In 1993, Honeywell Group launched the Honeywell Excellence Programme with a simple proposition: leadership can be built deliberately. More than three decades later, the programme is still running.
In February 2026, Honeywell launched its tenth cohort into a development journey that combines cross-functional exposure, business simulations, mentorship and direct engagement with senior executives. Its alumni now lead across sectors including oil and gas, manufacturing, financial services, real estate and hospitality.
That history raises a question that sits underneath much of the current conversation about management training in Nigeria. What happens when leadership development becomes part of how an organisation builds its future? The answer matters as Nigerian businesses deal with a more demanding operating environment, where growth, technology, talent and organisational change are becoming increasingly connected.
PwC’s 2026 Nigerian CEO Survey found that 47% of Nigerian CEOs said their organisations had entered new sectors or industries over the previous five years, with technology the most frequently identified sector for future expansion. Talent availability and cyber risk each ranked as a major concern for 38% of CEOs.
In comparison, 50% said they were concerned about whether their businesses were transforming fast enough to keep pace with technological change, including AI. Only 9% reported applying AI extensively to strategic decision-making.
Those figures point towards a leadership challenge that is easy to underestimate. A company entering a new market needs people who can make sound decisions beyond familiar routines. An organisation introducing AI needs managers who can guide teams through changing roles and workflows.
A business facing pressure for scarce talent needs managers who can help capable people perform, grow and stay. As organisations become more complex, more of these decisions fall to managers who may sit several levels below the executive team.
That is why leadership development deserves to be treated as an organisational capability issue. The question for HR and business leaders is how deliberately the organisation is preparing the people who will make decisions, manage teams, develop talent and carry strategy forward.
Why Nigerian Organisations Need A New Leadership Development Model
For many organisations, leadership development still begins with a programme and ends when the programme closes. Managers attend a workshop, work through leadership concepts, complete an evaluation form and return to the business. The calendar then moves towards the next learning priority.
The gap between training activity and lasting leadership improvement can be significant. McKinsey’s research into leadership development found that only 11% of more than 500 executives surveyed strongly agreed that their leadership-development interventions achieved and sustained the desired results.
Its analysis identified four conditions that were associated with stronger outcomes: connecting development to organisational strategy and context, reaching leaders broadly, designing for learning transfer and reinforcing the desired behaviour through the wider organisational system.
That finding changes the way leadership development should be approached. A programme can be well designed and well facilitated while still struggling to create lasting change if managers return to an environment that gives them little room to practise what they learned.
A manager who has been taught to delegate may work in a structure where routine decisions still require senior approval. Someone who has learned to coach may carry a workload that leaves little time for meaningful conversations with team members.
The workplace becomes part of the learning design. The Center for Creative Leadership has studied how managers develop for decades. Its 70-20-10 framework places challenging experiences at the centre of leadership growth, alongside developmental relationships and formal learning.
CCL describes the framework as a research-based guide built from more than 30 years of its Lessons of Experience research, while also emphasising that challenging assignments become more powerful when supported by relationships and formal learning.
That idea has direct relevance to Nigerian organisations. A manager does not master delegation simply because a facilitator has explained its benefits. The learning becomes useful when that manager is given responsibility for a demanding piece of work, gives another employee meaningful ownership, encounters a problem, receives feedback and adjusts their approach.
The classroom gives the manager concepts and language. Experience gives those ideas context.
Make Leadership Development Serve Business Strategy
Leadership capability is needed wherever strategic execution takes place. Managers make decisions about people, customers, risk, technology, performance and change. The leadership question for Nigerian organisations is not whether managers have attended training. It is whether the organisation has built the leadership capacity required to execute its strategy.
The Nigerian corporate environment provides useful evidence of what a sustained approach can look like. First Bank of Nigeria offers one example. A 2016 case study published in the Journal of Education and Learning examined leadership development at First Bank’s headquarters in Lagos through interviews with 30 managers, supervisors and officers with substantial banking experience.
The researchers identified classroom, online and on-the-job learning, mentoring, coaching through a shadow manager, and personal development and work-life balance as important elements of the bank’s leadership-development approach.
Honeywell provides a more recent example. The tenth Honeywell Excellence Programme cohort, launched in February 2026, entered a twelve-month journey combining cross-functional exposure, business simulations, mentorship and executive engagement. Honeywell says the programme has operated since 1993 and that its alumni now lead across several sectors of the Nigerian economy.
The value in both examples sits in the architecture. Leadership development is woven into workplace experience, relationships and longer-term career development. That approach gives organisations a way to build capability before leadership vacancies become urgent.
Design Development Around Leadership Transitions
One of the most important transitions in a professional career can happen before a formal promotion. An employee who has consistently delivered strong individual results may begin coordinating a project, supervising colleagues, representing a department in meetings or taking responsibility for junior team members. The title may remain unchanged for a period while the expectations around the role have already shifted.
The new responsibilities require a different way of working. A person who was previously judged by the quality of their own output now has to create the conditions in which other people can perform. They have to decide what to delegate, how much direction to provide, when to intervene and how to respond when someone makes a mistake.
Technical expertise does not automatically provide those capabilities. A strong salesperson can understand customers deeply and still struggle to coach a struggling team member. An experienced engineer can have excellent technical judgement and feel uncomfortable addressing repeated underperformance. A finance professional can understand controls and reporting while needing development in stakeholder influence or people management.
This is where the leadership-pipeline idea becomes useful. In The Leadership Pipeline, Ram Charan, Stephen Drotter and James Noel describe leadership progression as a series of transitions in which people have to change how they use their time, where they place their attention and which skills they rely on. The practical question for HR is simple: what changes when someone enters each level of leadership in this organisation?
A first-line manager may spend much of the working day dealing with employee performance, customer issues, workloads, operational decisions and team coordination. Their development should prepare them for those responsibilities through practical work around delegation, feedback, coaching, conflict management and accountability.
Middle managers occupy a different position. Their decisions often cross functional boundaries, and they may have to interpret strategic priorities, influence colleagues over whom they have no direct authority, negotiate resources and develop the managers beneath them. Their development therefore needs more room for commercial judgement, stakeholder management, and strategic decision-making.
At executive level, the field becomes broader still. Leaders are dealing with organisational direction, transformation, governance, succession, investment, reputation and long-term competitiveness. Development at this level needs space for strategic discussion, complex decision-making and the examination of enterprise-wide consequences.
The point is easy to miss when organisations use the same generic leadership course for everyone. Leadership development becomes more useful when it is built around the decisions people are responsible for making at each stage of their careers.
Translate Global Frameworks Into Nigerian Workplace Realities
Leadership frameworks often emerge from research conducted across different industries and national settings. Their principles can travel across borders, while the situations in which managers apply them remain shaped by local culture, organisational structure and economic conditions.
Consider a manager working in a hierarchical environment where employees rarely challenge a senior leader. A workshop on employee voice can explain why open communication matters, while a realistic case gives the manager a chance to practise how they invite disagreement, respond to uncomfortable feedback, and handle a junior employee who raises a difficult issue in front of senior colleagues.
Delegation presents a similar challenge. A manager may understand how to assign responsibility and return to a workplace where routine decisions require several layers of approval. The development programme needs to help the manager recognise the behaviour required while also examining the organisational conditions surrounding it.
This is why Nigerian leadership programmes should use situations that managers recognise. A bank manager can work through sales targets, regulatory expectations, operational risk and the performance of a high-value employee. A manufacturing manager can deal with a quality failure while production pressure is rising.
A technology leader can manage an AI-enabled change that alters several roles within the team. The case becomes the bridge between the concept and the working day. Managers are learning how to make decisions in situations that carry consequences.
Make The Workplace Part Of The Learning Experience
There is a useful way to judge the design of a leadership programme: look at what participants are being asked to do. A programme built around presentations can give participants exposure to concepts, while a programme built around realistic decisions gives them the chance to demonstrate behaviour. That difference matters because leadership is expressed through actions taken under pressure.
The Leadership Challenge, developed by Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner through decades of research, approaches leadership through observable practices. Its model centres on behaviours such as modelling the way, enabling others to act, inspiring a shared vision, challenging processes and encouraging others. The value of a behavioural framework lies in the fact that it can be practised and observed.
Imagine a manager handling a simulation in which a strong employee challenges a decision in front of colleagues. The facilitator can observe whether the manager listens, how they respond to disagreement and whether they create room for constructive discussion. The participant receives feedback on what happened rather than simply hearing that good leaders should encourage employee voice.
That is why strong leadership-development programmes often use case studies, simulations, role plays, coaching, peer discussion, practical assignments and structured reflection. Each method provides a different route into the same question: what will this manager do differently when the situation arrives at work?
Formal learning is important because it gives managers concepts, models and language. The impact of those ideas depends on what happens when participants return to their roles. CCL’s research on leadership development places challenging experiences and developmental relationships alongside formal learning because people develop through a combination of these elements.
A manager attending a delegation programme might leave with a plan for a live project. Their own manager can review that plan. Several weeks later, the participant can return with evidence of what worked and where the delegation broke down. A coach or peer group can help them think through the next attempt.
Organisations can narrow that gap through practical measures. A manager can be asked to complete a workplace assignment after training. Their line manager can discuss progress during a regular one-on-one. Cohorts can meet after several weeks to compare experiences. HR can check for changes in behaviour after a quarter or two. The exact structure can vary, while the principle remains important: learning needs time, practice and reinforcement.
An organisation can teach delegation in a training room and discourage it in practice. Imagine a manager assigning an important task to a capable employee. The employee makes a reasonable mistake. A senior executive steps in, takes over the work and questions the manager for allowing the situation to arise. Everyone who sees the episode receives a message about how much autonomy is safe.
Harvard Business Review has examined this problem in its work on organisational culture and leadership development, arguing that development programmes can struggle when they fail to account for the culture, norms and systems surrounding leaders. The issue becomes especially important when organisations want managers to encourage employee voice, delegate decisions, support experimentation or coach their teams. Those behaviours need organisational space.
Senior leaders create much of that space through their own behaviour. Their reactions to mistakes shape how managers handle risk. Their response to disagreement influences whether employees speak openly. Their promotion decisions tell the organisation which behaviours matter.
Their willingness to give managers authority determines how much decision-making can happen below the executive level. Leadership development therefore reaches beyond the people attending the programme. The wider leadership culture determines how much of that learning becomes part of everyday management.
Diagnose The Business Problem Before Choosing Training
A business may tell HR that its managers need delegation training. Before choosing a programme, the organisation should understand where delegation is breaking down. Managers may be reluctant to release control. Decision rights may be unclear. Employees may need more preparation before they can take on larger responsibilities. Senior executives may routinely reverse decisions made below them.
Each situation points towards a different response. Performance management presents the same issue. A company may say that managers need better skills for difficult conversations while the deeper problem sits in unclear standards, inconsistent documentation or a culture that gives strong performers wide room to operate without accountability.
The L&D function needs enough diagnostic discipline to distinguish a capability problem from a process problem, a structural issue or a leadership-behaviour issue. CIPD recommends approaches such as performance consulting, stakeholder engagement and impact tracking to help organisations make that distinction and connect learning activity to business needs.
McKinsey’s research supports the importance of context. Its study of leadership-development programmes found that contextualising programmes around organisational strategy, designing for learning transfer and reinforcing desired behaviours through the wider system were among the factors associated with stronger results.
For Nigerian businesses, this has a practical implication for choosing a provider. A credible provider should understand the organisation before recommending a curriculum. It should ask what managers are expected to do, where they are struggling and what business outcome the development programme is expected to influence.
Measure Behaviour, Capability And Business Impact
Attendance tells an organisation who participated. Participant feedback tells it how the learning experience was received. Neither provides a complete picture of whether leadership capability has improved. The measurement approach should begin with the reason the programme exists.
An organisation strengthening succession can examine readiness for critical roles, internal movement and the depth of its leadership pipeline. A company dealing with high turnover can examine manager effectiveness, retention and employee feedback. A business experiencing slow decisions can track escalation rates and decision turnaround.
A company transforming can examine adoption, manager confidence and the pace at which teams adjust to new processes. The measures will differ according to the business problem. That is why the outcome should be defined before the programme begins.
LinkedIn’s 2025 Workplace Learning Report found that 49% of learning and talent-development professionals surveyed said their executives were concerned that employees lacked the skills required to execute business strategy. The report also found that leadership training was the most common career-development practice, with 71% of organisations offering it.
Leadership training has therefore become a common organisational investment. The quality of the investment depends increasingly on whether the organisation can connect the programme to the capability it needs and gather evidence that the capability is changing.
Build A Leadership Pipeline That Lasts
As organisations become more complex, functional expertise can give leaders only part of the picture. A finance leader benefits from understanding what commercial teams are trying to achieve and how those decisions affect cash flow and margins. A commercial leader needs a view of operational capacity and the economics of delivery. An HR leader needs to understand how workforce decisions affect growth, productivity and customer experience.
Cross-functional development creates room for that wider perspective. Honeywell’s current leadership programme illustrates the approach. Its HEP10 cohort is moving through a nine-month journey that includes cross-functional exposure, business simulations, mentorship and executive engagement, alongside an introduction to the group’s investment philosophy and strategic priorities.
That exposure matters when organisations are preparing people for larger leadership roles. Managers begin to understand how decisions made in one function affect other parts of the organisation, while senior leaders gain more visibility into the people who could eventually carry broader responsibilities.
Sustained leadership development has another benefit that deserves more attention: it gives organisations a structured way to transfer knowledge across generations of leaders. A long-serving executive may understand why a major decision was taken years ago. An experienced operations manager may know where a process tends to fail during periods of high demand. A senior commercial leader may understand relationships and institutional history that took years to build.
When these leaders leave, some of that knowledge leaves with them. Structured leadership programmes can bring emerging leaders closer to the organisation’s history, strategic logic and operating principles while giving experienced leaders a framework for sharing knowledge through mentoring and direct engagement.
Honeywell describes its Excellence Programme as a long-term investment in talent, with alumni now leading across several Nigerian sectors. First Bank’s case study similarly shows how formal learning, mentoring, coaching and workplace experience were combined within the organisation’s development approach.
The result is a leadership pipeline with greater continuity. Future leaders gain organisational context earlier, experienced leaders have a structured way to pass on knowledge, and the organisation gets more visibility into the people who may be ready for larger responsibilities.
