A new report finds that organizations are more eager to offer leadership development programs to all workers, not just those at the C-suite level.

Leadership Development: Cultivating Critical Skills for Employees at All Levels, was published last week by the Association for Talent Development (ATD) and is based on a survey of talent professionals, executives, and rank-and-file workers. Three fourths of executives (75 percent) said that leadership development for all employees is a “high priority,” though currently only 47 percent provide that kind of training across all levels.

This is the first time ATD has conducted a survey on the subject, said ATD Director of Research Rocki Basel, PhD, who added that it was inspired by increased anecdotal conversations around it. 

“This was a topic that kept coming up,” she said. “Organizations are realizing that they shouldn’t just be training their executives or directors on leadership, but it’s something that everybody within the organization can really benefit from.”

Retention is a key motivating factor in that shift, she added. “We are seeing organizations that are saying that it’s improving employee performance and that it’s also improving their retention of employees,” she said. “If they can get some kind of talent development and leadership development within the organization, it might keep them around.”

The report bears out the novelty of the change: Half of the organizations surveyed said they’ve added leadership training for individual employees in the past five years, and a third (31 percent) within the past three years. And while 60 percent of training professionals surveyed say that leadership training improves retention, there are other benefits as well, including a stronger organizational culture, leadership pipeline, and employee performance. 

The survey found that a strong majority of organizations are already using AI to develop content for their leadership training: 57 percent of training professionals say they are using it now, and 27 percent say they intend to. 

That content can take a variety of forms, Basel said. “ I think for some organizations, they’re finding that they can use AI for things like building the courses—creating outlines, creating speaker notes,” she said. “It’s a little more efficient, they can save time in creating these courses. But then also within courses, they can use AI to make the training more personalized. We’re seeing organizations that are using AI to take people through like their own journey of that course, so they can really personalize that learning.”

One point of friction: Executives and workers disagree about which leadership skills should take priority. Though both agree about the importance of communication and decision-making skills, 75 percent of executives said learning adaptability was very important, while only 34 percent of workers agreed. Similarly, while 72 percent of executives cited “building trust” as important, only 40 percent of workers felt the same.

Basel said that finding should be a prompt for organizations to explore their own needs more deeply. “There’s some kind of a gap there, where leaders or executives are saying, ‘This is something that we need in our staff,’ but the staff isn’t seeing it as a need,” she said. “Or maybe the learners think that that’s something that they’re already good at, and that they don’t need to be trained in it, whereas the executives are maybe seeing that they’re not as good as they think they are.”

ATD will host a webinar on the survey findings May 28.