How long does a leadership development programme take?

At Inner Leader, a leadership development programme takes from a single intensive day to 6 to 12 months. Coaching Skills for Managers, our programme for managers, typically runs as four to six sessions spaced across three to six months, which is about 13 to 26 weeks. The right length depends on what you want to change.

If you are planning a programme and need to fit it into people's diaries, this article is for you. It gives the typical length of each format we run and explains what decides how long a programme needs to be. It also sets out what the research says about spreading learning over time.

Inner Leader is a UK leadership, team and sales development consultancy based in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire. We run leadership development programmes in person anywhere in the UK, virtually or a mix of both.

Typical lengths of leadership development programmes

These are the formats we run and how long each one takes.

In weeks, two to three months is roughly 9 to 13 weeks, three to six months is roughly 13 to 26 weeks and 6 to 12 months is roughly 26 to 52 weeks. Our article on leadership training for remote and hybrid teams explains how the shorter format works.

What decides how long a programme takes

Four things decide how long your programme needs to be.

What you want to change

A leadership team that needs time together to build trust and agree how it wants to work can use a single day well. Harvey Nash brought its UK and Ireland leadership team together in Leeds for one Leadership Team Accelerator day. Leaders left re-energised, aligned and proud of the team they were part of. The Harvey Nash case study has the detail.

A new everyday habit takes longer. Asking a question before giving the answer, or giving feedback in the week it matters, only becomes natural once a manager has tried it several times on real people.

How much time people can give

Every hour a manager spends in training is an hour away from their work. Four to six sessions of ninety minutes add up to less than two working days. They are also easier to fit into a working week than two or three days in a row.

Whether coaching runs alongside the workshops

One-to-one sessions between workshops need their own time in the calendar, and they are where a leader works on the thing that is getting in their own way. At ITV, every manager had two sixty-minute one-to-one sessions alongside four ninety-minute workshops, spaced out from October to March. The managers' own rating of their confidence in coaching others rose by 116%. The ITV case study sets out the programme.

What else the programme has to fit around

A graduate scheme already has placements in different departments, projects and presentations to the leadership team. Our graduate development programmes are a small number of full days spread across the year, fitted around the other parts of the scheme.

What the research says about spacing learning over time

Researchers have long compared learning that is spread over several sessions with the same learning done in one block. Spreading it out is called distributed practice, and the benefit it gives to memory is known as the spacing effect.

In 2006 Nicholas Cepeda and colleagues published a review of 839 assessments of distributed practice, drawn from 317 experiments, in the journal Psychological Bulletin. They found that the longer people needed to remember the material, the longer the best gap between sessions was. Those experiments tested how well people recalled verbal material. They were not studies of leadership behaviour, so we treat the finding as a general principle when we design a programme.

A second body of research looks at whether people use what they learned once they are back at work, and keep using it. Researchers call this transfer of training. In 1988 Baldwin and Ford published a review of that research in the journal Personnel Psychology. It looked at three things that affect transfer: the people being trained, the design of the training and the work environment they go back to.

This is our reason for spacing sessions. When a programme runs across months, people go back to their own workplace between sessions, try something and return to talk about what happened.

Why we space most programmes across several months

Short sessions across several months give managers time to take something into a real conversation at work, then come back and talk about what happened. It gives you a lot of change for relatively little time in the classroom.

In a single day nobody has the chance to try a new skill in a real situation at work. When the sessions are spaced out, managers have someone to coach, a few weeks to try it and somewhere to bring what went wrong. That is how our coaching skills for managers programme is built.

A single day still has its place. Most leadership team work happens in the room, and one intensive day suits a leadership team that needs time together. If the budget only covers one day, spend it on a session, led by a facilitator, about a real live problem the group is stuck on.

Length is one of several things to check before you book. Our guide to what a leadership development programme includes covers the rest, with four questions to ask a provider.

How soon you can expect to see a difference

You can expect specific behaviours, such as running a better one-to-one or holding a feedback conversation, to change within weeks. Shifts in trust and in how freely people raise problems take a quarter, because they depend on the team seeing whether the new behaviour holds when the manager is busy.