#83 - The Fast-Track Fallacy!

15 Oct 25

Fast-track leadership schemes are designed to accelerate talent development by giving high-potential employees a breadth of experience across the business. While they can build impressive technical and organisational knowledge quickly, they often miss a critical ingredient: the slow, human work of leadership growth.

The result? 

Leaders who can navigate systems, but struggle to navigate people. This edition explores why judgement and interpersonal maturity can’t be compressed into a rotation plan and what organisations can do instead.

What?

Many organisations invest heavily in accelerated leadership programmes. The logic is sound:

• Rotate promising employees through key functions.

• Expose them to senior leaders and complex challenges early.

• Develop a holistic understanding of the business.

By design, these schemes create technical breadth and institutional awareness in record time. They can be powerful tools for identifying and preparing emerging leaders...on paper.

But the danger lies in what they don’t develop: the experience of leading through setbacks, conflict and ambiguity; the resilience that comes from weathering the slow grind of people problems; and the wisdom that only accumulates through lived consequence.

Why?

Leadership isn’t just about skill it’s about judgement.
And judgement forms through time, reflection, and relational experience, not simply exposure to multiple departments.

Fast-tracked leaders often reach senior positions before they’ve had time to:

• Earn trust rather than inherit it.

• Handle sustained team friction.

• Recover from decisions that didn’t work.

• Develop the emotional intelligence that deep leadership requires.

As a result, they may find themselves in senior roles with high accountability but limited grounding. When the system gets noisy or the team becomes strained, they lack the experiential memory to fall back on; the calm confidence that comes from 'I’ve been here before.'

In short: you can fast-track knowledge, but not wisdom.

How?

If fast-tracking isn’t the full solution, what is?

1. Balance breadth with depth.
   Rotations build perspective but ensure participants also spend long enough in roles to experience the full cycle of leading people: building trust, making mistakes, recovering and improving.

2. Embed coaching and reflection.
   Give emerging leaders structured opportunities to reflect on how they lead, not just what they deliver. Reflection turns experience into insight.

3. Value slow growth.
   Reframe 'slow progression' as 'deep preparation.' Some of the most effective senior leaders grew through years of steady exposure to complex people challenges, each one adding another layer of maturity.

4. Model leadership as a craft, not a promotion.
   Make it clear that leadership excellence isn’t about speed of ascent, it’s about the depth of impact.

In Summary

Fast-track leadership programmes can create technically proficient managers. But without time to develop emotional intelligence, self-awareness, and sound judgement, they risk producing leaders who know the map but not the terrain.
The most sustainable leadership growth happens not in acceleration, but in accumulation; the steady layering of experience, empathy, and self-understanding that no scheme can shortcut.

Have a great week!

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