I've been thinking a lot recently about the concept of team development. Truth be told, I've been using this term lightly over the past year, mostly to differentiate it from traditional team building. But what I'm thinking about now is something bigger: how few true team development experiences actually exist.
For years upon years, we've invested in leadership development. We upskill leaders so they can guide their teams to be high-performing, retain employees, and lead in an effective and impactful way. And it's a huge industry. Hult Ashridge estimated that annual revenue for the global leadership development industry would pass $100 billion in 2025. At the company level, a Forrester and HR Executive survey of more than 700 HR leaders found that 65% of businesses spend up to $2,500 per employee each year on leadership development.
What this tells us is that organizations see real value in this upskilling. I'm glad leadership development is expanding to include people who aren't managers, too. But here's the thing: almost all of it is focused on individuals.
Most leadership development sends one leader, or several leaders who don't work together, off to learn and grow. The hope is that they bring those skills back and the benefits spread to the team. The research says that hope often falls short. In a 2016 Harvard Business Review article, Michael Beer and colleagues called it "the great training robbery." US companies were spending about $160 billion a year on training, yet much of that learning never changed how the organization actually worked. Nearly a decade later, the pattern holds. In Gartner's 2025 survey of more than 1,400 HR leaders, over half of organizations were increasing spending on leader development and still not seeing results.
There is leadership development aimed at teams, but it tends to focus on senior leadership teams. The goal is for them to work better together, and also for their learnings and the investment to trickle down.
There are team programs built around assessments like DiSC or The Five Behaviors. These give teams a shared language and understanding of personalities and ways of working, but most start with a profile or report, and the conversation centers on the results. It still focuses more on individuals within the team than on the team as a unit.
When I step back and look at all of this, I see the gap. We expect an investment in the leader alone to transform the team. I'm not saying it has no impact. But I do question whether it's having as much impact on the team as a unit as we all hope.
The research on training transfer points to the same thing. One of the strongest predictors of whether new skills actually get used is support from the people you work with every day, especially your manager. In other words, the team the leader comes back to matters just as much as the course they attended.
Let’s not forget that, on top of all of this, we are asking more and more of those leaders. Gallup found that only 22% of managers were engaged at work in 2025, down 5% from the year before. We're putting the full weight of team culture on the people who are already the most stretched.
The most important predictor of a high-performing team, according to Google's Project Aristotle, is psychological safety. But psychological safety doesn't work like a hub-and-spoke model, with the leader in the middle. The leader is a key part, absolutely. Yet the team as a whole needs to feel safe to take interpersonal risks: to share an idea, admit a mistake, or ask for help, with everyone in the room. McKinsey found that a positive team climate has a stronger direct effect on psychological safety than other factors they studied, and that only 43% of people report having one. Safety is something a team builds together. It can't be handed down.
For me, the way forward is team development. The key is that the team and the leader share a hands-on experience together, then pair it with training and workshopping so what they discover becomes how they actually work. That's what puts ownership of the team on the team as a whole, not on the leader alone.
Imagine what shifts when a leader isn't running the session or watching from the side, but is right there in it with their team, when teammates (including the leader) get to know each other beyond roles, titles, and assumptions. When the team walks away not just feeling closer, but with agreements they built together about how they want to show up for each other. It can absolutely be fun, but fun isn't the point, and it isn't another course for one person to carry back. It's an investment in the unit where the work actually happens.
We've spent decades developing leaders. I think it's time we started developing teams.
