Why manager development programs fail (and what works)

Any parent who's tried to explain "because I said so" to a teenager already knows why your manager development program isn't working. Good judgment doesn't just spontaneously take hold from a single teachable moment. It builds through repetition, in real conditions, over time. Until the infrastructure supporting your managers matches that reality, the gap between how you develop leaders and how those leaders actually lead will keep costing you.

That argument runs through a recent conversation between Ryan Holiday, author of The Obstacle Is the Way and Wisdom Takes Work, and Ana White, Chief People and AI Enablement Officer at Lumen. Holiday has spent a decade translating Stoic philosophy into practice. White has spent the last two and a half years rebuilding a culture from the inside of one of the most significant enterprise turnarounds in recent memory. The through line is that good judgment at scale is a systems problem, not a willpower problem.

The design flaw in most development programs

Holiday opened the conversation with a distinction that reframes the whole question. The Stoics aren't writers you have read. They're writers you are reading.

“The right idea has to appear at the right time,” he said. “Sometimes we can read something, be told something, but it's not until we're in a very specific situation that those words can actually have their impact on us.”

A January offsite doesn't prepare a manager for a February no one saw coming. The goal of a development program isn't to brief people once and hope the knowledge holds. It's to build a practice they can return to — the way Marcus Aurelius returned to his journals every day, not to review the material, but to do the work.

Aurelius was writing reminders to himself about what kind of person he wanted to be when things got hard. Holiday describes this as “practicing the pause,” which is essentially creating a structure for intentional response rather than reflex. For the manager with 12 direct reports and a packed calendar, that structure has to be designed in. It won't emerge on its own.

If your development program doesn't build a repeatable practice, it’s an event not a development program.

What Lumen built, and why it held during a turnaround

When Ana White joined Lumen, the company was navigating declining revenue, a declining stock price, and inertia that came from years of playing not to lose. A new CEO, Kate Johnson, had come in, driving a hard reset of both the business and the culture at large.

Johnson knew that a new strategy wasn't going to be enough. Lumen needed leaders who could operate differently under pressure — leaders who could name what was getting in the way. Transformation at scale also required a fundamental shift in behaviors among all employees.

They created an entirely new cultural infrastructure in the “Lumen 8” — a defined set of behavioral expectations embedded in how Lumen’s people lead, collaborate, and deliver results. In partnership with Brene Brown’s Center for Daring Leadership and BetterUp, they didn’t just train leaders — they built a system to help leaders consistently practice the behaviors required to bring that culture to life in everyday work.Two and a half years in, 90% of Lumen employees say their manager’s behaviors align with the Lumen 8.

The more useful number is one White cited from their VP coaching cohort: an almost 20% increase in locus of control among senior leaders, with stronger agency, less reactive decision-making. That shift is what enabled the rest of the turnaround to hold.

White used a formula from sports psychologist Timothy Gallwey to surface where performance was being compromised: Performance equals Potential minus Interference. At a recent gathering of leadership, Lumen dedicated an entire day to naming that interference: unclear priorities, decision bottlenecks, and competing demands that leaders had been carrying instead of flagging and working through how to reduce it.

“You can't solve what you can't see,” White said.

It's the organizational version of Holiday's argument: daily practice isn't just personal discipline. It's a structural condition that makes problems visible earlier, when they're still solvable.

What “focus on what you can control” actually requires of managers

The Stoic principle is easy to misapply. A manager who is accountable for outcomes she can't fully control, like team performance, retention, and business results, can hear “focus on what you can control” as an excuse to disengage from results. Holiday cited a conversation with a college basketball coach who had stopped evaluating players on whether shots went in, and started evaluating whether they took the right shot from the correct position.

“Were you in the right place at the right time with the right approach? That's what we want to be thinking about as far as the things that are in our control.” — Ryan Holiday

White added the organizational version of the same principle: anxiety is one of the most contagious emotions in a workplace, and it travels down. The coaching Lumen runs through BetterUp's Center for Daring Leadership is designed to: slow leaders down enough to identify the actual problem before they start solving it. That 20% increase in locus of control measures the difference between a senior leader who carries organizational interference and one who addresses it.

The habits that make the infrastructure stick

The practices Holiday and White described are small, repeatable, and designed to fit inside a real schedule.

1. Journaling. Holiday called it the number-one practice of high performers across history. Format is irrelevant; what matters is sitting down regularly to ask not what happened, but what kind of person you want to be when things happen.
   
   
2. Protecting your best hours. Most calendars are built reactively, around whoever requests time first. Holiday recommends flipping that: work requiring full judgment goes first, everything else fills in around it.
   
   
3. The two-word check-in. White's team starts every leadership meeting with one question: how are you doing? Two words. “You get a wide range of emotions. And then you can follow up individually.” Before you drive execution, you know what you're actually working with.
   
   
4. The Five Cs. Before rolling something out or navigating a disagreement, Lumen leaders walk through color, context, consequence, cost, and connective tissue. The structure pulls reactivity out of the room before anyone starts problem-solving.

None of these require a philosophy background. They require a decision made by the CHRO or talent leader that daily practice is part of how this organization develops leaders.

The one question worth asking before your next program review

If your manager development program ended tomorrow, what would your managers still be doing differently six months from now?

If the answer is nothing specific, the program was an event. If the answer is something specific — a journaling habit, a meeting ritual, a structured way to surface blockers — you've built a practice. Lumen has the culture movement data to show what that difference looks like two and a half years in. The Stoics have the framework, and BetterUp has the coaching infrastructure to make it repeatable at scale.