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Leadership education is failing in multiple aspects.

The Importance of Implementation

Business schools have significantly expanded in their curricula their coverage of organizational change and transformation. Yet, in the field, organizations continue to struggle with implementation. This essay argues that the problem is not a lack of awareness about change, but a deeper omission in leadership education: the mechanics and politics of turning decisions into action.

Management curricula emphasize decision-making while largely avoiding the realities of authority, power, structure, and conflict that determine whether decisions are executed. By focusing on individual leadership capabilities and psychological models of resistance, leadership education underestimates the systemic and structural conditions required for implementation. As a result, leaders are well prepared to decide—but poorly prepared to make decisions happen.

Management and leadership education was developed in a socio-economic context very different from the one organizations face today. When the foundational principles of management were first articulated, societies were more authority-driven, organizations were simpler, and the pace of change was slower. Under those conditions, implementing decisions posed relatively few difficulties.

Today, implementation has become a central managerial challenge. Authority is routinely questioned, technological advances have increased complexity, and economic abundance has reduced employees’ dependence on the organizations that employ them. Compliance can no longer be assumed, and decisions do not automatically translate into action.

Despite this shift, management and leadership education continues to focus primarily on decision-making rather than decision implementation. Students are taught how to make good decisions in areas such as marketing and finance, often as if correct decisions will naturally be implemented. In practice, this assumption does not hold, yet it remains largely unchallenged in academic curricula.

One source of this gap lies in the composition of business school faculty. Many faculty members, including the author, entered academia without having managed organizations. The limitations of this background become evident when confronting real organizational challenges—particularly how to rejuvenate bureaucratic systems and implement change which existing  curricula offer little guidance. A review of management education reveals a notable absence of systematic treatment of implementation.

Theory Over Practice

Another issue. Historically, business schools struggled for academic legitimacy. Initially viewed as trade schools, they responded by prioritizing theoretical research over practical knowledge. Applied expertise was devalued, and tenure criteria rewarded theoretical publications rather than field experiences. Practitioners addressing real organizational problems were often marginalized within academia. Peter Drucker was considered not a scholar but a journalist.

This bias has affected the relevance of management education. Many graduates move into staff roles such as finance or strategic planning, or into consulting and investment banking, where they are not directly responsible for execution. Running operations means successfully implementing decisions and that has not been taught.

Organizational Health

Leadership development focuses on how to make companies successful and emphasizes achieving results. The most valuable assets a company or its people possess are often only truly recognized in their absence. We do not realize the value of democracy until we live under a dictatorship, nor the value of health until we are sick. Similarly, leadership development is incomplete if it does not address the importance of organizational health.

Organizational health is not synonymous with performance alone, but with the balance between external integration and internal disintegration.

Organizations are systems composed of subsystems that change at different speeds. These differences create internal disintegration, which manifests as chronic problems and consumes energy that could otherwise be directed toward responding to external challenges.

Leadership education almost exclusively focuses on how to succeed in the external environment, in getting most of the market share. Internal integration is ignored in the curricula. That is being left to human resources leaders not to line managers and that explains why some organizations follow the space syndrome, expending on the margin and falling apart at the core.

An integrated company, externally and internally, is the sign of health and healthy companies have a better chance for sustainable success.

Focus exclusively on individuality

Extensive fieldwork identifies four essential managerial functions necessary for optimal operation of a company: productivity, administration, entrepreneurship, and integration. These functions address effectiveness and efficiency in both the short and long term. They are inherently in conflict, and no single individual can perform all of them well simultaneously. Sustainable performance therefore depends on complementary teams rather than individual excellence.

Leadership education, however, remains focused on developing individuals rather than on composing and leading complementary teams.

A complementary team by cross pollinating each other with diversity of information that no single leader can possess alone, their decision making is done with less uncertainty because of the diversity of inputs a complementary team makes. Reduced uncertainty reduces risk, thus, companies managed by a complementary team run with mutual trust and respect have a much better chance for sustainable exceptional results than a company managed by a single individual. Management education is still nevertheless trying to develop the outstanding leader who can perform at excellent level all functions simultaneously.

Constructive Culture

Conflict becomes constructive only in the presence of mutual trust and respect. Where trust and respect are absent, conflict becomes destructive—within organizations as well as societies. While leadership curricula acknowledge the importance of trust, they largely rely on psychological approaches to develop it which is insufficient for managing change in complex systems. How culture becomes destructive, because of inadequate design of organization structure or processes or reward systems is not addressed adequately

A good organizational structure determines how power and authority are distributed and has a decisive impact on whether change can be implemented. Structural arrangements that favor short-term efficiency over long-term adaptability, or that concentrate administrative power, can block change regardless of leadership intent. Yet organizational architecture is rarely examined in management education.

The Future of Leadership Development

Leadership education can also be viewed within a broader historical trajectory. Leadership has evolved from reliance on physical power and possessions, to the information society and intelligence. As artificial intelligence increasingly replaces cognitive functions, leadership will depend more on qualities related to empathy, responsibility, and concern for collective well-being. Leadership education, to its detriment, still teaches how to think and not how to feel as well.

Overall, management and leadership education remains misaligned with the realities of modern organizations. While it increasingly acknowledges the challenges of change, it does not adequately address the systemic, structural, and political realities that determine whether decisions are going to be effectively implemented.