Every fall, as budgets for the coming year take shape, learning and development leaders are asked about the ROI of their programs. It's a fair question. But it's also one that no one can really answer with precision, and I've spent a good part of my career trying.
Why ROI is so hard to prove
Measuring the financial return of a leadership program means isolating its effect from everything else happening in and around a business at the same time: the economy, a reorg, a new product, a great hire, plain luck. Most major consulting firms have tried to price their work on ROI for years, and it has never become the norm. If anyone could figure it out, they could.
Outside of incremental sales for salespeople, the learning field mostly measures proxies. The Kirkpatrick-Phillips model lays out 5 levels of evaluation, from the satisfaction survey at the bottom to ROI at the top, and whole companies have been built around helping L&D teams climb that ladder. You can run A/B comparisons and longitudinal studies, or track whether participants get stronger performance reviews, post higher engagement scores, or stay longer. All of that tells you something, but very little of it gets you to a dollar figure an executive will trust. The more sophisticated the model gets, the harder it is to explain.
I used to believe the answer was better measurement. When I was co-president of The Regis Company, we brought in a former client who had run the data science center of excellence at Ernst & Young, and together we built a practice that used advanced analytics to measure learning and its impact. We developed custom assessments measuring behavior change and shifts in participants' mental models. The results were powerful.
They were also nearly impossible for anyone outside the team to follow. Our immediate stakeholders, who were very smart people, struggled with the statistical nuance and the new language we'd invented to describe mental model shifts. If they couldn't follow it, they definitely couldn't take it to their own executives. We eventually came back to simpler measures. Now, I look for measures that are simple and intelligent at the same time.
A mentor of mine, Rob Lauber, who was chief learning officer at McDonald's and before that at Yum! Brands, put it more bluntly. He watched organization after organization pour time and money into elaborate ROI efforts, only to find that by the time they had enough data to say anything, the program had changed or the priorities had moved on. The cost of getting to measurement can swallow the value of measuring at all.
Rob's view was that if you can answer 3 questions confidently about a program, you've answered what executives want to know.
The first is whether participants would recommend it to someone else. That's Net Promoter Score. If the people you're developing wouldn't send a colleague through the same experience, that reflects on the program and on you for choosing it.
The second is whether it was a good value for the time spent in the learning program. A program can be enjoyable enough to recommend and still not be worth the hours. Compared to everything else competing for their week, did it give participants real value in their work and their growth?
The third, and the most important, is what people are doing differently as a result. You can get at this through participants' own reports, and you can strengthen it with pre- and post-program 180 or 360 assessments that ask the people who work alongside them whether they've noticed a difference. It still isn't a cash return, but it shows movement in behavior, which is what a leadership program is supposed to produce.
Executives almost always ask for quantitative data, and you should have it. But what everyone remembers, executives included, is the story. Daniel Kahneman spent part of his career showing that we judge how true something is by how coherent the story feels, more than by the strength of the evidence behind it. His early studies found the same errors in research psychologists who were trained to catch them.
Pair your numbers with a story. Share details about the manager who finally had the conversation she'd been avoiding for 6 months, or the director whose team stopped losing people.
You can also lower the cost of a program so far that the answer to the ROI question is beyond question. Making the case that a program produced a meaningful ROI almost never lands unless the ROI is so obvious and compelling that you don't have to debate specific measures. And that is much easier to do when the cost of a program seems absurdly low relative to the feedback the program provides.
In my space–leadership development–the ROI for an affordable program should be plain on its face. Better leaders reduce turnover, cut the churn and chaos inside teams, and raise engagement, and Gallup's long-running research ties engagement to performance and profitability. Gallup also estimates that replacing an employee costs between half and twice that person's annual salary. When a program costs a few thousand dollars per person, you don't need an elaborate model. If one manager who goes through it keeps one more person on their team for a year, the program has paid for itself, often several times over.
The math gets complicated when the price is high. It's hard to justify a six-figure engagement on retention assumptions, so people build detailed models to defend it. Warren Buffett made a similar point about investing–the best decisions are the ones where the case is so overwhelming you don't need to get clever in the analysis. You want every line in your budget to look like that.
When I put myself in the shoes of an L&D leader planning next year, a lot of spending comes down to coverage. We need courses on all the basics, so we license a large content catalog. It's often expensive in aggregate, participation is low, and it rarely changes how anyone leads. When people need to learn a specific technical skill, they go to YouTube, ChatGPT, or Claude. Paying for content is a weaker investment every year.
What AI hasn't made cheap is changing how a person thinks. No one becomes a better leader by watching 8 hours of video. Tactical skills get practiced briefly and forgotten. Lasting behavior change, especially in how people work with and treat others, comes from a shift in mindset, and mindsets shift through self-generated insights. People reach those insights through deep reflection, and deep reflection happens in a few places: one-on-one coaching, small peer cohorts where people trust each other enough to be honest, and experiential learning that puts someone inside the hardest interpersonal moments before they face them for real. As content gets cheaper, those human experiences are where your budget can do the most good.
How we hold ourselves to these questions
At Lead Belay, we measure ourselves against those 3 questions, and we set our pricing to pass the no-brainer test. Our flagship Emerging Leader Ascent costs $1,325 per person. Our Net Promoter Score is +62. Average attendance is 91%, in a field where 50 to 60% is normal for multi-week programs. That's the clearest signal I know that people find the time worth it. More than 80% of Emerging Leader participants report changes in how they lead: more often reaching good outcomes in difficult conversations, prioritizing coaching for everyone on their team, and reflecting on their own role when something goes wrong. We're confident enough in that we guarantee it: if fewer than 80% of pilot participants would recommend the program to others in their organization, we refund the cost.
If you're heading into budget season with the ROI question hanging over you, answer it with better questions this year. Ask whether people would recommend the program, whether it was worth their time, and what they're doing differently. Then put your money where those answers are strongest. The leaders on your team are doing the hard climbing. Your job is to make sure someone is holding the rope.
If you'd like to learn more about how Lead Belay delivers results, reach out to a member of our team today!