You’ve Identified Your Successors. Why Isn’t the Development Making Them Ready?
An hour on why leadership development fails to close the readiness gap, and what actually closes it. For HRDs, Talent Directors, and senior L&D professionals.
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3 Dates Available
Choose your preferred session
1 hour
Strategic conversation
The problem isn’t identifying your successors. It’s what happens next, and if the process itself is opaque or done to people rather than with them, that’s a second problem stacked on top of the first.
You’ve named your successors. You’ve done the 360s. You’ve run the programmes.
And yet, when a role opens, the person you’d earmarked isn’t quite ready. A 360 here, a workshop there, a stretch project if one came up, none of it built around what that person specifically needed.
The uncomfortable truth: neither of these is a talent problem. One is a succession framework people can’t fully engage with. The other is development that was never really diagnosed.
The result? People who were identified, went through it, and still aren’t ready when it matters.
What this is actually costing you right now
Before you think about investment, consider what an unready pipeline costs every year:
Stalled transformation. A single delayed transformation project, a £2M initiative deferred by six months, loses an estimated £340K in value, plus £50K in extended consultant costs and £75K in diverted internal resource. £465K from one project that a leader wasn’t ready to push forward.
The cost of getting it wrong on appointment. External hires fail at 40–50% within their first 18 months when the internal pipeline isn’t genuinely ready. Every one of those failures means restarting the search, the onboarding, and the twelve months of lost momentum, the same gap the development was supposed to close in the first place.
The team underneath an unready leader.
A leader who’s stuck operating below the level the role demands doesn’t just underperform individually, their team feels it: less direction, slower decisions, less confidence that someone competent is in charge. Engaged teams outperform disengaged ones by 17–21% on productivity, and replacing someone who leaves costs roughly 150% of their salary. That’s the bill for a team led by someone who isn’t ready yet.
The question isn’t whether you can afford to fix how development is designed. It’s whether you can afford to keep investing in development that doesn’t produce readiness.
Limited to 25 Attendees
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✓ Free to attend
✓ Real value, no hard sell
What You Will Walk Away With
This is a practitioner session: Esendia’s frameworks and findings, openly shared.
"Some consultants are very precious over their materials, but Ines is generous and collaborative. That means I can use those tools on an ongoing basis with the team and continue to get a lot of value from the investment."
— Katherine Allison, Chief People Officer, Moore Barlow
A dynamic career journey instead of a static label, jointly owned by managers and employees rather than run behind closed doors. Why transparent frameworks get better completion rates than confidential ones.
Why development fails even when organisations mean well. The five recurring reasons it doesn’t produce ready leaders: opaque talent management approaches, development done to people not with them, no real diagnosis, development disconnected from real work, and fragmented delivery.
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The 5-Way Intelligence Scan: personality, how they show up, what they’ve mastered, how they perform under pressure, and what they actually want. And why two leaders with identical 360 results can need completely different development.
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Real experience beats theory. Why most of what makes a leader ready comes from coached stretch projects on real business challenges, not classroom content, and how to build that in without pulling people off the job.
A real case study. Noble Foods: 16 emerging leaders, a diagnostics-first programme, and what changed: 56% progressed into more senior roles or expanded responsibilities, with 100% retention.
The approach works. Here's what it looks like in practice.
“We wanted to really get under the skin of our leaders and find out who they really are, not who they had learned to be.”
— Louisa Hogarty, Group HR Director, Noble Foods
56% of Noble Foods participants progressed into more senior roles or expanded responsibilities. 100% retention.
Winner, Learning Technologies Award for Best Blended Development Programme.
Three Things That Make It Work
This isn't theory. It's how we've helped organisations develop strategic leaders in 12 months, not 24-36.
Framework
A framework people can engage with, feeding a real diagnostic. Simple and transparent enough for people to know where they stand, followed by development built on genuine diagnosis, not assumption.
One System
One coherent system, not five disconnected activities. A 360 here, a workshop there, and a stretch project if one comes up isn’t a development plan. Learn how to connect diagnosis, individual development, and cohort learning into one system.
Real Work
Built around real work, not generic content. Learn why development embedded in actual business challenges produces readiness that classroom theory doesn’t.
Traditional vs Esendia Approach
Why most leadership programmes fail and what we do differently
Traditional vs Esendia Approach
Why most leadership programmes fail and what we do differently
✔️12 months to strategic leadership
Timeline
Starting Point
Content Design
Development Method
Delivery
Behavioral Change
Leadership Shift
Traditional Approach
Esendia Approach
❌ 24-36 months to "ready"
✔️12 months to strategic leadership
✔️Diagnostics: 360s, preferences, experience
❌ Generic competency
framework
❌ Off-the-shelf modules,
one-size-fits-all
✔️Built around your growth reality
✔️Embedded in real work, decisions, challenges
❌ Classroom workshops
and theory
✔️Blended: coaching + projects + action learning
❌ One-off training events
✔️Sustained through structured reflection + real application
❌ Forgotten within weeks
✔️From operational to strategic leadership
❌ Focus on individual
competence
Element
Traditional Approach
Esendia Approach
Your Host
Led by an expert who has done this dozens of times, across industries and contexts
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Ines Wichert
Ines has spent 15 years designing and evaluating high-impact leadership development and succession solutions across manufacturing, healthcare, logistics, utilities, and financial services. Her doctorate in organisational psychology and her award-winning work sit behind everything covered in this session.
Organisational
Psychologist
FAQ
Everything you need to know before registering
Isn’t this really just a talent problem; don’t we just need better people?
Usually not. Most people in an unclear succession process, or an underperforming development programme, are genuinely capable. The problem is almost always the design: a framework too opaque to engage with, and development that isn’t diagnosed properly. Fix the design, and the same people get considerably more ready.
Who should attend this session?
HRDs, Heads of L&D, Talent Directors, and senior HR/OD professionals accountable for succession readiness and leadership pipelines.
Will you try to sell me something?
This is a genuine strategic conversation. We’ll share the framework, a real case study, and practical tools. At the end, we’ll briefly explain how we work with organisations: zero pressure either way.
What if we already run 360s, workshops, and stretch assignments?
Good, those are the right raw ingredients. The question is whether they’re connected into one system built around real diagnosis, or running as separate activities that each tell you only part of the story.
What if I can’t make any of these dates?
We run these quarterly: register your interest and we’ll notify you of the next date. We also run 1:1 sessions for organisations; get in touch if that’s a better fit.