Measuring Behaviour Change.
Hello Able’s organisation survey heat map
The Leadership Development Industry’s Dirty Little Secret.
Anybody working in the leadership development space knows measuring behaviour change, the actual development (or not) of leadership & management capabilities and organisation outcomes is the gold standard, rather than just measuring participant satisfaction and net promoter scores. But a dirty little secret of the industry is that most leadership development practitioners, L&D providers, HR teams, coaches and organisations still don’t measure behaviour change and capability development, let alone organisational outcomes such as improved retention or sales.
While many organisations value behaviour change and approximately 78 % say it’s the most important measure, the actual implementation of robust behaviour-change measurement is far lower - under 40%.
Measuring the impact of leadership development initiatives has always been a challenge. Many L&D practitioners and companies rely on superficial metrics, such as attendance and participant satisfaction (“happy sheets”), which fall short of capturing how a program truly shapes behavior and drives meaningful outcomes. Evaluating and analysing program quality, impact and outcomes is challenging for several reasons and an area that few practitioners and organisations are able to put the resources into doing thoroughly.
At Hello Able we're making it super easy for everyone to measure and benchmark behaviour change.
Challenges of Measuring Behaviour Change & Leadership Capability Development.
There are many reasons why organisations and practitioners find it challenging to measure behaviour change in leadership development initiatives, a few key challenges are:
Lack of clear alignment to business outcomes: many programs are designed with learning in mind, but not tightly connected to specific behavioural indicators or business-metrics. As noted by Harvard Business Publishing, a common pain point is: “The business is asking for proof, I don’t know where to start.”
Difficulty in capturing the right data at the right time: behaviour change often happens after the formal program, in day-to-day work, and is diffuse. Capturing meaningful data is therefore challenging.
Measurement capability and design issues: L&D teams often have limited experience in designing robust measurement frameworks that go beyond simple metrics. Many L&D professionals feel unequipped with analytics skills or the frameworks needed.
Complex, Multi-Level Impact & Confounding Variables: leadership development programs typically generate multi-level changes: individual behavioral change, and changes in team dynamics and organisational culture.
Attribution and confounding variables: even if you observe behaviour change or improved outcomes, isolating which intervention caused it is hard. Many other variables (organisational change, culture, team dynamics, external market conditions) intervene.
Time-lag and sustainability of behaviour change: behaviour change often requires time, reinforcement, follow-up, and embedding in job practice. Measuring too early or only one snapshot may miss the real impact. Many programs measure immediately post-training (reaction, learning) but rarely track six-, nine-, twelve-months later to see whether new behaviours are sustained or embedded in daily work.
Our Approach to Measuring Behaviour Change.
At Hello Able we’re committed to helping leadership development practitioners measure the impact of programs on participant behaviour, leadership capability development and organisational outcomes. We designed Able to make it easy for practitioners to deploy a comprehensive, customisable, evaluation methodology on all programs.
Pre-designed Evaluation Process: Able comes with a pre-designed set of program evaluation surveys, tools and leadership profiles so practitioners can be up and running with best practices tools in a few minutes. Able makes it easy to include pre- and post-program measures to demonstrate impact has improved the leadership & management skills of participants, based both on participant self-assessment and feedback from others (eg. managers and/or peers).
Best-Practice Methodology: our evaluation methodology and platform is based on best-practice research to ensure it captures information on the most impactful aspects of a program, and is aligned with Kirkpatrick's learning evaluation model.
Norms & Benchmarking: Able’s 180º and 360º feedback leadership & management profiles have over 40,000 responses so you can easily benchmark individual and group leadership & management capabilities.
Automated Process & Scheduling: Able’s evaluation process and leadership profiles are semi-automated to ensure consistent and continuous measurement of program outcomes. Surveys can be set to automatically send pre-program, post-session or post-program, and 360º leadership profiles can be scheduled at the appropriate intervals eg. pre-program and 9-12 months post-program.
Multi-level Measures: our surveys and measures cover a range of levels: participant intent (intake forms), post-session participant evaluations (including quality, impact and Net Promoter Score measures), individual behavioral change (via 180º or 360º feedback leadership & management profiles), professional development plans, and organisation surveys (culture and outcomes).
Capture Data at the Right Time: Able’s monthly pulse surveys and 180º or 360º feedback leadership & management profiles help you measure behaviour change in the flow of work.
Built-in Reporting & AI Summarisation: built in real-time reporting captures program evaluation and behaviour change data in realtime so you can easily monitor impact. Reports capture all levels - individual participant, sessions, individual practitioner, program cohort, project and organisation level data. AI summarises data into simple bite sized chunks for participants, project teams and clients to easily understand.
Hello Able’s leadership 360º feedback profile report
Best-Practice Program Evaluation Process to Measure Behaviour Change.
Depending on your clients specific needs we recommend using Hello Able to deliver the following program and participant evaluation process:
Pre-Program Participant Questionnaires (Intake Form): prior to the first session we recommend onboarding participants with a pre-program questionnaire to help assess participant needs, skills and priorities.
Pre-Program Leadership & Management Profiles (a 180º or 360º feedback process): include a pre-program feedback process to measure & benchmark participant capabilities and opportunities for development. Able’s Leadership & Management feedback profiles come in three flavours; participant only (self); self and their manager (180º); and self, managers, peers & direct-reports (360º). Pre-program 360º feedback can be done a month or 2 prior to the core program to assist in the design of the core program or in the early stages of the core program.
Post-Session Participant Evaluations: after each workshop or coaching session we recommend emailing participants/coachees a short survey to collect feedback about the session across a range of aspects - attendance, quality, engagement, learning/knowledge transfer, impact, facilitator/coach fit and environment. You can also get participants/coachees to complete these surveys at the end of the session. Able allows you to easily set these evals up with 1 or 2 clicks, and then review aggregated data as it comes in. Reviewing post-session evaluations allows you to continuously improve the program in an iterative way and stay in-front of any issues.
Pulse Surveys: a monthly survey/form for participants to complete to help track self-perceived behaviour change across five core capabilities from the Leadership & Management 360º Profile, reflect on the past months progress and set three goals for the next month.
Post-Program Participant Evaluations: Able lets you easily survey every participant at the end of the program. The post-program survey merges the last session eval to reduce survey fatigue. The post-program survey collects participant feedback on quality scores for programs components; program strengths & areas for improvement; and self-assessed impact.
Post-Program Leadership & Management Profiles: we recommend including a post-program feedback process to measure and benchmark participant capability development compared to your initial measure. To minimise survey fatigue you may consider just using a 180º feedback process (ie. self and manager). If you have purchased an annual Learner Plans for your participant you can redo Leadership Profiles as many times as you like through-out the year, so pricing shouldn’t be too much of an obstacle to re-measures.
Pre/Post-Program Reporting: Able’s Insights and program surveys come with pre/post-program reporting built in, so it is easy to evaluate program quality and impact, along with comparison to our norms. We recommend you incorporate a post-program debrief with your client to review and discuss program & participant data, insights, issues and any recommendations you may have for next steps.
Helloable.co is a Unified Intervention & Analytics Platform
Able is a unified intervention and analytics platform for leadership development practitioners, bringing together both the delivery and measurement of initiatives. Able streamlines program evaluations, leadership capability measures and organisation surveys so you can focus on driving real behaviour change - not admin.
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References:
VeeMind: https://veemind.com/the-state-of-leadership-development-in-2024
HBR: https://www.harvardbusiness.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Measuring-the-Impact-of-Leadership-Development-Slides.pdf
Ivey Business School: https://www.ivey.uwo.ca/executive-education/insights/2025/04/measuring-the-true-impact-of-leadership-development-a-holistic-approach/?utm_source=chatgpt.com