Essay
The $366 billion problem nobody wants to solve.
What organizations spend on leadership development every year, and why so little of it survives contact with the job.
Read the essayCase study · Federal health
Rebuilt from the framework up.
A federal health agency of 6,700 employees, and a leadership development architecture designed to outlast any single program. Built to give the organization a measurable way to know whether it’s producing leaders.
Multi-year·GS-13 through SES·6,700 employees
The engagement
- Engagement
- Multi-year, in progress
- Scope
- 6,700 employees, GS-13 through SES
- Sector
- Federal health
- Practice
- Leadership Development
- Client
- A federal health agency, anonymized at the client’s request
Engagement led by Bryan Miles prior to establishing MaestroVox Advisors.
The situation.
A large federal health agency with more than 6,700 employees, and a leadership tier that had grown faster than the infrastructure to develop it. The agency had training, and it had classes.
What it didn’t have was a coherent leadership development framework: a connected architecture that built skill deliberately across levels, measured what changed, and gave the organization a way to know whether its investment in developing leaders was producing leaders worth the investment.
What existed was a collection of disconnected programs, each designed in isolation, none building toward a shared picture of what leadership capability here was supposed to look like. A leader could attend, check the box, and leave largely unchanged. The ask was to fix that.
What the diagnostic found.
The presenting request was a program: build something for the leadership tier, run it, report on it. Underneath it sat three gaps, and not one could be closed by another program. The ask was to fix the development problem. The real work turned out to be building the conditions that make fixing it possible.
The first gap was architectural.
Nothing defined what leadership looked like at different levels: no shared language, no developmental progression, and no way to distinguish a GS-13 team lead from an SES executive in terms of what each needed to build and why. Programs existed in a vacuum because there was nothing to connect them to.
The second was methodological.
The existing programs were content-delivery vehicles. Leaders sat in a room, received information, and left. The research on adult development is unambiguous about what that produces: familiarity and vocabulary, not skill. The agency was spending significant resources on development that could not produce the outcome it was designed for.
The third was measurement.
There was no way to track whether anything was changing, and no way to distinguish between programs that worked and programs that felt good.
The work.
Three interconnected workstreams over multiple years. There was no existing program to build from, which created a specific resistance: leadership development in a federal context tends to mean compliance training, and the phrase soft skills can end a conversation with career executives before it starts. The work had to be reframed early, toward what the agency already understood. Capability, readiness, and what happens at 6,700 people when those are missing.
01
Framework design. A shared architecture for each level.
Bryan designed a leadership development framework scaled to an organization of 6,700, defining competencies and developmental expectations from front-line supervisors through senior career executives. It set what skill looks like at each level, what the progression to the next requires, and how individual programs connect to the larger picture. For the first time, a manager attending a program could see where it fit and what came next.
02
Program development and delivery. Deliberate practice over content.
From the framework, Bryan designed and delivered a curriculum of skill-building programs: classes, tools, and structured practice built on the competency architecture. Participants were doing something rather than watching something, working real decisions already in front of them. Micro-skill development, structured reflection, and application in job conditions were the design standards, not engagement scores.
03
Impact measurement. The workstream most organizations skip.
Bryan built an L&D impact measurement plan grounded in the Learning-Transfer Evaluation Model (LTEM), a research-based framework designed to measure behavioral change and learning transfer rather than participant satisfaction. LTEM separates what learners remember, what they can demonstrate, and what they do differently on the job, a distinction most federal training programs have never made explicit.
Where it stands.
The engagement is ongoing and the framework is in active use. What follows is what exists today, stated as built rather than as expected. The work sits inside the agency’s Workforce Resilience office, being stood up to own, maintain, and evolve the framework over time. Bryan works alongside that office as the partner helping the agency become its own solution rather than as the permanent one.
The evidence at the leadership level is specific. Leaders who entered unable to articulate their own developmental edge left with growth plans, skill-building structures, and the capacity to know when they were practicing and when they were defaulting.
The engagement was designed against a standard Bryan holds on every build. The goal is never to be needed forever. It is to leave something behind that holds once the partner steps back, which is why the framework, the curriculum and the measurement plan were all built to be owned by the agency rather than serviced by us.
Built and in use
01
A leadership development framework built for 6,700 employees, designed to outlast any single program.
02
A competency architecture spanning GS-13 through SES, with shared language and a developmental progression.
03
A connected curriculum where disconnected classes had existed before.
04
An LTEM-grounded impact measurement plan, tracking behavioral change rather than satisfaction.
05
Evidence of behavioral change in the cohorts who completed sustained development experiences.
What we’re measuring.
The agency wanted a measurable way to know whether it’s producing leaders. That is the claim this engagement will be judged on when it closes, so the instruments are named here rather than assembled afterward.
The LTEM standard.
LTEM sets what counts as evidence. It separates what learners remember from what they can demonstrate and from what they do differently on the job. Only the last of the three answers the agency’s question.
Touchpoints before and after.
Assessment touchpoints are established before and after development experiences, so change is read against a baseline rather than against a recollection.
Behavioral indicators at intervals.
Indicators are tracked at multiple intervals post-program, which is where transfer either holds or decays. That gives the agency a data-grounded basis for evaluating which programs are producing real change.
The Lectica assessment.
The next evolution of the plan, currently in development, incorporates Lectica’s Leadership Decision-Making Assessment for leaders engaged in sustained coaching.
For a federal agency spending public funds on workforce development, the difference between development that changes behavior and development that scores well carries real accountability weight. These instruments exist to make that difference checkable, and they are how this case will be reported at close.
Satisfaction surveys at the end of a class are not evidence of development.
If you can’t tell whether your programs are producing leaders.
Most engagements start with a 30-minute call about the population you’re developing and how you would know it worked. We’ll be honest about what answering that takes at your scale. The call is with Bryan or Justin.
Where this argument continues
Practice
Leadership development built for the bench.
How we design programs that produce behavioral change instead of satisfaction scores. Cohort architecture, integrated coaching, assessment built into the arc.
Explore the practice