Leadership development for organizations in Saudi Arabia
Most leadership development does not fail at delivery. It fails at transfer.
The program is good. People enjoy it, the feedback scores are high, and on Tuesday nothing is different. This is so common that many organizations have concluded the content was wrong and bought different content, which does not work either — because content was never the variable.
Three things determine whether anything transfers, and none of them is in the program:
Does the participant's own manager know what they are working on, and care? Is there a live problem to apply it to within a fortnight? Does anything in the organization reward the new behavior, or does the old one still get promoted?
Where all three hold, almost any competent program produces change. Where none holds, no program does. Everything on this page is built around that.
ICF ACC · MBA · Riyadh · Arabic and English
The transfer diagnostic
Score your last program, or the one you are planning. 2 = yes, 1 = partly, 0 = no.
| Score | ||
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Each participant's line manager could name what that person was working on | |
| 2 | Managers had a conversation with participants before it started | |
| 3 | Participants had a real, current problem to apply it to | |
| 4 | Something was expected of them between sessions, and someone looked | |
| 5 | The behavior we are asking for is visibly rewarded here | |
| 6 | The people one level above the participants behave the way we are teaching | |
| 7 | We could name, six months later, what specifically changed | |
| 8 | Participants were told why they were selected |
13–16: your design is sound; content choice is a secondary question.
8–12: you have a transfer problem, and it is cheaper to fix than to re-procure. Rows 1, 2 and 4 are the usual gaps and all three are organizational, not commercial.
Below 8: buying a different program will produce the same result. Fix rows 5 and 6 first, or accept that you are buying an event rather than a change.
Row 6 is the one nobody wants to score. If the level above the participants behaves in the opposite way, the program is teaching people to be unlike the people who get promoted, and participants work that out faster than sponsors do.
Which unit are you developing?
The most common design error is choosing a format before naming the unit. These are different problems with different delivery models.
| The problem | The unit | Where it goes |
|---|---|---|
| One senior leader facing a transition, decision or stakeholder problem | The individual | Executive coaching for organizations |
| A senior team that cannot decide, or that decides and does not execute | The team, together | Leadership team development |
| A layer of managers with the same gap | A cohort | Manager development coaching |
| Identified talent you might lose, or might over-promote | Selected individuals | High-potential employee coaching |
| Good people who cannot see a path here, so they leave | The system, plus individuals | Internal mobility and promotion readiness |
| People leaving, by your decision | The individuals, and your reputation | Outplacement and career transition |
| No credible successor for a role that matters | Named individuals against a named seat | Succession planning and coaching |
Read down the left column, not the right. Buyers who start from the format — "we want a leadership program" — end up with an intervention aimed at a unit that was never the problem.
What not to buy
A program when the problem is structural. If people leave because there is no path, or because one executive is intolerable, development spend postpones the conversation and adds cynicism.
Training when the level above will not change. See row 6.
A two-day workshop expecting behavior change. Workshops transmit information. Behavior changes through repetition against real problems with someone paying attention. Buy the workshop if information is what you need, and do not measure it as though it were something else.
A program for everyone. Universal programs are how organizations avoid deciding who matters. They are also why participants do not know why they were selected — diagnostic row 8.
Content alone, when what is missing is attention. Frequently the intervention that works is the cheapest one: someone senior taking an interest, on a schedule.
Anything sold with a return multiple attached. There is a fuller treatment of what can and cannot honestly be measured on executive coaching for organizations, and the short version is that nobody can forecast a return for your organization.
Design worksheet
Fill this before talking to any provider, including this one.
1 THE PROBLEM, not the solution What is happening that should not be, or not happening that should: _____________________________________________________ 2 THE UNIT Individual / team / cohort / selected individuals / the system itself: _________________________________ 3 WHO SELECTED THE PARTICIPANTS, AND WHAT WILL THEY BE TOLD _____________________________________________________ 4 THE MANAGER'S ROLE What each participant's manager will do, specifically: _____________________________________________________ 5 THE LIVE PROBLEM What each participant will apply this to within two weeks: _____________________________________________________ 6 WHAT WE WILL LOOK AT, AND WHEN _____________________________________________________ 7 WHAT IN OUR SYSTEM CONTRADICTS WHAT WE ARE TEACHING _____________________________________________________ 8 WHAT WE WILL DO IF THE FINDING IS STRUCTURAL _____________________________________________________
Copy the block — nothing to download and no email required.
Item 7 is the one that changes designs. Every organization has an answer to it, and naming it in advance is the difference between a program that works around the contradiction and one that pretends it does not exist.
Measuring it without inventing numbers
Name the change before you start, in observable terms, per participant or per cohort. "More strategic" cannot be reviewed; "brings a recommendation rather than a set of options" can.
Ask the people who named it, not the participants alone. Self-assessment is data and it is not sufficient.
Look at a longer horizon than the program. Retention and internal progression of participants over two years say more than a satisfaction score at the end of week six.
Accept a structural finding as an outcome. A program that surfaces something the organization can now act on has produced value even where the behavioral objective was only partly met.
Do not attribute business results to development spend. The attribution is not available and claiming it damages the credibility of the next request.
How engagements are structured here
The stated organizational process is Understand → Design → Deliver → Apply → Review. The Apply and Review stages are where transfer is addressed, which is why they are separate stages rather than a follow-up email.
Six organizational service areas: executive and senior leadership coaching, manager development, career development for employees, internal mobility and promotion readiness, professional positioning, and career transition support.
Six audience levels: emerging talent, individual contributors, new managers, experienced managers, senior leaders, executives.
Entry configurations range from a single senior leader to coaching attached to an existing program — which matters if you already have content and the gap is application rather than curriculum.
On confidentiality, the position is stated plainly on the corporate page: "The organization pays. The session still belongs to the participant." Individual session content is not reported back to the sponsor; review happens against engagement-level objectives.
Delivery is in Arabic or English, and participants choose.
Book a discovery call · Message Saad on WhatsApp · See the organizational page
In the Saudi context
Let participants choose the language. A manager developing in their second language is working on two things at once, and sponsors default to English because the materials are in English. Ask the cohort, not the procurement form.
Mixed cohorts are normal and they are an asset if the design uses them. Different nationalities, sectors and first languages in one room produce better peer learning than a homogeneous cohort — provided the facilitation makes space for it rather than letting the most fluent participants dominate.
Rapid growth has created leadership roles faster than experience has accumulated. That is a real and specific gap, and it responds better to applied work on live problems than to curriculum.
Public-sector and government-linked organizations operate inside approval structures that change what a manager can actually do with what they have learned. Development designed without that constraint teaches behaviors people cannot use.
The calendar shapes design. Ramadan, Eid and the school year affect cohort scheduling and application windows; a program that runs through them without planning for them loses its middle.
Discretion inside a cohort matters. Where participants are peers competing for the same seats, what is said in the room travels unless the contracting is explicit.
Common questions
We have run programs before and nothing changed.
Score the transfer diagnostic on the last one. In most cases the answer is in rows 1, 2 and 4, and none of them is about the provider you chose.
How long should a program be?
Long enough to include application between sessions, which usually means spread over months rather than concentrated into days. Duration matters less than the gap between sessions.
Can you work with our existing curriculum?
Yes — coaching attached to an existing program is a stated entry configuration, and it is often the right answer where the content is fine and the transfer is not.
What size cohort?
Small enough that everyone speaks. Beyond that, the number is a scheduling question rather than a design one.
Do you provide reports?
Against the engagement objectives agreed at the start, yes. Against what individuals said in sessions, no.
Can we start with one team or one leader?
Yes, and it is often the sensible way to test whether the design transfers before committing a budget across a layer.
What if the diagnostic says our problem is structural?
Then you have saved the program budget, which is a better outcome than spending it. Item 8 of the worksheet exists so that this is decided in advance rather than argued about later.
Start with the unit
Before the format, before the provider, before the budget: name the problem and name the unit. Most disappointing programs were aimed correctly at the wrong thing.
A useful next step, matched to this topic
If you want support applying what you just read, start with the option closest to the problem in front of you.
Working on this for a team or organization?
Use the corporate route for leadership, manager development, succession, transition and organization-wide coaching needs.
Saad Al-Wuqayan
Career & Executive Coach — ICF ACC, MBA
Saad Al-Wuqayan coaches professionals and executives in Riyadh. Nearly two decades across engineering, business development, financial leadership as a CFO and government transformation sit behind every session.
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