The Wood-Wide Web of Leadership: Why Your Development Programs Are Failing and How to Cultivate a Thriving Organization

The Day My “Perfect” Leadership Program Imploded

I remember the feeling with perfect clarity.

It was a crisp autumn afternoon, and I was standing at the back of a beautifully appointed conference room in a Napa Valley resort.

On stage, the CEO of our client—a fast-growing tech firm—was giving a rousing closing speech to the inaugural cohort of their new flagship leadership program.

I was a young, ambitious Organizational Development (OD) consultant, and this program was my baby.

For six months, I had poured everything into it.

We had benchmarked best-in-class competency models, designed intricate role-playing scenarios, and hired charismatic, top-tier facilitators.

The initial feedback, the “smile sheets” collected as everyone packed their bags, was glowing.

Participants felt inspired, energized, and valued.

I felt a surge of pride.

We had nailed it.

Six months later, that pride had curdled into a cold, hard knot in my stomach.

The program was a disaster.

A rigorous 360-degree follow-up assessment revealed that not only had the targeted leadership behaviors failed to materialize, but something far more corrosive had taken root.

The managers who attended the program, the “anointed” few, were now perceived by their teams as more disconnected than ever.

They spoke in a new jargon of “synergies” and “paradigms” that felt alienating to the people doing the actual work.

The program, intended to build leaders, had instead created a new kind of silo—a privileged club whose members had been on a fancy retreat while everyone else held down the fort.

It fostered cynicism and resentment.

One of the most promising “graduates” of the program had already resigned, citing a disconnect with the company’s direction.

My perfect program hadn’t just failed to create a positive return; it had actively damaged the organization’s culture.

This failure was a turning point in my career.

It forced me to confront a deeply uncomfortable truth, not just about my own work, but about my entire field.

My experience, I soon discovered, wasn’t an anomaly.

It was the norm.

The leadership development industry is a colossal enterprise, with companies spending an estimated $400 billion to $456 billion globally each year on training.¹

Yet the returns on this staggering investment are abysmal.

Study after study reveals a landscape of profound ineffectiveness: 75% of organizations rate their own leadership development programs as “not very effective”.¹

A mere 19% of companies believe they are “very effective” at developing leaders at all levels.¹

This led me to a haunting question that would define the next stage of my work: Why are we collectively pouring a fortune into a system that we know, deep down, is broken?

Part I: The Great Disconnect: Why the $400 Billion Leadership Industry Is Failing Us

The painful implosion of my Napa program wasn’t due to a lack of effort or poor execution of the standard playbook.

The problem was the playbook itself.

Traditional leadership development is built on a foundation of flawed assumptions that create a “Great Disconnect” between the training provided and the reality of organizational life.

This disconnect manifests in three critical ways.

The “Hero-Leader” Fallacy

Most leadership programs are fundamentally designed to forge individual heroes.

They operate on a “Great Person” theory of leadership, plucking promising managers out of their daily context, sending them to an off-site workshop, and attempting to fill them with a generic set of skills—strategic thinking, communication, emotional intelligence.⁴

The implicit belief is that if we can polish an individual enough, they will return to their team and single-handedly transform its performance.

This approach is fundamentally flawed because it ignores a basic truth: leadership is not an individual attribute, but a collective phenomenon.

It exists in the relationships and interactions between people, not solely within the designated leader.

By overemphasizing individual development, these programs sideline the far more important context of the team and the broader organization.⁵

This creates leaders who may excel on their own but are unable to function effectively within the complex, interdependent systems of a real workplace.

This approach is a relic of an old “command and control” style of management, a mindset where ownership equals power, which clashes violently with the modern need for shared accountability and networked collaboration.⁶

The Context-Free Catastrophe

My Napa program failed in part because it was a “one-size-fits-all” solution parachuted into a unique corporate culture.⁸

This is a fatal error.

When development programs are designed without being deeply intertwined with the organization’s specific strategic goals, its unique cultural challenges, and the real-world problems its leaders face, they become exercises in irrelevance.⁵

The data on this point is damning.

In an audit of LinkedIn Learning’s vast library of leadership courses, a staggering 97% of the content never even referenced business outcomes.¹

The training is treated as a separate, disconnected activity rather than an integral part of executing the business strategy.

Leaders are taught how to have difficult conversations in a generic sense, but not how to have the specific difficult conversation needed

next Tuesday to get a critical, delayed project back on track.

When training is not immediately and obviously applicable, it becomes a burden—an academic distraction from the pressing demands of the job, rather than a tool for succeeding at it.³

The Forgetting Curve on Steroids

The typical delivery method for leadership training—the multi-day workshop or the online course—is almost perfectly designed to ensure its contents are forgotten.

Neurologically, adults retain very little from passive learning methods.

Research shows that learners typically retain only 10% of what they hear in a classroom lecture, compared to nearly two-thirds when they learn by doing.⁶

Most programs are a sprint of information overload, subjecting managers to hours of lectures and theoretical models with little opportunity for practice, feedback, or real-world application.¹

On average, it takes about two months for a new behavior to become automatic.¹¹

A weekend workshop simply cannot achieve this.

Without a structure for ongoing support, accountability, and reinforcement from senior management, the initial inspiration fades, and leaders inevitably revert to their old, ingrained behaviors.⁵

The investment evaporates, leaving behind little more than a binder on a shelf and a vague memory of good intentions.

This combination of flaws leads to a conclusion that is far more disturbing than mere ineffectiveness.

A poorly designed leadership program is not a neutral event.

It is an active agent of organizational decay.

When employees see a massive investment of time and money yield no tangible change, they don’t just shrug; they become cynical.⁶

They see the program for what it is: a performative, box-ticking exercise.

This cynicism erodes the single most important currency of leadership: trust.

Employees who don’t trust their organization’s leadership are four times less likely to be engaged.¹²

During tough economic times, executives, seeing no demonstrable return on investment, cut the “fluffy” L&D budget, reinforcing a Darwinian “cream will rise to the top” culture that signals to high-potential employees that the company is not invested in their growth.⁶

The best people leave, the leadership pipeline is depleted, and the organization becomes weaker.¹³

This is the true, hidden cost of the Great Disconnect.

Part II: The Forest Floor Epiphany: Discovering “Mycelial Leadership”

After the spectacular failure of my big project, I was deeply disillusioned with my profession.

I took a sabbatical, a period of reflection to question the very foundations of my work.

I spent time away from the world of business consulting, hiking and reading widely on subjects that seemed, at first, to be entirely unrelated.

It was during this time that I stumbled upon the science of mycorrhizal networks—the astonishing, hidden ecosystem that connects the trees in a forest, often called the “Wood-Wide Web”.¹⁵

The more I learned, the more I realized I wasn’t reading about biology; I was reading about a perfect model for a healthy organization.

Beneath the forest floor, a vast, intricate network of fungal threads called mycelium connects the roots of individual trees, often across different species.¹⁷

This network is the true fungal organism; the mushrooms we see are merely its fruit.

This underground web is not passive; it is a dynamic, living marketplace.

The trees, through photosynthesis, create carbon in the form of sugars.

They send this carbon down to their roots to trade with the mycelial network.

In return, the fungus, which is far more adept at mining the soil, provides the trees with essential nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus, as well as water.¹⁵

It is a massive, symbiotic system of exchange that underpins the health and resilience of the entire forest.

The epiphany struck me with the force of a physical blow.

For years, I had been trying to grow taller, stronger trees, focusing all my efforts on the visible individual.

But the real strength of the forest wasn’t in the individual trees; it was in the invisible, interconnected network beneath them.¹⁹

A healthy organization, I realized, works the exact same Way. It isn’t a collection of individual “hero-leaders” competing for sunlight.

It is a living ecosystem, and its health, resilience, and growth depend entirely on the quality of its largely invisible network of connections.

This realization fundamentally shifted the core question of leadership development.

The old, broken model asks: “How do we make this individual a better leader?” This question inevitably leads to interventions that try to “fix” the person in a vacuum, ignoring the powerful systemic forces—the culture, processes, and incentives—that will inevitably pull them back into old patterns.²

The mycelial analogy provides a new, far more powerful question: “How do we cultivate a healthier, more intelligent organizational network?”

This question changes everything.

It shifts the focus of our interventions away from polishing an individual’s skills and toward enhancing the connections between people.

It moves us from focusing on the static attributes of a person to the dynamic flow of resources—information, trust, support, and knowledge—throughout the system.

We stop treating leadership as an attribute of a person and start treating it as an emergent property of a healthy network.

Part III: The Principles of a Living Network: The Four Pillars of Mycelial Leadership

Adopting a mycelial perspective requires a complete paradigm shift in how we think about, design, and measure leadership development.

Instead of isolated workshops and generic competencies, we focus on cultivating the living network of the organization.

The following table contrasts the old, failing model with the new, network-centric approach.

Dimension	Traditional “Hero-Leader” Model	“Mycelial Leadership” Model
Core Unit of Focus	The Individual Manager	The Team, The Network, The System
Primary Goal	Individual Skill Acquisition	Network Health & Systemic Adaptability
Primary Method	Classroom Training, Theoretical Learning	Real-World Projects, Action Learning, Systemic Coaching
View of “Knowledge”	A commodity to be transferred top-down	A resource to be exchanged throughout the network
View of “Culture”	A slogan to be promoted	An outcome of network behaviors
Key Metrics	Course Completion, “Smile Sheets”	Network Density, Information Velocity, Project Success, Employee Retention & Engagement

This new paradigm is built on four pillars, each drawn directly from the functioning of a forest’s mycorrhizal network.

Pillar 1: The Unseen Network (The Mycelium) — Focus on Relationships & Trust

In a forest, the vast majority of the fungal biomass—the true organism—is the invisible, underground mycelium.

The mushrooms are just the temporary, visible fruiting bodies.¹⁵

The network is the source of the ecosystem’s strength.

Similarly, the true strength of any organization lies in its “undercurrent”—the often-invisible network of relationships, informal communication, and, most importantly, trust.¹⁹

The formal organizational chart is just the “mushroom”; it shows reporting lines, but it tells you nothing about who really trusts whom, who people turn to for advice, or how work actually gets done.

The Mycelial Leadership model makes tending to this invisible network its first priority.

This directly counters the “Hero-Leader” fallacy by shifting focus from the individual to the quality of the connections between them.

It recognizes that trust is the essential soil from which all positive organizational outcomes—engagement, collaboration, innovation, and psychological safety—grow.

When employees strongly agree that they trust their organization’s leadership, they are four times more likely to be engaged.¹²

Pillar 2: The Symbiotic Exchange (Nutrient & Signal Transfer) — Foster Dynamic Knowledge Flow

The mycelial network is not a static structure; it is a dynamic pathway for a constant, symbiotic exchange of resources.

Nutrients and carbon flow through the network based on a “source-sink gradient,” moving from where they are abundant to where they are needed most.¹⁵

In an organization, this principle demands that we stop thinking of leadership development as a one-way “training” event where knowledge is pushed down from on high.

Instead, our role is to design and facilitate systems for the dynamic, multi-directional flow of knowledge, support, and resources to the people and teams that need them most, at the moment they need them.

This means prioritizing methods like peer coaching, reverse mentoring, communities of practice, and action learning, where real work drives the learning process.

This approach replaces the passive, theoretical learning of the old model—which is so quickly forgotten—with active, continuous, and applied learning that is directly relevant to the organization’s most pressing challenges, dramatically increasing both retention and impact.⁶

Pillar 3: The Hub Tree Effect (Mother Trees) — Identify and Empower True Influencers

Forests are not uniform democracies.

They contain “hub trees,” often called “Mother Trees.” These are typically older, larger trees with the most extensive root and mycelial connections.

They act as stabilizing nodes in the network, nurturing younger saplings by sending them excess nutrients and playing a central role in passing information through the system.¹⁵

Every organization has its own “hub trees.” These are the people who, regardless of their formal title or position on the org chart, are the true culture carriers, the trusted connectors, and the keepers of institutional knowledge.

They are the go-to people, the natural mentors, the ones who bridge silos.

A Mycelial Leadership approach actively seeks to identify, support, and leverage these organic influencers.

This breaks the dangerous reliance on formal hierarchy.

Instead of exclusively developing a small cadre of senior managers, it democratizes development, investing in the people who form the true backbone of the organization’s social structure.

This builds a far more resilient and distributed form of leadership.

Pillar 4: Systemic Resilience (Defense Signaling) — Build Robust Feedback Loops

One of the most remarkable functions of the mycelial network is its role as an early-warning system.

When a tree is attacked by pests or disease, it can release chemical distress signals into the network.

These signals travel through the mycelial pathways and are picked up by neighboring trees, which can then preemptively mount their own defenses, such as by producing insect-repelling compounds.²⁰

The network enables the entire forest to sense and respond to a localized threat with systemic resilience.

An organization with a healthy network develops a similar capacity.

It can sense and respond to threats (like market shifts, competitor moves, or internal dysfunction) and opportunities with speed and agility.

This requires deliberately building systems for fast, honest, and psychologically safe feedback.

It means creating a culture where “uncomfortable conversations” are seen not as a conflict to be avoided but as a vital data point for the health of the system.¹⁹

This pillar directly addresses the failure of traditional programs to connect to business outcomes and the critical need for leaders who can navigate constant change and uncertainty.²³

It focuses on building an adaptive organization, not just a few adaptive individuals.

Part IV: Weaving the Network: A Practical Guide to Implementing Mycelial Leadership

Translating this paradigm into practice requires the leader, the CHRO, or the OD consultant to stop being a “trainer” and start being a “network weaver”.²⁵

After my initial failure, this is the approach I adopted.

It involves a four-step process of diagnosing, weaving, nourishing, and evaluating the organizational network.

Step 1: Network Diagnostics (Mapping the Forest Floor)

Before you can cultivate a network, you must first see it.

This means moving beyond traditional employee engagement surveys, which only measure individual sentiment.

The first step is to use more sophisticated tools, like Organizational Network Analysis (ONA), to map the real, informal pathways of influence, trust, and information flow.

ONA software and targeted surveys can answer critical questions:

• Who do people actually go to for advice when they hit a roadblock? (Identifying the real experts).
• Who are the critical bottlenecks, whose overload is slowing everyone else down? (Identifying system constraints).
• Who are the “brokers” who connect otherwise disconnected teams or departments? (Identifying key collaborators).
• Who are the “hub trees”—the highly central and trusted individuals who act as the social glue? (Identifying organic leaders).

This process provides a data-driven map of the invisible network, revealing its strengths, weaknesses, and key leverage points for intervention.

Step 2: Network Weaving (Designing Interventions)

With a clear map of the network, the next step is to shift budget and focus away from generic classroom training and toward experiences that are explicitly designed to strengthen productive connections.

This is about weaving the network together more tightly and intelligently.

Examples of such interventions include:

• Action Learning Sets: Instead of hypothetical case studies, give a small, cross-functional team a real, high-stakes strategic problem the business is facing and charge them with developing and implementing a solution. The leadership development happens not in a classroom, but in the crucible of collaborating under pressure to create tangible value.⁶
• Systemic Team Coaching: Rather than coaching only the team leader, a coach works with the entire team as a system. The focus is on improving their internal dynamics, their communication patterns, and their interface with key stakeholders across the organization.
• Strategic “Tours of Duty”: Deliberately rotate high-potential individuals through assignments in different business units or functions. This is one of the most powerful ways to build both broad business acumen and a rich, cross-silo personal network—two skills essential for executive roles.²⁵

Step 3: Network Nourishment (Redesigning Support Systems)

Interventions alone are not enough if the organization’s formal systems—the “mushrooms”—are not aligned with the network you are trying to cultivate.

The formal structures of power, performance management, and rewards must be redesigned to nourish, rather than starve, the network.

• Performance Management: Evolve performance reviews to include and heavily weight metrics related to network health. Assess and reward managers on their team’s engagement, their success in developing others, and their documented contributions to cross-functional projects.²⁶
• Rewards & Recognition: Publicly celebrate and reward teams that achieve breakthroughs through collaboration. Move away from individual hero-worship. Create bonus pools tied to the success of cross-business-unit initiatives. This provides the tangible management support and accountability that is so often missing, ensuring leaders “walk the talk”.⁶

Step 4: Network Evaluation (New Metrics for Success)

Finally, to prove the value of this approach and create a virtuous cycle of investment, we must abandon the vanity metrics of the past.

“Training hours completed” and “smile sheet” scores are meaningless.

We must measure what truly matters to the health and performance of the network.

New metrics should include:

• Network Metrics: Use periodic ONA to track changes in network density, the average path length for information to travel, and the reduction of bottlenecks over time.
• Talent Metrics: Track employee retention rates within teams participating in network-weaving initiatives, as well as internal promotion rates. A healthy network should be a powerful engine for retaining and developing talent.¹⁴
• Business Impact Metrics: Most importantly, directly link development initiatives to the business KPIs they were designed to influence. This could be project success rates, cycle times for innovation, customer satisfaction scores, or profitability.⁸ This solves the chronic “failing to measure results” problem that plagues the industry.¹⁰

Conclusion: Stop Planting Trees, Start Cultivating the Forest

I think back to that day in Napa, to the feeling of pride followed by the sting of failure.

The lesson I learned was profound.

My mistake was not in the details of the program I designed; it was in the very paradigm I was operating from.

I was trying to plant a perfect tree in barren soil.

Years later, I had the opportunity to work with another organization facing a complex challenge of siloed behavior and slow innovation.

This time, we didn’t run a single workshop.

Instead, we mapped their network.

We identified their hidden influencers.

We created cross-functional “action learning” teams to tackle their most wicked problems.

We coached those teams as systems.

We helped senior leadership redesign their reward structures to celebrate collaboration.

The outcome was not a handful of “anointed” leaders; it was a more connected, more resilient, and more innovative organization.

The solution to their problem emerged from the network itself.

The true, lasting benefit of leadership development is not creating a few heroic leaders.

It is to cultivate an entire organization that is more adaptive, intelligent, and resilient.

The job of a 21st-century leader—and of those who develop them—is no longer to be the tallest, strongest tree in the forest, standing alone.

It is to be the master gardener of the forest floor: to tend to the soil of trust, to nourish the invisible network of connection, and to cultivate the health of the entire, living ecosystem.

That is where the real work lies, and that is where the real rewards are Found.

Works cited

1. The Leadership Training Industry Is Broken – Association for Talent Development, accessed August 12, 2025, https://www.td.org/content/atd-blog/the-leadership-training-industry-is-broken
2. Why Leadership Training Fails—and What to Do about It – Article – Faculty & Research, accessed August 12, 2025, https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=51709
3. Why Leadership Development Fails & What to do About it – Gasparotto Group, accessed August 12, 2025, https://gasparotto.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Gasparotto-Whitepaper-Why-Leadership-Development-Fails-What-to-do-About-It.pdf
4. The Benefits of Leadership Training for Professional Development, accessed August 12, 2025, https://www.loebleadership.com/insights/benefits-of-leadership-training-for-professional-development
5. Why Most Leadership Development Programs Are Not Working – PeopleThriver, accessed August 12, 2025, https://peoplethriver.com/why-are-most-leadership-development-programs-not-working/
6. Why Leadership Development Programs Fail — and How To Do It the Right Way, accessed August 12, 2025, https://raybwilliams.medium.com/why-leadership-development-programs-fail-and-how-to-do-it-the-right-way-a5967811ba43
7. Why Leadership Development Programs Fail – Ray Williams, accessed August 12, 2025, https://raywilliams.ca/why-leadership-development-programs-fail/
8. Leadership Training Pros and Cons: Is It Really Worth It? – EDI Staffing, accessed August 12, 2025, https://edistaffing.com/2019/08/27/leadership-training-pros-and-cons-is-it-really-worth-it/
9. Three reasons your leadership development program is failing – Elite Business Magazine, accessed August 12, 2025, https://elitebusinessmagazine.co.uk/people/item/three-reasons-your-leadership-development-program-is-failing
10. Why leadership-development programs fail – McKinsey, accessed August 12, 2025, https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/leadership/why-leadership-development-programs-fail
11. 5 Problems With Leadership Training – MacklinConnection Blog, accessed August 12, 2025, https://www.macklinconnection.com/blog/5-problems-with-leadership-training
12. Why Executives Need Leadership Development – Gallup, accessed August 12, 2025, https://www.gallup.com/learning/474638/effective-leadership-training.aspx
13. The Impact of Organizational Leadership Development: 5 Reasons to Invest, accessed August 12, 2025, https://mba.csumb.edu/blog/why-invest-in-organizational-leadership-development
14. 3 Reasons Your Organization Needs to Invest in Leadership Development, accessed August 12, 2025, https://www.td.org/content/atd-blog/why-your-organization-needs-to-invest-in-leadership-development
15. Underground Networking: The Amazing Connections Beneath, accessed August 12, 2025, https://www.nationalforests.org/blog/underground-mycorrhizal-network
16. Mycorrhizal network – Wikipedia, accessed August 12, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycorrhizal_network
17. www.nationalforests.org, accessed August 12, 2025, https://www.nationalforests.org/blog/underground-mycorrhizal-network#:~:text=Mycelium%20are%20incredibly%20tiny%20%E2%80%9Cthreads,nitrogen%2C%20carbon%20and%20other%20minerals.
18. The Common Mycelial Network (CMN) of Forests – College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, accessed August 12, 2025, https://clas.ucdenver.edu/ges/common-mycelial-network-cmn-forests
19. Teams and Organizations as living networks: the mycelium metaphor – TransitionStudio, accessed August 12, 2025, https://transitionstudio.global/en/teams-and-organizations-as-living-networks-the-mycelium-metaphor/
20. How do trees “signal” to the fungi where they want to “send” their nutrients? – Reddit, accessed August 12, 2025, https://www.reddit.com/r/mycology/comments/tl3sq2/how_do_trees_signal_to_the_fungi_where_they_want/
21. Unlocking Nature’s Hidden Network: Meet Mycelium, the Fungi that Connects Trees | One Tree Planted – YouTube, accessed August 12, 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KVdlcTEYLA
22. Inter-plant communication through mycorrhizal networks mediates complex adaptive behaviour in plant communities – PubMed Central, accessed August 12, 2025, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4497361/
23. Developing Leadership Training: Benefits, & Best Practices – FranklinCovey Academy, accessed August 12, 2025, https://www.franklincoveyacademy.com/developing-leadership-training/
24. Why Is Leadership Development Important? 4 Reasons to Invest, accessed August 12, 2025, https://www.ccl.org/articles/leading-effectively-articles/why-leadership-development-is-important-4-reasons-to-invest/
25. How to Become a Chief Human Resources Officer: All You Need to Know – AIHR, accessed August 12, 2025, https://www.aihr.com/blog/how-to-become-a-chief-human-resources-officer/
26. The Role of an Organizational Development Specialist – AIHR, accessed August 12, 2025, https://www.aihr.com/blog/organizational-development-specialist/
27. From HR to the C-Suite: What it Takes to Become CHRO – Southern New Hampshire University, accessed August 12, 2025, https://www.snhu.edu/about-us/newsroom/business/become-chro