Why most leadership training fails, and how we can fix it before it begins.
The leadership pipeline is broken. If it even exists. Every year, poorly trained managers cost businesses an estimated $438 billion.
And the worst part? Most of those leaders were never trained before they got the job.
What does a leader actually do?
It’s the person responsible for business growth and success, fulfilling (or creating) the vision, championing the culture and values, often being the representative of the business, the guide to the employees, ensuring the targets are met, and that employees are able to grow, not being destroyed in the process.
In other words, they drive results, shape culture, keep people engaged, and turn chaos into progress.They are the link between vision and execution. The ones who keep the machine running and growing.
Everyone can agree they are some of the most vital people in every single business.
But here’s the chilling truth: most leaders are not trained.
How we promote
The problem begins early on with how we promote people to leadership positions. It’s a common practice to promote those who are great at their job. Which seems fine. The issue occurs when they are great at doing their job as employees, but don’t possess skills that are necessary to be a great leader. Leadership isn’t about doing. It’s about directing, aligning, and amplifying others. The knowledge of how to do the tasks is important, but it doesn’t matter if they don’t have the other skills.
Yet we hand people the title first, and only then expect them to magically “figure it out.” Four out of five managers in the UK, and more than 2 out of 5 managers globally, have never received formal training before taking on leadership responsibilities. (Sources: The Times, 2025; Kinkajou Consulting, 2025)
How we train
Another problem is within the training itself. The most critical skill of all, people management, is often treated like an afterthought or nice to have. But this is the key skill which drives the biggest and most costly mistakes, when missing. A small percentage of people have natural intuition for it, but most need structured preparation, long before they start managing others.
People management part of the leadership is what drives such KPIs as team productivity, team profitability, and team engagement, which is quoted as the #1 reason why people quit. They are very much calculable results of the 'soft' work done by the manager. And very expensive.
The Cost of Poor Leadership
Leadership quality is directly linked to the business outcomes: profitability, productivity, and engagement. It’s a complex set of skills that can make or break even the biggest business behemoths in the world like Enron, Kodak, Nokia.
Add it up across the world, and poor leadership costs businesses $438 billion every year. But how much is that?
It could pay the annual salary of $55,000 for the entire population of New York City, for a full year.
It’s also higher than the net worth of Elon Musk. (as of May 2025, Forbes estimates his net worth to be US$424.7 billion)
Or, if you spent $1 million every single day, it would take you over 1,200 years to spend it all.
It’s ridiculous, but also presents a great competitive advantage you can have over others if you focus on improving the leadership in your business. Level up your existing leaders. Train your future leaders before they step up. Build the foundation, not just the reaction. Outpace your competition.
This specific research has been the core motivation behind the Ace Media and focus on the leadership, with special attention to the people management. Personally, it blows my mind to see how many misconceptions, errors, and outdated ideas there are about leadership, which are clearly hurting every business: from small companies to the Fortune 500 giants. I’m on a personal mission to use the Ace platform to train the leaders of tomorrow, break the faulty thinking, and show that leadership, even if complex and challenging, is a wonderful skill to have.
Until next time,
-A.