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Imagine spending $366 billion globally on a fire suppression system because you never fix the faulty wiring. That is what leadership development has become. An entire industry built to compensate for a role design failure that nobody addresses.

Jackson Lynch and Scott Morris (former CHRO, founder of Propulsion AI) unpack why 60% of new managers get no training when promoted, 60% fail within two years, and employee engagement has barely moved since the year 2000. The problem is not the programs. The problem is we designed the manager job with functional delivery first and people development as an afterthought, then built a function to do what managers should have owned from the start. This episode names the 10-step loop that keeps the system stable but ineffective, and lays out a practical playbook for CHROs willing to stop optimizing the workaround.

What You'll Learn

The solutions order problem:

• We defined the managerial role with functional delivery as the primary output and development as secondary. That ordering is a signal to every manager about what actually matters.
• Gallup found only 10% of people have the natural talent to manage, yet we promote based on functional excellence, which has almost no correlation with people development ability.

Why the system does not self-correct:

• Every program built to close the capability gap tells managers that development is someone else's job. Each one is a permission slip.
• L&D teams create their own constituency. Activity feels like progress. The system is stable, just not effective.

The 10-step loop:

• From hiring on functional expertise to nominating for programs to measuring vanity metrics, the loop ends where it starts: nobody accountable for whether anyone actually got better.

The playbook for this week:

• Audit your largest multi-incumbent manager job description. Find the word "develop" and see how far down the list it sits.
• Ask your L&D leader what percentage of participants apply what they learned, and how they know.
• Run a time study on five managers to expose the gap between what the organization says matters and what the system reinforces.
• Kill your lowest-impact program and fund a pilot where five managers get held accountable for developing their people with measurements and consequences.

Key Quotes

"If you had a manufacturing line with a 60% defect rate, you would not buy more inspection equipment. You would redesign the line."

"Every program we develop, even with the best of intentions, is a permission slip for the manager not to do their job."

"The leadership development function is a confession. It is an admission that we built the manager role wrong and compensated with a function instead of fixing the design."

Diagnostic Questions

• Where does "develop people" appear on your largest manager job description? Top three, or buried below functional delivery?
• Can your L&D leader tell you, with data, what percentage of participants are applying what they learned?
• What percentage of manager time is actually going toward developing people versus producing functional work?
• When was the last time you promoted someone primarily because they built their team, not because they hit their numbers?
• Are you measuring outcomes (did people get better?) or inputs (did people attend?)?

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Resources

• My Talent Sherpa: mytalentsherpa.com
• Talent Sherpa Substack: talentsherpa.substack.com
• Scott Morris / Propulsion AI: getpropulsion.ai
• Dripify: try.dripify.com/talentsherpa