Build, Don't Buy
The hidden costs of buying leadership development off the shelf
Most leadership development programs fail before the first workshop even starts.
Not because the content is weak.
Not because leaders don’t care.
But because the moment an organization buys a leadership program, it quietly outsources its point of view on leadership.
What looks like a practical decision (speed, credibility, ease) instantly becomes a philosophical one.
And most organizations don’t realize it.
Most organizations don’t set out to outsource their leadership philosophy.
But that’s exactly what happens when leadership development is treated as something you can buy off the shelf.
A shiny program is selected. A reputable vendor is hired. Toolkits are distributed. Workshops are delivered. Everyone nods along.
And yet- months later - very little has actually shifted.
Not because the program was bad.
But because leadership development is not neutral.
It always carries a worldview.
Leadership Is Never Just Skills
One of the core threads running through my Leadership Beyond the Toolbox series is this: leadership is not a collection of interchangeable skills that can be bolted onto any organization.
Every model of leadership rests on a set of assumptions:
What people are fundamentally like
How change actually happens
Where power and authority live
What conflict means
What “good leadership” looks like under pressure
When you buy a leadership program, you are not just buying content.
You are adopting (often unknowingly) the vendor’s answers to these questions.
That may be fine if those answers are already deeply aligned with your organization’s lived values, culture, and strategy.
In practice, they never are.
The Hidden Cost of Philosophical Misalignment
Most organizations are thoughtful about aligning strategy with their context.
They are far less thoughtful about aligning their leadership philosophy.
The result is downstream tension that’s hard to name but easy to feel:
Leaders are taught tools that subtly contradict how decisions are actually made
Participants sense a gap between the language of the program and the reality of the organization
Managers feel pressure to “perform” the model rather than integrate it
HR and L&D teams end up translating, softening, or selectively applying what was taught
Over time, this creates cynicism.
People don’t reject leadership development because they don’t care about growth.
They reject it because they can feel when it doesn’t belong.
Buying Programs Solves for Speed (Not Fit)
The appeal of buying is obvious:
It’s fast
It’s packaged
It’s defensible (“This is a proven program”)
It reduces internal effort and risk
But speed is not the same as effectiveness.
Purchased programs are designed to be broadly applicable.
Your organization is not broad.
It has a specific history, identity, power structure, and set of tensions. Leadership development that ignores those realities may feel polished, but it will remain peripheral.
This is why so many programs land as interesting but not transformative.
They live alongside the organization instead of inside it.
Building Leadership Development Is an Act of Organizational Clarity
Building your own leadership development approach forces harder (and more important) questions:
What kind of leadership do we actually need here?
What behaviours do we reward, tolerate, and quietly punish?
Where do leaders consistently struggle in this system?
What conversations are we avoiding?
What capacities matter most for the future we’re moving toward?
These are not academic questions.
They are organizational soul-searching questions.
And they cannot be outsourced.
From Toolboxes to Capabilities
In Leadership Beyond the Toolbox, I’ve argued that tools without context create dependency rather than capability.
From an organizational perspective, the same is true at scale.
When leadership development is built internally (often with external partnership, not replacement), the focus shifts:
From teaching techniques → to developing judgment
From adopting models → to strengthening shared language
From compliance → to coherence
From “best practices” → to our practices
This doesn’t mean reinventing everything from scratch.
It means starting with the organization, not the vendor’s curriculum.
Vendors Are Not the Problem. Abdication Is.
To be clear: this is not an argument against external expertise. At The Ally Co., we specialize in coming alongside leaders and their organizations to do this exact work. And through our community-driven program The Co., we provide leaders with a path towards more power-conscious leadership.
Skilled partners can:
Help surface blind spots
Challenge embedded assumptions
Bring rigour and structure
Accelerate learning
The problem arises when organizations hand over authorship.
When the vendor’s framework becomes the framework.
When leaders are trained into a philosophy rather than from one.
The most effective leadership development work I see treats external partners as co-designers and accountability partners, not owners.
Leadership Development as a Living System
Organizations change.
Strategies evolve.
Contexts shift.
A bought program is static.
A built approach can adapt.
When leadership development is owned internally:
It can respond to real-time challenges
It can integrate lessons from lived experience
It can evolve alongside the organization
It becomes part of how the organization thinks, not just how it trains
This is slower.
It is messier.
And it is far more durable.
The Question Beneath the Question
The real question isn’t build versus buy.
It’s this:
Are we willing to take responsibility for the kind of leadership we are producing?
Because the moment you stop asking that question, someone else will answer it for you.
And you may not like the downstream effects.
Leadership development, at its best, is not a product.
It is a practice.
And like leadership itself, it has to be grown.
-Jeff
I’ve regularly mentioned The Co. → check it out here if you’re looking for partners and peers on your power-conscious leadership journey.
