Organizations in the Gulf spend large sums on leadership development every year. They send executives to programs abroad, run internal academies and sponsor cohorts of high-potential employees. Ask the sponsors what they got for the money, and many will point to satisfaction scores and attendance records. Few can show a change in business results.
That gap matters. When budgets tighten, development spending is often the first line to shrink, because nobody can prove what it delivers. Measuring impact protects good programs, exposes weak ones and helps sponsors choose between them.
From four levels to five
In the late 1950s Donald Kirkpatrick proposed four levels for evaluating training: reaction, learning, behavior and results. Jack Phillips later added a fifth level, return on investment, and a set of methods for reaching it. The Phillips model, promoted by the ROI Institute, is now widely used in corporate and public-sector learning.
The five levels build on each other. A program cannot change business results if participants never apply what they learned, and they cannot apply what they never learned.
The five levels in plain terms
Level 1: Reaction and planned action
Did participants find the program relevant and useful, and do they intend to act on it? A good Level 1 survey asks about relevance to the participant's role and about specific actions planned, rather than whether the venue and the coffee were pleasant.
Level 2: Learning
Did participants gain the knowledge and skills the program promised? Tests, case analyses, simulations and practical exercises show whether learning happened. For leadership programs, a well-designed simulation often reveals more than a written exam.
Level 3: Application and implementation
Are participants using what they learned back at work? This is where many programs fail. Evidence comes from 360-degree feedback three to six months later, from managers' observations and from the progress of real projects that participants lead.
Level 4: Business impact
Did the changes in behavior move measures the organization cares about? Depending on the program, those measures might include team productivity, project delivery times, customer satisfaction, staff retention or cost savings.
The choice of measures should happen at the start, not after the program ends. If a fellowship aims to improve how senior leaders run major projects, the sponsor and the provider should agree before the first session which projects they will track and which indicators they will watch, such as delivery against schedule or budget variance. Measures chosen after the fact invite the suspicion that someone picked whatever happened to improve.
Level 5: Return on investment
Do the monetary benefits exceed the full cost of the program? The basic calculation divides net program benefits by program costs and multiplies by 100 to express the result as a percentage.
The hard part: proving cause
A sales team's results may rise after a leadership program, but they may also rise because the market improved or a competitor stumbled. The Phillips method asks evaluators to isolate the effect of the program before claiming credit.
Evaluators can do this in several ways. A control group that did not attend the program offers the strongest comparison. Trend analysis compares actual results with the trend that existed before the program. Where neither is possible, evaluators ask participants and their managers to estimate how much of an improvement came from the program and how confident they are in that estimate, then reduce the figure accordingly. Conservative assumptions protect the credibility of the result.
Costs need the same honesty. A fully loaded cost includes fees, travel, materials, the time participants spend away from work and the internal staff who manage the program.
Some benefits resist conversion into money: stronger teamwork, a clearer strategy, a successor ready for a key role. The Phillips approach reports these as intangible benefits alongside the financial figures. A sponsor should value them, provided the report labels them honestly.
An illustration
Consider a hypothetical case. A company sends 20 managers through a leadership program at a fully loaded cost of 100,000 rials. As part of the program, each manager leads a project to fix a real operational problem. Six months later, the company measures the savings from those projects, isolates the share attributable to the program and converts it to a value of 180,000 rials.
The net benefit is 80,000 rials. Dividing 80,000 by 100,000 and multiplying by 100 gives an ROI of 80 percent. The company also records intangible gains, such as two managers now ready for promotion, without forcing a monetary value onto them.
The numbers here are invented to show the method. A real evaluation would document every assumption behind them.
What sponsors should ask before enrolling
Measurement works best when it starts before the program, with the objectives. Sponsors can ask providers for evidence at the right points:
- Before: Which business measures should this program move for us, and how will we capture a baseline?
- During: How will participants apply the learning to real work while the program runs?
- Three to six months after: How will we know whether behavior changed, and who will collect that evidence?
- At the end: How will the provider isolate the program's effect, and what costs will the calculation include?
A provider that welcomes these questions and builds an impact plan with the sponsor at the start is worth more than one that offers only a satisfaction survey at the end.
Building evaluation into the design
The most reliable way to show impact is to design for it. Programs that link each participant to a real project, involve the sponsor in setting goals and follow up months after the classroom sessions end produce evidence as a natural part of their work.
Sponsors should also watch for three common mistakes. The first is stopping at Level 1: high satisfaction scores feel reassuring, but they say little about whether anything changed at work. The second is claiming every improvement for the program, which damages credibility the moment a finance director asks what else happened that year. The third is measuring too early. Leadership behavior takes months to change, and business results take longer to follow, so an evaluation run in the week after the last session will miss most of the story.
Good evaluation also feeds back into the program itself. When application data shows that participants struggle with one skill, the designers can strengthen that module for the next cohort. Over several cycles, measurement turns into a tool for improvement as much as a report card.
The National Academy of Leadership and Innovation builds a five-level impact plan into its programs, including the National Fellowship in Strategic Leadership, so that sponsors can follow how learning turns into results. Until the first cohorts complete their evaluation cycles, the academy presents these levels as targets rather than reported outcomes.
