What Are You Actually Buying With Your Training Budget

By Naomi Withers | WBN News | September 16, 2026 Editor: Karalee Greer Subscription to WBN and being a Contributor is Free

Most leadership training budgets are spent on the wrong category of work.

Not because the vendors are bad. Not because the owners are careless. Because the question underneath the budget never gets named out loud.

The question is whether the program you are paying for changes who someone becomes, or how someone presents. Those are two different purchases.

Two Different Purchases

Presentation work teaches people to hold a room. How to speak with authority, how to carry themselves in front of a client or a board.

Identity work changes how someone holds their authority when a decision is genuinely hard and nobody is watching.

Both have a place. They are priced similarly and sold in similar language, which is exactly why they get confused. Only one of them tends to move the numbers an owner actually cares about.

By The Numbers

The research here is more settled than most people expect.

A 2016 meta-analytic review found a mean correlation of about 0.57 between authentic leadership, meaning the identity-anchored kind, and trust. In this field, 0.57 is a strong relationship. Most leadership constructs do not produce numbers that high, and there is no comparable meta-analysis showing the same for the presentation frame.

A separate 2016 meta-analysis covering 112 studies and more than 7,700 teams found a correlation of about 0.30 between team trust and team performance, which researchers describe as above average for this kind of work.

The chain is short. Identity-based development builds trust. Trust moves performance.

The Pattern I Keep Watching

A company runs a leadership cohort built around presence and polish. The vendor is reputable. The cohort finishes. People say they enjoyed it.

A year later, retention sits where it sat before. The trust signals from the people who actually work for those leaders are flat. And the strongest manager in the group has left, citing the way decisions get made.

When somebody finally walks that to the owner, the question that comes back is the right one. What were we actually buying?

Name It Before You Fund It

Before signing anything, I would ask three questions in order.

What is actually happening here, named honestly? Not what looks acceptable at the next board update. The real shape of the problem on the ground.

Who else needs to see it the same way for the next decision to be a real decision? The most expensive leadership decisions get made when only one person in the room has a clear picture.

And only then: what is the right move, and how does it become real?

Most training conversations skip the first two and start at the third. Pick a vendor, pick a cohort, run the program. That is how a budget gets spent on the wrong category without anybody making a mistake you could point to afterward.

Why It Matters

For a business of thirty or fifty people, the leadership budget is not large enough to spend twice. Getting the category right is worth more than finding a better vendor inside the wrong one.

Identity work also takes longer. The research is clear that it does not move in eight weeks, and a program promising otherwise is quietly selling you the other thing. Budget for the longer engagement, and measure it against trust and retention rather than satisfaction scores.

The program everyone enjoyed and nothing changed is the most expensive kind. It costs you the budget and the year.

Adapted from an article first published on the Growth Consultant Services blog: The Category Mistake in Leadership Development

About The Author

Naomi Withers | WBN News https://www.linkedin.com/in/naomi-withers-7044491b/

Naomi Withers is the founder of Growth Consultant Services, where she advises founders, CEOs, and executive teams on AI strategy, executive coaching, and high-performance leadership. She writes at growthconsultantservices.com.

Editor: Karalee Greer Subscription to WBN and being a Contributor is Free

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