Ever tried to start a new, positive habit, or change an old one? You’ll know that it doesn’t happen straight away. Most behaviour change takes 3 – 12 months to stick. 

This doesn’t just apply to a new gym routine, either. When it comes to learning new leadership skills, the science around behaviour change is also worth thinking about for a hot minute.

Leaders don’t embed new behaviours or skills from spending three hours in a workshop or even three days in a leadership programme. It takes three to twelve months of practice, reinforcement, reflection (and perhaps, most importantly) support to level up.

Here’s the kicker: Without reinforcement, the decay curve is pretty brutal.

Sure, leaders might leave a workshop feeling energised and psyched up, but within a few weeks, the behaviour starts slipping. Business-as-usual gets in the way and, as humans, we return to our comfortable ‘baseline’. This means we’re soon responding from our deeply entrenched automatic behaviours, whether those are the ones we want to show up with or not. 

This isn’t because people don’t care, or because the content of the workshop or programme wasn’t any good. It’s because real leadership life rushes back in, and nothing in their environment reminds them to keep practising.

This lack of focus on embedding and supporting behavioural change after learning events doesn’t just cost the organisation because it’s a wasted investment. It also means leaders lose confidence and momentum.

In my research for Beyond the Workshop, the organisations getting the best results weren’t doing *more *training. They were doing more reinforcing. They were providing more opportunities for leaders to practise the skills they were learning. 

They built leadership behaviours into:

  • **Performance cycles: **quarterly reflections, development plans, coaching conversations
  • **Team rhythms: **weekly check-ins, project kick-offs, one-on-ones
  • Manager routines: expectation-setting, feedback loops, and their leaders and senior executive teams in the organisation modelling the behaviours themselves

They treated leadership development as something leaders do, not something they attend.

And because of that, the behaviour didn’t decay, it strengthened.

On the other hand, the organisations struggling the most relied on workshops as the whole kit and caboodle. They provide a big burst of learning, and then… crickets.

The difference between those two approaches shows up in capability, culture, and retention, but it starts with something far simpler:

Do leaders have a place to practise this behaviour, regularly, in their real work?

If the answer is no, the decay curve will win every time. 

If the answer is yes, you’re already halfway to behaviour change.