Leadership: Why is it so Rare and How Can We Build it Internally?

Have you ever watched a newly promoted manager completely freeze when their team looks to them for direction during a crisis? Or seen a talented individual contributor get the leadership role they've been chasing, only to watch them struggle for months while their team's performance or morale takes a nosedive?

It's brutal to witness. And it's happening everywhere, all the time.

Here's what makes it worse. Most of these struggling leaders never had a fighting chance. According to the Center for Creative Leadership, 60% of new managers report they never received any training when they transitioned into their first leadership role. (Center for Creative Leadership, 2024). And Gartner's research confirms that 60% of new managers fail within the first 24 months, largely due to a lack of training in leadership and management skills. (Wharton Executive Education, 2024).

We're not just setting people up to struggle. We're setting them up to fail. And the ripple effects touch everyone around them.

The Leadership Crisis Nobody's Talking About

Leadership isn't just another soft skill you can develop through a weekend workshop, online course, and a motivational speaker. It's the foundational capability that determines whether teams innovate or stagnate, whether organizations adapt or collapse, whether people grow or quit.

Yet organizations treat leadership development like an afterthought. According to Harvard Business Publishing's 2024 Global Leadership Development Study, over 1,100 L&D professionals identified a critical gap. The need to transform how we develop leaders to meet accelerating organizational change. (Harvard Business Publishing, 2024). The old playbook isn't working anymore, but most companies keep running the same failing plays.

The consequences show up everywhere. Poor leadership costs businesses up to $550 billion annually. (Saville Assessment, 2024). That's not just lost productivity or failed projects. It's talented people walking out the door because their manager can't lead, teams burning out because nobody knows how to prioritize, and organizations missing strategic opportunities because leaders can't make decisions under pressure.

We promote people based on technical expertise or time spent at the company, give them zero preparation for the human side of leadership, then act surprised when they can't navigate complex team dynamics or make strategic calls. It's like handing someone a pilot's license because they're great at building airplanes.

"Leadership" - Wix Stock Images

Why Traditional Leadership Training Keeps Failing

Organizations spend enormous sums trying to fix this. U.S. corporations invested $456 billion globally in 2015 alone on employee training and education, but they aren't getting a return on their investment. (Harvard Business Review, 2016). People revert to old ways of doing things, and company performance doesn't improve.

The research reveals why traditional leadership training falls short, and it's not because the content is wrong. It's because the delivery method can't create the neural pathways that actual leadership requires.

The Practice Gap That Training Can't Bridge

Traditional leadership training operates on a fundamental misunderstanding: that knowing what to do translates into doing it when it matters. A meta-analysis published in the Journal of Applied Psychology examined leadership training design and delivery, suggesting that knowledge transfer doesn't equal skill application. (APA PsycNet, 2024).

What I see is that participants absorb concepts beautifully in the classroom. They nod enthusiastically during case study discussions. They can articulate exactly what a good leader should do in various scenarios. Then they walk back into their actual work environment, face their first real crisis, and all that theoretical knowledge evaporates under pressure.

This happens because leadership is a performance skill, not an information problem. You can't learn to lead by listening to lectures about leadership any more than you can learn to play piano by reading about music theory. The neural pathways that enable quick decision-making under pressure, the instinct to delegate effectively, the ability to read team dynamics in real-time, these develop through repeated practice in realistic scenarios.

The Transfer Problem: Classroom to Crisis

Studies on leadership training effectiveness show that contextual circumstances, managers' mental models, and implementation design all impact whether training translates into actual performance improvement. (Scandinavian Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 2025).

What this means in practice: your newly trained manager sits through a module on "handling difficult conversations." They learn the five-step framework. They role-play a scripted scenario with another manager who's also being polite and professional. Then they return to their team and need to address actual performance issues with a defensive, combative employee who's been there longer than they have.

The gap between that role-play and reality is massive. The stakes feel different. The emotional intensity is different. The unpredictability is different. And because they've never practiced in conditions that mirror those real pressures, they freeze, avoid the conversation entirely, or handle it so poorly that the situation escalates.

The Retention Cliff Nobody Mentions

From what I've seen facilitating leadership development, participants leave traditional training with genuine intentions to apply new approaches. Within two weeks, workplace pressures reassert old patterns. Within a month, almost everyone has reverted to their pre-training habits. The content wasn't wrong. The delivery method couldn't create lasting change because it never built the deep practice required for skill retention.

Companies recognize this, which is why some organizations invest in ongoing coaching and development. But even with follow-up support, if the initial skill-building didn't create strong neural pathways through realistic practice, there's nothing solid to reinforce.

Why Games Build Leaders Better Than Lectures

The learning science behind effective leadership development points to a clear solution: people need low-stakes environments where they can practice high-stakes skills repeatedly, get immediate feedback, and iterate on their approach.

This is where game-based learning fundamentally changes the equation. Not gamification, not simulations with scripted outcomes, but actual video games that create dynamic, unpredictable scenarios requiring real leadership decisions in real-time.

A Delphi method study consulting experts in leadership development and serious games design found that games foster the development and application of leadership skills, particularly emotional intelligence and critical thinking. (University of Southampton, 2024).

The Practice Laboratory That Actually Works

What makes games uniquely effective for leadership development is the combination of factors they provide simultaneously: high engagement, meaningful consequences, immediate feedback, and safe failure.

When you're leading a team through Overcooked's chaotic kitchen, or coordinating a squad in Apex Legends, or managing resources in Frostpunk, you're not watching a PowerPoint about delegation. You're actively delegating under time pressure, watching the results unfold immediately, and adjusting your approach in real-time. Your team's success or failure hinges on your decisions. But nobody gets fired, no real project tanks, no actual relationships suffer permanent damage.

The Repetition Engine That Builds Instinct

Games make you practice the same core skills across dozens of different scenarios in a single session. Each round, each match, each level is a new iteration where you can test different leadership approaches and see what works.

Studies on serious games in management education demonstrate their effectiveness as measurement tools for leadership skills. Research using FLIGBY gameplay data from 7,931 managers globally showed that games successfully measure 29 distinct leadership skills while teaching flow-promoting leadership styles. (University XP, 2023).

What I've observed facilitating game-based leadership workshops aligns with this research. Participants make more leadership decisions in a two-hour game session than they might make in a typical workweek. More importantly, they get immediate feedback on those decisions, see the consequences unfold, and can immediately try a different approach. This repetition with variation is exactly what builds the neural pathways that enable instinctive leadership under pressure.

The Emotional Authenticity That Creates Transfer

The critical factor that enables transfer from game to workplace isn't content similarity. It's emotional similarity. When you're managing limited resources, coordinating team members with different capabilities, making time-sensitive decisions with incomplete information, and dealing with the consequences of those choices, your brain doesn't distinguish between "this is just a game" and "this is a work project" at the neurological level.

Games facilitate leadership skills and competency development, particularly when they create authentic pressure and require adaptive decision-making. (Pepperdine Digital Commons, 2024).

The emotional intensity of racing against a timer in PlateUp while your kitchen falls apart and your team is looking to you for direction creates the same physiological response as a workplace crisis. Your brain builds leadership pathways that activate under pressure, regardless of whether that pressure comes from a game or a board meeting.

Leadership Skills Games Actually Develop

Not every game builds leadership skills effectively. The games that work require coordinating multiple team members, create genuine time pressure, force resource allocation decisions, and make consequences visible immediately.

Overcooked 2: Communication Under Chaos

Overcooked 2 forces leadership lessons that no workshop can replicate. You're managing a kitchen where team members need clear instructions, tasks must be delegated based on capabilities and positioning, and timing is everything. When the kitchen is on fire (literally), you can't hold a meeting to discuss the optimal approach.

Cooperative strategy games effectively teach team leadership skills through their collaborative mechanics and real-time decision requirements. (RePec IDEAS, 2024).

From facilitating dozens of Overcooked sessions, I consistently watch participants discover their default leadership style under pressure. Some micromanage every move. Some delegate effectively but fail to monitor progress. Some communicate beautifully but can't prioritize tasks. The game makes these patterns visible immediately, because the kitchen succeeds or fails based on those leadership choices.

What makes this transfer to workplace leadership is the emotional authenticity. The stress of managing chaos, the need to adjust strategy mid-execution, the balance between doing tasks yourself and trusting team members to handle them, these are identical to workplace leadership challenges. Participants who learn to lead effectively in Overcooked's chaos develop skills that activate when workplace chaos hits.

Apex Legends: Strategic Decision-Making and Team Coordination

Apex Legends creates a leadership laboratory for strategic thinking and adaptive team management. You're coordinating a small squad through unpredictable scenarios, making rapid resource allocation decisions, balancing risk and reward, and adjusting strategy based on changing conditions.

The game requires reading your team's capabilities, knowing when to push forward and when to regroup, communicating priorities clearly under time pressure, and making calls with incomplete information. These are core leadership competencies that traditional training struggles to develop.

What I find most valuable about Apex as a leadership development tool is how it reveals decision-making patterns under pressure. Some leaders become overly cautious, missing opportunities because they can't decide fast enough. Others make aggressive calls without gathering team input. The game provides immediate feedback on these patterns, and because matches are quick, participants can iterate on their approach rapidly.

Frostpunk: Long-Term Strategic Leadership

Frostpunk develops a different dimension of leadership: managing competing priorities, making difficult trade-offs, and living with the long-term consequences of your decisions. You're leading a city through a crisis, balancing immediate survival needs against long-term sustainability, and making choices that affect everyone.

The game forces leaders to confront uncomfortable truths: sometimes there's no good option, only less bad ones. Resources are always limited. Every decision creates winners and losers. Your job isn't to make everyone happy. It's to keep the organization alive. This translates directly to organizational leadership. The emotional weight of making decisions that affect your team, the strategic thinking required to balance short-term needs against long-term goals, the communication needed to maintain team trust through difficult choices, these are identical challenges to workplace leadership.

Making Game-Based Leadership Development Work

The data on implementation clearly suggests that game-based learning works, but only when it's designed and facilitated effectively. Organizations can't just buy some games, throw teams into matches, and expect leadership development to happen automatically.

Start With Pilot Programs That Prove Value

Research on leadership development ROI shows significant returns when programs are implemented effectively. Studies indicate an average ROI of $7 for every $1 spent on leadership development when programs include experiential learning and follow-up application. (PR Newswire, 2023).

Based on this data and my facilitation experience, I recommend organizations start with small pilot programs targeting specific leadership gaps. Select 10-15 emerging leaders who are struggling with identifiable challenges like delegation, communication under pressure, or strategic decision-making. Run focused game-based sessions with these cohorts, measure specific outcomes, and use that data to build the business case for broader implementation.

The pilot approach works because it lets you test game selection, facilitation methods, and measurement frameworks with limited risk. You can iterate on what works before committing significant resources.

Build Structured Debrief Into Every Session

The leadership learning doesn't happen during gameplay alone. It happens in the structured debrief afterward when participants connect their in-game decisions to workplace leadership challenges.

Research on what makes leadership training work emphasizes the importance of reflection and connection to real-world context. (Scandinavian Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 2025).

What this looks like in practice: after a game session, facilitate a discussion that asks participants to identify specific leadership decisions they made, analyze what worked and what didn't, and explicitly connect those patterns to their actual work environment. "When the kitchen was on fire and you started micromanaging every task, what does that look like at work? When do you fall into that pattern? What's the cost?"

This reflection is what enables transfer. Without it, games are just entertainment. With structured debrief, they become powerful tools that create lasting behavior change.

Measure What Actually Matters

Organizations need to track meaningful outcomes, not just participation metrics. Research on maximizing leadership development ROI emphasizes measuring behavioral change and organizational impact, not just training completion. (NIH - Behavioral Sciences, 2024).

The metrics that matter for game-based leadership development include 360-degree feedback on specific leadership behaviors before and after training, team performance metrics like project completion rates and quality scores, retention rates for team members under the developing leaders, and participant self-assessment of confidence in specific leadership situations.

From facilitation experience, I've found that the most compelling evidence comes from team members who report noticeable changes in their leader's approach. When direct reports say "my manager delegates more effectively now" or "they communicate priorities more clearly under pressure," that's real impact.

Create Ongoing Practice Opportunities

Leadership development isn't a one-time event. Skills degrade without practice, which is why organizations need to create ongoing opportunities for leaders to practice in low-stakes environments.

The practical approach, in my opinion, is to establish monthly or quarterly game-based leadership sessions that let developing leaders continue practicing core skills. Rotate through different games that target different leadership competencies. Keep the focus on skill development, not entertainment. Measure progress over time.

This ongoing practice model addresses the retention problem that plagues traditional training. Instead of hoping leaders will remember and apply lessons from a one-off workshop, you're creating repeated opportunities to strengthen leadership neural pathways through active practice.

The Real Question Isn't Whether Games Work

Game-based leadership development creates measurable skill improvements, better retention, and stronger transfer to workplace performance than traditional training methods.

The real question is whether organizations are willing to rethink how they develop leaders. Are you ready to move beyond the comfortable classroom model that consistently fails, and embrace an approach that actually builds the practice-based skills leaders need?

Because the alternative, continuing to promote talented individual contributors into leadership roles with zero preparation and wondering why they fail, is working exactly as well as the data shows. Which is to say, it’s not.