Six common leadership symptoms mapped to the framework each one implies, the modules that follow, what you can measure, and when the frame is wrong.
Most leadership programmes pick their framework before they have diagnosed anything.
It usually happens like this. A client describes a problem. Somewhere in the next few days you decide the programme will be "built on adaptive leadership," or "grounded in situational leadership," or "an Edmondson-based psychological safety programme." The decision feels like a design choice. It is not. It is a causal claim — a statement about why the behaviour you have been asked to change is not happening — and you have made it before you had the evidence to support it.
That matters because each of these frameworks explains a different cause. If you pick the wrong one, every module downstream is answering a question the organisation did not ask, and the measurement plan will be measuring the wrong thing convincingly.
What follows is the mapping I use: the symptom as the client states it, the competing explanations behind it, the test that separates them, and — the part that gets skipped — what each choice commits you to in module design and in measurement. If you have not yet had the conversation that produces the symptom in the client's own words, that comes first: the six-stage diagnostic conversation is the input to everything below.
A framework is a hypothesis about cause. Choosing one is choosing what you think is in the way.
Three causes cover most of what lands on a designer's desk:
Only the first is a training problem in the ordinary sense. The second is trainable in part, but the design looks nothing like a skills course. The third is not trainable at all, though naming it out loud is often the most valuable thing you deliver.
Frameworks sort neatly onto those three causes. That is what makes the mapping possible.
Two live hypotheses. Either they lack the capability or the authority to decide for this particular task, or they can decide perfectly well and have learned that deciding is dangerous.
The test: ask whether anyone has been visibly punished for a decision that went wrong, and whether these same people make confident decisions in any other part of their work. If they decide well elsewhere, the capability exists and you are looking at the second hypothesis.
If it is a task-specific capability gap — the frame is Hersey and Blanchard. Their "Life Cycle Theory of Leadership" (Training and Development Journal, 23(5), May 1969; page range reported by secondary sources as 26–34) matches the leader's behaviour to the follower's maturity for a given task rather than to the follower as a person.
A note on the vocabulary, because it is the thing people get wrong. The 1969 paper says maturity. The familiar word readiness came later — in subsequent editions of Management of Organizational Behavior, the follower continuum was changed from maturity levels to follower readiness, explicitly to make it about how ready someone is to perform a specific task rather than a personal characteristic, and later still to "performance readiness." If you write "Hersey and Blanchard's readiness model, 1969" in a design document, you have dated a term to a paper that does not contain it. The distinction is worth keeping for its own sake, not only for accuracy: the whole usefulness of the model is that it is task-by-task, not a label you hang on a manager.
Unit of intervention: the individual manager, per task. Modules: delegation calibration, decision-rights mapping, practice reps on real decisions with a named escalation threshold. Measure: decision cycle time and escalation volume on a defined class of decision — a Level 3 behaviour measure you can actually observe.
If it is a competing commitment — the frame is Kegan and Lahey. In "The Real Reason People Won't Change" (Harvard Business Review, November 2001, reprint R0110E) they argue that people who appear to resist change are often "unwittingly applying productive energy toward a hidden competing commitment" — and that "it's a psychological dynamic called a 'competing commitment,' and until managers understand how it works and the ways to overcome it, they can't do a thing about change-resistant employees."
Underneath the competing commitment sits the thing that makes it designable. Kegan and Lahey write that the answers "usually lie in what we call their big assumptions — deeply rooted beliefs about themselves and the world around them," and that "people rarely realize they hold big assumptions because, quite simply, they accept them as reality." That is your module content. A programme on this hypothesis is not a course about delegation; it is a structured surfacing of the assumption, followed by a small designed test of whether it holds.
Unit: the individual, but examined against the system they sit in. Modules: surfacing the competing commitment, naming the big assumption behind it, one designed test of that assumption on real work, and a manager conversation that changes the cost of deciding. Measure: you cannot honestly measure this at Level 3 in a quarter. Measure the tests attempted, and be explicit that behaviour change follows later.
When the capability frame is wrong: if you train delegation into people whose real barrier is that the last person who decided got publicly corrected, you will produce competent managers who still escalate, and a Level 1 evaluation that looks excellent.
Hypothesis: the change requires someone to give something up. That is Heifetz and Laurie's adaptive work. "Adaptive work is required," they write, "when our deeply held beliefs are challenged, when the values that made us successful become less relevant, and when legitimate yet competing perspectives emerge" ("The Work of Leadership," Harvard Business Review, 75(1), January–February 1997, pp. 124–134; reprint R0111K).
The test: ask who has to lose something for this to work. If the honest answer is the person who commissioned the programme, you have adaptive work and a training request is standing in for a conversation nobody wants to have.
Unit: the group holding the competing perspectives, not a cohort of individuals drawn from across the business. Modules: case-in-point work on the organisation's own live problem, structured surfacing of what each party would lose, and — following Heifetz and Laurie's point that "solutions to adaptive challenges reside not in the executive suite but in the collective intelligence of employees at all levels, who need to use one another as resources, often across boundaries, and learn their way to those solutions" — sessions that hand the problem back rather than resolving it on the client's behalf. Measure: Level 3 is the wrong instrument. Measure whether the trade-off got named and owned, and by whom.
When this frame is wrong: adaptive framing applied to a genuine skills gap produces a lot of uncomfortable dialogue and no new capability. Heifetz and Laurie's own caution is about balance: "Because a leader must strike a delicate balance between having people feel the need to change and having them feel overwhelmed by change, leadership is a razor's edge."
Frame: Edmondson. In "Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams" (Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 1999, pp. 350–383) she writes: "Team psychological safety is defined as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking" (p. 354).
The design consequence almost everyone misses. Edmondson states that an aim of the study "was to investigate whether beliefs about the interpersonal context vary between teams in the same organization, as well as to examine their effects on team outcomes" (p. 352) — and they do. She reports that "new measures such as team psychological safety and team learning behavior have high ICCs (.39 and .33, respectively)" (p. 365). Psychological safety is a property of a team, not of a person and not of a company.
Unit of intervention: the intact team, with its actual leader in the room. A programme that pulls one manager from each of forty teams into a workshop on psychological safety is intervening at a level the construct does not live at. This single point invalidates a large share of the psychological safety programmes currently sold.
Modules: team-level norm setting, error and near-miss review with the leader present, and leader coaching behaviour — "Team leader coaching is also likely to be an important influence on team psychological safety" (p. 356). Measure: here the chain is unusually clean. Her mediation test found that "the contribution of team psychological safety becomes insignificant (B = .25, p = .42) when entered into the regression model together with team learning, which remains significant (B = .60, p < .05)" (p. 367). Learning behaviour is the mechanism, so measure the behaviour — problems raised, near-misses logged, help sought — not the sentiment score alone. Building that chain from a Level 2 item to a Level 4 KPI is a separate piece of work, and it is where most measurement plans quietly break.
When this frame is wrong: if problems are being raised and ignored, safety is not the constraint. That is a response problem, and a safety programme will make it worse by increasing the volume of ignored signals.
Frame: Watkins. "Picking the Right Transition Strategy" (Harvard Business Review, January 2009, reprint R0901C) sets out five transition situations: "start-up, turnaround, accelerated growth, realignment, and sustaining success." HBR's own summary of the model describes them as "the challenges of launching a venture or project; saving a business or initiative that's in serious trouble; dealing with rapid expansion; reenergizing a once-leading company that's now facing problems; and following in the footsteps of a highly regarded leader with a strong legacy of success." Watkins notes that "turnarounds and realignments present especially distinct leadership challenges that call for particular transition strategies."
The design consequence: a single onboarding programme delivered to every incoming leader is averaging across five situations that demand different first moves. Unit: the individual, segmented by transition type. Modules: a diagnosis of which situation the leader has actually inherited, then situation-specific first-90-day planning. Measure: time to a defined performance threshold, held separately per transition type — pooling them hides the effect.
When this frame is wrong: if leaders are slow to become productive because nobody has defined what productive means in the role, you have a role-clarity problem wearing a transition costume.
Frame: Kotter. "Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail" (Harvard Business Review, March–April 1995, 73(2), pp. 59–67) names eight errors: not establishing a great enough sense of urgency; not creating a powerful enough guiding coalition; lacking a vision; undercommunicating the vision by a factor of ten; not removing obstacles to the new vision; not systematically planning for and creating short-term wins; declaring victory too soon; and not anchoring changes in the corporation's culture.
Use it as a diagnostic, not a curriculum. Kotter's own observation points to where to look first: "Well over 50% of the companies I have watched fail in this first phase" — urgency. Run the eight errors as a checklist against the client's actual programme and find which one it broke.
Two things the framework itself tells you not to promise. Kotter writes that "skipping steps creates only the illusion of speed and never produces a satisfying result," and that "until changes sink deeply into a company's culture, a process that can take five to ten years, new approaches are fragile." If the client wants culture change out of a twelve-week programme, the framework you are proposing to use contradicts the timeline you are proposing to sell.
Unit: the coalition, not a cohort. Modules: urgency evidence-building, coalition composition, and a communication cadence sized against the factor-of-ten problem. Measure: movement on the specific error you diagnosed, not "change readiness" in aggregate.
When this frame is wrong: Kotter's eight steps assume the destination is known and the work is getting there. If the disagreement is about where to go, that is adaptive work and the eight steps will be executed faithfully into the wrong place.
Frame: Goleman. "Leadership That Gets Results" (Harvard Business Review, March–April 2000, reprint R00204) sets out six styles: "Coercive leaders demand immediate compliance. Authoritative leaders mobilize people toward a vision. Affiliative leaders create emotional bonds and harmony. Democratic leaders build consensus through participation. Pacesetting leaders expect excellence and self-direction. And coaching leaders develop people for the future."
Two of them carry a warning. Goleman reports that "coercive leadership inhibits the organization's flexibility and dampens employees' motivation," and that "the pacesetting style destroys climate. Many employees feel overwhelmed by the pacesetter's demands for excellence."
Unit: the individual. Modules: style diagnosis, deliberate practice in the two styles the manager does not currently use, and climate feedback. Measure: climate instrument at team level, plus observed style range.
When this frame is wrong: if managers use one style because the organisation only rewards one style, repertoire training is asking individuals to absorb a system problem personally.
They often do, and the instinct is to blend them. Don't. Blending produces a programme that gestures at four scholars and commits to no causal claim — and it makes measurement impossible, because you can no longer say what the programme was supposed to change.
Sequence instead. Establish safety before asking a team to do adaptive work, because adaptive work requires people to say costly things out loud, and Edmondson's construct is the precondition for that. Establish task capability before repertoire, because style range is meaningless without baseline competence. Name the sequence in the design document, and say which stage each measure belongs to.
This is where most programme designs quietly overclaim, and it is the easiest thing for a client to check.
A client who checks will find all of this. Better that they find you already said it.
Before you commit to a framework, answer three questions with the client in the room:
Those three answers pick the framework. Everything after that is design.
Try this on a real brief. The Diagnostic Conversation Coach is free, takes no signup, and runs the same diagnosis against a gap you describe in your own words — including which framework the symptom actually points to and what it commits you to measuring. If it does not sharpen the way you run a discovery call, nothing else here will interest you.