I had someone once ask me, “Well, you can’t actually train leadership, can you?”
I’ll be honest—I was offended. But looking back, I think that question reveals something important about how we think about soft skills in organizations. People see leadership, communication, creativity, inspiration, motivation—all of these things—as almost magical. Like you’re either born with it or you’re not. You’re a prodigy or you’re just normal like the rest of us.
And sure, are there people who come out of the box naturally gifted with these skills? I guess. But most of us don’t. Most of us learn them. And frankly, most of us learned how not to do them as much as we learned how to do them.
This is why soft skills are actually the hardest skills to develop: people don’t even think you can learn them in the first place.
The Measurement Problem
The other reason soft skills training fails? It’s difficult to measure. How do you measure good leadership? How do you measure motivational ability?
The good news is there are ways to do it. If you’re talking to a leadership training company—or any L&D provider—and they don’t have a handle on how to measure soft skills development, that’s just because they’re not willing to put their money where their mouth is.
But here’s the challenge for HR and L&D leaders: soft skills development often happens in isolation in an organization. The people above your leaders don’t always know how to hold them accountable for it. There’s no mechanism necessarily for analyzing and testing a person’s leadership skills in real time. We often measure these things only in reflection rather than directly.
So how do we know a person is a good leader? Look at the outcomes:
- Do they have a lower-than-average employee turnover rate? That’s often a sign, though not the only one.
- If you do a 360 review, how do their results look?
- Is their team productive? Do they work hard? Do they produce more value than other teams?
- How does HR interact with that team? Are you constantly dealing with people issues, toxicity, or difficulties—or does the team work like a well-oiled machine?
These are all reflections of what good leadership looks like. But that’s exactly the problem. They’re challenging to measure, challenging to hold people accountable for, and challenging to maintain consistency around.
The Consistency Issue
This goes back to something fundamental about why leadership training can fail: there’s no consistency. People aren’t speaking the same language. You train one group of managers on feedback skills, but their leaders above them don’t reinforce it. Or worse, they model completely different behaviors.
Anyone who’s led L&D initiatives in large organizations knows this pattern. You roll out a leadership development program. It gets great feedback in the post-training survey. Six months later? Nothing has changed because there’s no system to support the behavior change, no way to measure progress, and no accountability for applying what was learned.
Soft skills aren’t hard because the concepts are complex. They’re hard because:
- People don’t believe they’re trainable
- Organizations struggle to measure them effectively
- There’s rarely consistency in how they’re developed and reinforced across leadership levels
- We measure them in retrospect (through turnover, engagement scores, team performance) rather than in real time
What L&D Leaders Can Actually Do
Here’s the reality: soft skills are learnable. Leadership, communication, motivation—these are practices you can develop through deliberate effort, feedback, and repetition. But that requires L&D leaders to build systems that support that development.
That means:
- Creating clear metrics for what good leadership looks like in your organization (not just generic competency models)
- Building accountability mechanisms that go beyond the training event itself
- Ensuring consistency from the C-suite down about what behaviors matter
- Measuring both leading indicators (are people applying what they learned?) and lagging indicators (what are the results?)
The hardest part isn’t the training. It’s building the infrastructure that makes soft skills development stick. That’s where most organizations fail—not because the skills can’t be taught, but because there’s no system to ensure they’re practiced, measured, and reinforced.
So yes, you absolutely can train leadership. But you can’t just train it and hope. You need to measure it, hold people accountable for it, and build consistency around it. That’s what separates organizations that develop great leaders from those that just talk about it.
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