I want to say something that might be uncomfortable if your current management development strategy lives inside a learning management system.
Online courses are not developing your leaders.
I am not saying they have no value. Information has value. A well-constructed course can introduce concepts, frameworks, and language that a manager has never been exposed to before. That is real and worth something.
But information alone does not change behavior. And behavior change is the only thing that actually makes someone a better leader.
The Completion Rate Problem
Let us start with the most obvious issue.
Industry research consistently shows that the average completion rate for corporate online courses sits somewhere between 10% – 15%.. That means for every ten managers you enroll in a self-paced program, eight or nine of them will not finish it.
And of the ones who do finish? Research on learning retention tells us that without reinforcement, application, and accountability, people forget the majority of what they learned within a week.
So what you are actually paying for, in most cases, is access to content that goes largely unconsumed and largely unapplied even when it is consumed.
That is not a development strategy. That is a subscription.
What Learning Actually Requires
I have spent years studying how adults learn and how behavior change actually happens inside organizations. And the evidence is consistent.
Adults do not change how they lead by reading about leadership or watching someone explain it on a screen. They change by doing – by trying something new, getting feedback, reflecting on what worked, adjusting, and trying again.
That cycle requires three things that self-paced online courses simply cannot provide.
The first is accountability. When there is no one checking in, no one asking how the application went, and no consequence for skipping a module, most people skip the module. Not because they are lazy, but because the urgent always crowds out the important, and a course notification is easy to ignore.
The second is coaching. A course can tell a manager what to do in a difficult conversation. It cannot sit with them afterward and help them process why it went the way it did, what they could do differently, and how to think about the next one. That kind of reflection and personalization requires a human being.
The third is community. One of the most underestimated elements of real development is the experience of learning alongside peers who are facing the same challenges. The shared language, the mutual accountability, the realization that you are not alone in what you are navigating – these things accelerate growth in ways that solitary learning cannot replicate.
The Checkbox Culture
Here is what concerns me most about the over-reliance on online courses for management development.
It creates a checkbox culture around something that should never be a checkbox.
When development is reduced to course completions and compliance metrics, organizations start measuring the wrong things. They track enrollment rates instead of behavior change. They celebrate completion certificates instead of asking whether anything is actually different about how that person leads their team.
And managers learn quickly what the organization actually values. If the message they receive is “finish the course,” they will finish the course. If the message is “we are invested in your growth as a leader and we are going to walk alongside you in that,” they will respond to that differently – in their performance, their engagement, and their loyalty.
The signal you send through how you invest in development matters as much as the investment itself.
What We Built Instead
When I designed the Mid-Manager Program, I started with one question: what does a mid-level manager actually need in order to show up differently as a leader?
The answer was never more content. The answer was structure, application, coaching, and community – delivered over enough time to create real and lasting change.
The program runs for six months. It combines a structured curriculum with regular group coaching calls, peer accountability, and direct application to the real challenges participants are facing in their organizations right now. That is the difference between information and development.
The Standard Worth Holding
If you are investing in management development inside your organization, you deserve to hold a higher standard than completion rates and course libraries.
Ask instead: are my managers leading differently than they were six months ago? Are their teams more engaged? Are they having the hard conversations they used to avoid? Are they operating with more clarity and confidence?
Those are development outcomes. And they require more than an online course to achieve.
Next week we are going to talk about the difference between a manager who simply survives in their role and one who truly leads and what that difference means for your organization.
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