The Role of Leadership Training in Creating High-Performing Teams
What Does Leadership Training Actually Do — and Does It Work?
By David Koff | Updated April 2026
TL;DR: Effective leadership training doesn't teach managers to give better PowerPoint presentations. It builds the behavioral skills — emotional intelligence, nonverbal communication, active listening, and adaptive thinking — that turn disconnected managers into leaders their teams actually trust. At Change Through Play, we use applied improvisation to do exactly that.
Why Does So Much Leadership Training Fail?
Most leadership training programs share a common flaw: they treat leadership as a set of concepts to be memorized rather than skills to be practiced. Participants sit through frameworks, absorb theory, and return to work largely unchanged.
Research supports this observation. A study by McKinsey found that fewer than 25% of executives believe their organization's training programs have meaningfully improved business performance. The gap between learning and doing is where most programs quietly fall apart.
The reason? Leadership is fundamentally a relational skill. You cannot develop it by reading a slide.
What Do High-Performing Teams Actually Need from Their Leaders?
High-performing teams share a set of well-documented conditions. Harvard Business School's Amy Edmondson identified psychological safety — the belief that it is safe to speak up, take risks, and make mistakes — as the single strongest predictor of team performance across industries. Her research, conducted across more than 180 teams at Google and replicated in multiple subsequent studies, found that psychological safety outweighed every other factor, including individual talent.
What creates psychological safety? Leaders who listen. Leaders who respond to ambiguity with curiosity rather than control. Leaders who read a room — and adjust.
These are not personality traits. They are learnable behaviors.
How Does Applied Improvisation Develop Leadership Skills?
Applied improvisation is a structured methodology — not a comedy class — that develops exactly the behaviors high-performing teams need from their leaders. At its core, it trains people to listen actively, respond adaptively, and communicate with their whole body, not just their words.
The skills it builds:
Active listening — attending to what is actually being said, not preparing your response while someone else is still speaking
Nonverbal communication — reading and using body language, tone, and facial expression as leadership tools
Adaptive thinking — pivoting quickly when circumstances change, without losing composure
Collaborative presence — making others feel seen, heard, and supported in real time
Trust under pressure — committing to group decisions even in conditions of ambiguity
These are not soft skills. They are the preconditions for the hard outcomes — productivity, retention, innovation — that organizations measure.
What Happens When a Leadership Training Session Goes Off-Script?
The most instructive leadership training I have ever facilitated happened because a curriculum failed.
I arrived at an Intel management cohort with a pre-approved set of exercises, designed in advance by the program organizers. Within the first few minutes, it was clear the group wasn't ready for them. The managers were physically still — sitting back, arms folded, minds elsewhere. They weren't in their bodies. The planned curriculum required a level of presence the group hadn't yet found.
With the group's permission, I pivoted entirely. I introduced an exercise I created called The Martha — a collaborative storytelling game that requires participants to use their bodies to build a narrative together, with no script and no safety net. No one can hide. Everyone has to show up fully.
The shift was immediate. Within minutes, managers who had been guarded were laughing, making physical choices, and — without being told to — watching each other with genuine attention. The debrief that followed surfaced something none of them had planned to talk about: how rarely they used nonverbal communication intentionally in their actual management roles, and how much information they'd been missing as a result.
The cohort asked that The Martha be used at every future Intel leadership kickoff — not as a warm-up, but as the opening framework for the entire program.
That's what happens when leadership training meets people where they actually are.
What Do Real Participants Say About Leadership-Focused Improv Training?
CTP's post-workshop survey data (n=34) shows consistent results across organizations, including Serenity Lane's executive leadership team, which completed a full-day session in April 2026.
Emily Smoot, a senior leader at Serenity Lane, wrote:
"I have a pretty serious career and it was nice to find new ways to communicate more effectively with other leaders. I don't often find time for 'play' at work. It was challenging to see the benefit at first, but it truly helped me learn to communicate more effectively."
Pete Kerns, also of the Serenity Lane executive team, observed:
"It was inspiring to see how willing team members were to engage in something they probably enjoyed but which was an uncomfortable stretch."
Across all survey respondents, average wellbeing scores improved from 5.94 to 8.29 — a 40% increase — within a single session. Ninety-four percent rated their sense of connection to fellow participants at 8 out of 10 or higher.
How Is This Different from Standard Leadership Development Programs?
Most leadership programs are built around content delivery: frameworks, case studies, assessments, and feedback reports. These have value. But they share a structural limitation — they put participants in the role of observer rather than actor.
Applied improvisation inverts this. Participants are not watching leadership being modeled. They are practicing it, in real time, with real colleagues, under conditions that are slightly uncomfortable by design.
The discomfort is intentional. Improvisation creates low-stakes situations that feel high-stakes — exactly the conditions under which leadership behaviors are most needed and most difficult to access. Practicing there makes the real thing easier.
CTP's corporate workshops are available as half-day and full-day formats, starting at $2,500, and can be designed specifically for management cohorts, senior leadership teams, or cross-functional groups. We have worked with leadership teams at companies including Nike, Intel, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Nestlé.
If you're building a case for bringing this kind of work to your organization, our corporate training page includes details on outcomes, format options, and how to start a conversation. You might also find our post on what makes improv effective for business professionals useful background.
Key Takeaways
Fewer than 25% of executives report that traditional leadership training has meaningfully improved business performance (McKinsey).
Harvard's Amy Edmondson found psychological safety — created by leadership behavior — to be the strongest predictor of team performance.
Applied improvisation trains the specific behaviors that create psychological safety: active listening, nonverbal awareness, adaptive thinking, and collaborative presence.
CTP's participant data (n=34): wellbeing improved 40% in a single session; 94% rated connection to fellow participants at 8/10 or higher.
Leadership training works when it requires practice, not just comprehension — and when it meets participants where they actually are.
Frequently Asked Questions
What makes applied improvisation more effective than traditional leadership training? Traditional programs teach leadership as theory. Applied improvisation requires participants to practice leadership behaviors — listening, adapting, communicating nonverbally — in real time, with real colleagues. The practice is what creates the transfer back to the workplace. Read more about how improv builds skills for business professionals.
Does leadership training work for introverted managers? Yes — often especially well. Introverted leaders frequently have strong listening instincts already. Applied improvisation builds on those strengths while developing the areas — physical presence, spontaneous communication, comfort with ambiguity — that tend to be harder. The exercises are structured to create psychological safety, not performance pressure.
How quickly do leaders see results from this kind of training? Some shifts are immediate. CTP's survey data shows that participants' average wellbeing score rises from 5.94 to 8.29 within a single session. Behavioral change — the kind that transfers to how someone runs a meeting or handles a conflict — typically deepens over weeks of application. A single session creates the foundation; follow-up sessions accelerate it.
Can this training be tailored to a specific leadership challenge? Yes. CTP designs sessions around the specific needs of each team — whether that's communication across a newly merged group, trust repair after organizational change, or developing presence in senior individual contributors stepping into management. Book a conversation with us to discuss your team's situation.
Is this appropriate for senior executives or C-suite leaders? Absolutely. Some of CTP's most impactful work has been with senior leadership teams — including executives at Serenity Lane, Tektronix, and Intel. The level of the participant doesn't change the value of the work; if anything, senior leaders tend to have the most to gain from developing the relational skills that formal authority alone cannot provide.
David Koff is the founder of Change Through Play, an applied improvisation and team development company in Portland, Oregon. A professional actor, director, and SAG/AFTRA member with credits including "The West Wing" and "Sesame Street," David trained at The Groundlings Theater in Los Angeles and has performed alongside comedy legends including Ray Romano, Fred Willard, and The Kids in the Hall. He has trained thousands of individuals and teams across four continents — working with corporate clients including Nike, Intel, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Nestlé. He has delivered in-person workshops throughout the United States and in Paris, France. His virtual workshops have been attended by participants joining from the US, UK, France, Sweden, Colombia, Canada, and China. He is also the creator of a documentary film following a Portland middle schooler as applied improvisation helps her confront social anxiety. Change Through Play offers corporate training, improv classes, executive coaching, and specialized programs for attorneys, educators, and mental health practitioners.