Prioritize questions over advice: Train groups to ask curious, open-ended questions that help the leader see their challenge from a new angle.
- Require real-world application: Leaders must commit to taking a specific action based on the group’s conversation and report back on the actual results during the next session.
The result is a talent development program that’s embedded in and a regular part of work. It makes leaders more capable of expressing recognition, navigating decisions, and delivering feedback, creating the psychological safety and clarity required to rebuild employee engagement and cultivate thriving companies.
Leadership Is a Learned Skill
While leadership may come more naturally to some than others, effective leadership is developed through practice, partnership, and collaboration.
Exposure to new ideas or easy access to information alone doesn’t create the transformation we need to drive lasting change. Real growth comes from creating the conditions where those ideas can be continuously revisited, applied, and refined over time.
Action Learning Sets can help close the gap between information and implementation, empowering leaders at every level to translate their knowledge into tangible, culture-shifting impact.
