The rise of empowering leadership training: What it means for your talent strategies

The past year has been marked by turbulence, with businesses of all sizes facing financial challenges, reorganizations, and shifting strategies. Against this backdrop of uncertainty, organizations are making a decisive pivot in their talent development strategies.

Drawing from data analysis of 27,746 learners across 196 industry-leading companies and 204,111 hours of skills practice, Lepaya's The State of Skills 2026 report revealed that empowering leadership training has grown continuously for three years, up 511% from 2023 to 2025, and now accounts for more than half of all training investment.

This growth reflects organizations' urgent need to develop strong internal guidance during market uncertainty. But what's driving this focus, and what are key trends in leadership development for today's complex business environment?

‍What is empowering leadership?

Empowering leadership training focuses on developing leaders who inspire, enable, and support their teams to take ownership of their roles, make decisions, and achieve their team’s potential. The training includes capabilities essential for modern business leadership such as building psychological safety within teams, setting and achieving team goals, cultivating leadership mindset and values, and driving talent performance.

While traditional leadership models rely on top-down decision-making, empowering leadership cultivates environments where teams can thrive with autonomy, trust, and shared responsibility. In this framework, leaders evolve from controllers to enablers, becoming facilitators of high-performing workplaces where their teams can confidently tackle challenges and opportunities. They build trust through transparency and consistent support, encourage experimentation while providing safety nets for learning from failure, and actively develop their team members' capabilities to think strategically and act autonomously.

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Driving forces behind the leadership development trends 

The growth in empowering leadership training is a signal that organizations now see traditional leadership as a constraint. Three converging pressures are driving that conclusion:

1. CEO succession patterns signal a capability gap: CEO turnover rates climbed from 9.8% to 12.5% in 2025, with external appointments nearly doubling and internal promotions dropping below 70%. This shift signals a gap: boards are seeking leadership skills their internal pipelines cannot provide, acknowledging that leaders who succeeded by directing operations now struggle when markets demand speed, autonomy, and continuous adaptation. 
2. AI success depends on leadership effectiveness: As 95% of AI pilots failed to deliver returns this year, research shows that the difference between success and failure does not lie in technology, but in whether leadership enables or blocks transformation. Nearly half of executives cite leadership effectiveness as the most significant driver of AI ROI, well ahead of technology, talent, or culture.
3. Employee engagement crisis demands new approaches. With only 21% of employees engaged globally, traditional command-and-control methods no longer work. Teams need leaders who can build psychological safety, inspire commitment, and develop capability in others rather than maintaining control.

These pressures demand a new approach to leadership. Organizations need leaders who delegate authority, grant autonomy, and enable teams to operate without constant oversight. Especially as AI adoption reshapes workflows, leaders must become change navigators: demystifying technology, championing experimentation, and mitigating fear. They must connect transformation goals to daily behaviors, helping teams understand how AI changes work without replacing human value.

With empowering leadership representing 51.6% of all training investment in 2025, organizations are placing a clear bet: transforming how leaders lead has become the primary lever for organizational effectiveness when everything else remains uncertain.

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Empowering leadership development in practice

Freudenberg: Developing leaders who take ownership of decisions

Dr. Makoto Makabe, Director of Corporate Learning & Development at Freudenberg, explains how his organization is developing empowering leaders:

"Our programs are designed to engage leaders across Freudenberg in meaningful discussions about doing the right thing. These programs challenge participants to apply concepts within their own contexts, rather than waiting for trainers to provide answers. Leadership isn’t about expecting to be told what to do—that’s following, not leading. True leadership requires courage: taking risks, making decisions despite incomplete information, and staying accountable.”

Roxtec: Building human-centered leaders across global manufacturing teams

Roxtec, a manufacturer of sealing solutions operating across multiple markets, offers a concrete example of how systematic leadership development can translate into business performance.

As a globally distributed company, Roxtec needed leaders who could coordinate across borders, enable autonomous team performance, and retain talent in an industry facing severe labor shortages. Partnering with Lepaya, they designed a leadership upskilling program with two goals: developing leaders who empower rather than just direct, and building connections across global teams.

On the first, the program focused on coaching conversations, feedback skills, and managing stress, practiced through real-life scenarios with business actors, and grounded in helping leaders discover and adapt their own leadership style. On the second, in-person sessions brought leaders from different regions together, with online follow-ups to maintain collaboration and knowledge sharing across markets.

The results showed up in daily behavior. As Samantha Tan, Commercial & Logistics Manager at Roxtec, put it:

“Lepaya's training gives me a lot of opportunities to think outside the box. I was able to have more thoughtful conversations, more meaningful conversations with my team.”

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Beyond engagement, the program addressed one of manufacturing's most pressing challenges: retaining skilled talent through genuine development rather than just task management.

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Looking ahead: Transforming leadership development in 2026 and beyond

With leadership development emerging as the top training priority in 2025, organizations are reassessing how they build empowering leadership capabilities at scale.

Moving beyond traditional one-off training programs, success in 2026 and beyond demands creating continuous learning environments that reinforce empowering leadership principles daily.

This means implementing personalized coaching programs that help leaders build psychological safety and trust, establishing feedback systems that reinforce autonomous decision-making, and providing practical tools for guiding teams through complex challenges.

Organizations that get this right will be better placed to build teams that can make good decisions, adapt quickly, and grow without needing direction at every turn. That becomes even more consequential as AI takes on a growing share of routine work. The more AI handles, the more the human side of leadership matters: building trust, developing people, and helping teams figure out how their work is changing.

“To lead a people-centered AI future, HR and L&D must go beyond teaching tools and focus on building talent—cultivating the uniquely human skills AI can’t replicate and creating cultures where learning is continuous, experimentation is safe, and transformation is something people shape, not endure. Equally crucial is deliberate role design: organizations must decide which skills and tasks belong to AI agents and which remain human, so both can excel in a complementary system.” - Marlene De Koning, Director of Workforce Transformation at PwC