Leadership Doesn't Stop With The C-Suite. So Why Should Learning?
Leaders often talk a lot about adaptability, but when it comes to their own development, too many treat learning as something they outgrow. It's one of the great ironies of corporate life: the higher someone climbs, the less likely they are to be formally supported in thinking critically, creatively or ethically. That's not just short-sighted—it's risky.
The most senior people in firms hold decision rights over the biggest levers: strategic priorities, organizational culture, financial bets, technology adoption, workforce policies. When their thinking is stale or reactive, the consequences echo far beyond the boardroom.
Thinking well isn't just a nice-to-have. It's the core of modern leadership. Yet support for lifelong learning, especially for those in or approaching senior roles, is quietly being rolled back on both sides of the Atlantic.
Much of what's celebrated in business—speed, decisiveness, hustle—comes from what psychologists call System 1 thinking. It's fast, intuitive and efficient. But when complexity enters the picture, instinct isn't enough. The messy, high-stakes challenges that now define leadership—climate change, geopolitical tension, workforce transformation, AI ethics—can't be solved on autopilot.
'Thinking is to humans as swimming is to cats,' wrote Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking Fast and Slow. We can do it, but we'd rather not. Deep, reflective thought is cognitively expensive. Most of us avoid it. That's a problem when leaders are tasked with navigating uncertainty, interpreting ambiguous data and making decisions that affect hundreds or thousands of lives.
And AI tools don't help as much as we think. Generative AI may streamline tasks, but it also discourages hard thinking. It tempts leaders to delegate judgment to algorithms trained on the same public data everyone else is using. That leads to intellectual convergence, not creativity.
There's something seductively efficient about outsourcing reflection. When tools generate plausible answers before leaders even finish formulating their questions, the temptation to skip the hard part—wrestling with ambiguity, weighing nuance, facing doubt—becomes stronger. Over time, that changes not just how leaders work, but how they think. Or whether they think at all.
The danger isn't that AI gives us bad answers. It's that it gives us good enough ones—answers that sound right, feel familiar, and allow us to move on. But good leadership isn't about sounding right. It's about being right, at the right time, for the right reasons. And sometimes that means slowing down long enough to be uncomfortable.
The World Economic Forum lists analytical and creative thinking as the top skills needed in the global workforce—not just now, but five years from now. Yet in many leadership pipelines, those skills are underdeveloped and under-supported.
In the UK, government policy has just taken a notable turn. Starting in 2026, public funding for Level 7 Senior Leader Apprenticeships—postgraduate programs that combine applied strategy, ethics and organizational development—will be restricted to learners aged 21 and under. Employers who previously relied on the Apprenticeship Levy to fund these programs for mid-career or senior managers will now have to self-fund or stop offering them.
Anne Dibley, the head of Post-Experience and Apprenticeship Programmes at Henley Business School, notes that employers are already expressing concern. 'They've seen the transformative impact of Level 7 training,' she told me in an interview. 'It's enabled their managers to challenge assumptions, navigate complexity, and make more considered decisions.'
Dibley emphasized that creating space for managers to explore the value of curiosity—through questioning, reflection, and openness—stimulates the critical and creative thinking that organizations urgently need in an increasingly uncertain world.
Dibley also highlighted a broader concern: while there is widespread enthusiasm for investing in early-career talent, withdrawing funding from leadership development sends the wrong signal. 'Organisations will still need to develop their leaders,' she said. 'But now they'll have to do it without support. Some will rise to that challenge—others won't.'
The issue isn't just one of policy design. It's about the deeper message being conveyed: that leadership learning beyond a certain career stage is optional—or worse, dispensable.
The UK's rollback of funding comes at the same time the U.S. is witnessing its own tensions over adult education and institutional autonomy. In late May, a federal judge temporarily blocked an effort by the Trump administration to strip Harvard University of its ability to host international students. The Department of Homeland Security had previously revoked Harvard's certification under the Student and Exchange Visitor Program, triggering a lawsuit from the university.
While the legal case centers on immigration procedures and alleged free speech violations, its broader implications are clear. At stake is the question of whether universities—and by extension, professionals—retain the right to learn, teach and exchange ideas free from government interference.
Even a temporary restriction sends a chilling signal. It suggests that advanced learning, especially learning perceived to challenge prevailing political narratives, can be disincentivised or disrupted. And it risks reducing access to the very kind of thinking that strong leadership requires.
Leadership education doesn't have to be theoretical. The best programs aren't about lectures or certificates. They're built on real organizational challenges. Participants tackle live projects, engage stakeholders, gather data, test ideas and reflect on the results. They don't just learn how to lead—they lead while learning.
This kind of experiential approach, rooted in action learning principles, allows leaders to develop critical thinking skills in the context of actual work. It fosters the ability to ask better questions, to see beyond one's own assumptions and to hold complexity without retreating into binary choices.
It also builds judgment—a quality often confused with experience. Experience alone doesn't generate insight. Reflection does. And reflection needs space, structure and support.
There's a tendency in both business and policy to treat leadership as a fixed trait—something people have or don't. That mindset is convenient, but wrong. Leadership is a practice. And like any practice, it deteriorates without deliberate effort.
Organizations that fail to support leadership learning beyond the early years of a career end up promoting people into roles they're not cognitively or ethically prepared for. The consequences can be subtle at first: missed signals, narrow thinking, fragile strategies. But they accumulate fast.
The solution isn't to overdesign or overcontrol learning. It's to make space for it. To treat thinking not as indulgence but as necessity. And to recognise that good leadership, like good judgment, is something we get better at only if we keep working on it.
Public funding changes and political attacks may make it harder. But smart firms won't wait to be told. They'll invest in learning not because it's mandated, but because it's mission-critical.
Because once thinking stops, leadership does too.
And when that happens, decisions don't get worse all at once. They just get narrower. Fewer voices are heard. Fewer options are considered. The easy answers get louder, and the better questions fade. Until one day, someone asks, 'How did we miss this?' And no one in the room can remember how to think it through.
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