There is a strange corporate belief that if something is important enough, it must fit into a quarterly KPI. Leadership development? Measure it. Learning culture? Measure it. Managerial maturity? Ideally, convert it into revenue impact by the end of the year, add a decimal point, and put it in a slide deck. Because nothing says “we understand human development” quite like asking a feedback training to prove its contribution to annual revenue.
This is where the current disappointment with Learning and Development (L&D) often begins. Companies invest in corporate universities, leadership programs, business schools, coaching sessions, online academies, feedback workshops, resilience trainings, strategic thinking modules, and many other carefully branded efforts to make adults behave slightly better at work. Yet after all of this, a senior manager still cannot give normal feedback, delegate without anxiety, make a decision without forming a committee, or have a difficult conversation without turning it into either silence or theater. So the question appears, quite naturally: what exactly did we pay for?
Some of this criticism is fair. Many L&D functions helped create their own trap. Too often, learning became an activity factory, with success measured by completed courses, training hours, attendance, satisfaction scores, internal NPS, and the famous “participants found the session useful.” Useful for what, exactly, is sometimes left for future historians to investigate. When a function reports primarily on activity, it should not be surprised when the business asks whether that activity has any real value.
But when companies face a complex problem, they often simplify it until it becomes wrong. The new demand becomes: prove business impact. Not through changed behavior, better management practices, stronger succession pipelines, or lower avoidable attrition. No, show us the effect on revenue. Directly. Preferably this quarter. On paper, the impulse is healthy. Nobody wants L&D to be a black hole of budget, reporting “insights” and “engagement” while the organization keeps producing the same weak managers with better certificates. It is reasonable to ask whether learning changes anything.
The problem is that revenue is not a clean metric. Revenue reflects the market, the product, the price, the sales team, the brand, the economy, competitors, timing, luck, and sometimes the mysterious corporate force known as “we have no idea why this worked, but please build a framework around it.” Trying to isolate the exact revenue contribution of feedback training is not measurement. It is performance art with spreadsheets. The result is fake precision: a model appears, a number appears, someone writes that the program contributed 2.8% to revenue growth, nobody truly believes it, and everyone still copies it into the report. And the machine continues.
The irony is that this pressure pushes L&D in exactly the wrong direction. If you ask learning teams to prove immediate financial impact, they will optimize for what can be attributed quickly: short-term skills, visible activity, easy before-and-after metrics, and programs that produce numbers fast enough to survive the reporting cycle. But adult development does not work that way. A person does not become a mature leader because they attended a workshop on Tuesday and received a PDF on Wednesday. A manager may know how to give feedback yet still avoid it. They may understand delegation yet still micromanage. They may repeat the word “strategy” while spending every week in operational panic.
The problem is often not a lack of information. It is habits, fear, status, incentives, organizational politics, avoidance, culture, and the hidden reward system that says one thing in leadership principles and another in promotion decisions. This is why leadership development is slow, distributed, and inconvenient. It appears in different conversations, better decisions, fewer unnecessary escalations, stronger teams, more capable successors, and managers who can finally hold complexity without immediately turning it into a dashboard. Naturally, this makes it difficult to report in a neat quarterly table.
We demand that L&D speak the language of the execution machine. Then we complain that it no longer develops people but produces learning theater. The medicine is judged by the metric of the disease. Here is the larger problem: for years, many companies avoided the hard work of developing leaders internally because there was always a convenient alternative. Hire someone from the market. Did not grow your own? Buy someone else’s. This worked for a while, or at least it looked like it worked. But everyone was buying from the same limited pool. One company’s “great external hire” was often another company’s “we failed to retain this person.” The total supply of mature leaders did not magically expand. It just moved between LinkedIn announcements.
At some point, the market stops solving for what the organization refuses to build. This is already evident. Companies complain that strong leaders are hard to find. Candidates complain that companies want impossible combinations of maturity, speed, loyalty, transformation experience, political sensitivity, technical literacy, emotional intelligence, and low compensation expectations. Both sides are disappointed, which usually means the system is working exactly as designed, just no longer in our favor.
So no, the real issue is not whether L&D has the right KPI. The real issue is whether companies still know how to create the conditions in which adults can grow into better leaders. That requires more than courses. It requires serious managers above them, real feedback, space to think, consequences for poor leadership behavior, promotion criteria that reward maturity rather than visibility alone, and an organization that does not outsource every uncomfortable developmental task to the training department.
L&D should absolutely be accountable, but not for pretending a workshop directly drove revenue. It should be accountable for building organizational capability: better managers, stronger decision-making, healthier leadership pipelines, and fewer costly failures caused by promoting people faster than they developed. The problem is not that development cannot be measured. The problem is that we often measure it in ways that destroy the very thing we claim to value. And then, with impressive seriousness, we call it management.