Many organizations use the terms leadership development and executive development interchangeably.

That is a mistake.

While the two are connected, they serve very different purposes, happen at different stages of a career, and require different levels of investment and organizational involvement. Companies that fail to understand the distinction often end up underpreparing future executives while overestimating the effectiveness of generic leadership training programs.

Leadership development should begin long before someone is being considered for an executive role.

In fact, the strongest organizations often begin intentionally developing future leaders nearly a decade before a major leadership transition occurs. Why? Because leadership capability is not built in a weekend workshop or a one-year program. It develops gradually through exposure, experience, feedback, coaching, and increasingly complex responsibility over time.

At its core, leadership development is about building foundational leadership capacity throughout the organization.

This process should combine both internal and external development strategies.

Internally, organizations should establish leadership competency models tied to specific job roles so employees understand what leadership looks like at each level of responsibility. Performance reviews should evaluate not just technical performance, but leadership behaviors and readiness for broader responsibility. Coaching, mentoring, targeted professional development, and ongoing feedback should become a part of the culture rather than treated as occasional events.

Externally, organizations should expose future leaders to workshops, retreats, certifications, degree programs, assessments, and behavioral coaching opportunities that broaden perspective and challenge existing thinking. Assessments paired with meaningful feedback and supported behavioral change can be especially powerful when external coaches are involved.

But perhaps the most important part of leadership development is assignments.

Leadership capability grows through experience.

Project leadership, business development opportunities, lateral moves across departments, customer exposure, cross-functional initiatives, and team management responsibilities all help future leaders develop judgment, adaptability, and enterprise thinking. These experiences stretch individuals beyond their technical expertise and prepare them to think more broadly about the business.

Executive development, however, is something entirely different.

Executive development is narrower, more intensive, and applied to a much smaller pool of candidates who are already demonstrating significant leadership capability and executive potential.

Typically occurring during the final two to three years before a major executive transition, executive development is designed to test and strengthen a leader’s readiness for strategic responsibility at the highest levels of the organization.

At this stage, the focus shifts.

The question is no longer whether someone can lead a team or manage a department. The question becomes whether they can think strategically across the enterprise, lead through ambiguity, make high-stakes decisions, influence organizational direction, and carry the weight of executive leadership.

This is where CEO and senior leadership involvement becomes critical.

Future executives should be coached and mentored directly by current executives who can expose them to company-level discussions, strategic planning, operational complexity, investor or ownership dynamics, and difficult leadership decisions that rarely appear in formal training environments.

Commercially available executive education programs offered by universities can be valuable in this phase, but they should never stand alone. Too many organizations send leaders away for executive training and assume development has occurred simply because a certificate was earned.

Executive development only works when real-world application, executive mentoring, coaching, and follow-up inside the participant’s actual work environment are part of the process.

The organizations that execute leadership development and executive development intentionally — at the appropriate stages and with increasing levels of complexity — create something far more valuable than a training program.

They create a culture where leadership capacity-building becomes standard operating procedure – which means continuity in how the business runs, which then increases the speed at which the company can operate and grow.

By Nanette Miner, Ed.D.

Keywords: Entrepreneurship, HR, Leadership

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