The Goal Nobody Asked About
What I See From the Other Chair, Part 7
The programme was running well. It was running on the wrong goal. Most leadership development starts from a competency model and never asks the person what success would actually look like to them.
A senior leader once arrived several sessions into a development programme, well regarded, clearly capable, working through a fairly standard set of leadership goals: better delegation, sharper communication, more strategic thinking. All reasonable. All the kind of thing a competency framework would flag. Somewhere in that conversation, almost as an aside, this person mentioned what they actually wanted: to stop feeling like a fraud in rooms full of people who seemed more certain than they were. Nobody had asked that question directly before. The programme had been running for months on an entirely different, perfectly sensible goal that simply wasn't the one that mattered most to the person living it.
This happens more often than it should, and it isn't anyone's fault in particular. It's a quiet gap in how most leadership development gets designed.
Why the real goal often goes unasked
Most development conversations start from a defensible place: a competency model, a manager's observation, a 360 review, some structured input that tells everyone involved what 'good' looks like for this role. All of that is useful, and none of it is wrong. What it rarely does is ask the person at the centre of it a much simpler, more direct question: what would actually feel like success to you, in your own words, by the end of this. That question gets skipped surprisingly often, not out of carelessness, but because the competency framework already feels like it answered it.
The two things, an organisation's competency model and a person's own definition of success, often overlap substantially. They are not, however, the same question, and the gap between them is exactly where a lot of well-funded, well-intentioned development effort quietly underperforms. A programme can hit every milestone on the framework and still leave the person feeling like nothing that actually mattered to them moved at all.
What changes when the question gets asked
When someone is asked directly, early, what success would actually look like to them, the answer is sometimes close to the competency-driven goal already in motion. Often, though, it's adjacent to it in a way that changes everything about how the work should go. Someone working on 'executive presence' might really be working on recovering from a specific moment of public failure that's never been named. Someone working on 'delegation' might really be working through a fear that delegating means becoming dispensable. The competency label captures the visible behaviour. The real goal usually lives one layer underneath it, and naming that layer correctly often does more for the visible behaviour than working on the behaviour directly ever could.
This is, in some ways, the same thread running through everything else in this series: the title someone hasn't been given, the permission they keep seeking, the strength that's started costing more than it earns, the conflict they're avoiding, the question sitting under the question, the bottleneck a senior leader has become. In every case, the surface problem was real. The thing that actually moved was something quieter, sitting just behind it, that nobody had thought to ask about directly.
Building the question into how development gets designed
For an organisation running any structured leadership development, the simplest, least expensive fix is also the easiest one to skip: before a programme begins, ask each participant one direct question, in their own words, with no framework attached, what would success in this actually look like to you. Hold onto that answer, and revisit it at the midpoint and the end, alongside whatever the formal competency tracking shows. The two measures will sometimes agree closely. When they don't, that gap is usually the most useful piece of data the whole programme produces, far more useful than another point on a skills matrix.
If you're reading this as someone currently in, or about to start, some form of leadership development, the question worth sitting with isn't 'am I hitting the goals that were set for me'. It's narrower and considerably more personal: if you described success in your own words, with nobody else's framework in the room, would it sound anything like the goals currently written down for you?
For an organisation designing or funding this kind of work, the parallel question is just as direct: does your programme design make room for that question to be asked at all, or does it move straight from a competency model to an action plan without ever stopping to check whether the two are actually pointed at the same thing? That single question, asked early and taken seriously, often costs nothing and changes almost everything about whether the work that follows actually lands.
Deepak Narayan is an independent leadership coach and consultant at Rivi Consulting.