Executives at large companies believe that putting in placeprograms to develop future company leaders is important, but notnecessarily a top priority, according to a new study.

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A report released by Harvard Business Publishing, a nonprofitaffiliated with Harvard University that focuses on businessmanagement, also shows that many executives don’t view theircompanies’ leadership programs as particularly effective.

Forty-three percent of the 700 executives surveyed said that theleadership training at their company was either inconsistent orunderperforming. The largest group (47 percent) rated theirprograms as “aspiring,” meaning they are excellent in some ways butcould use some improvement in some areas, while only 7 percentbelieved their programs were top-notch.

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The report said that those giving their leadership training topmarks disproportionately came from very large companies, with morethan 10,000 employees, while those offering the most negativereviews most often came from smaller companies with fewer than5,000 employees. The survey did not include any companies withfewer than 1,000 employees.

Leaders identified a number of barriers that prevent them fromdeveloping better programs. The top reason, cited by 43percent of respondents, was a lack of time to implement necessarychanges.

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Just over a quarter cited the absence of a provenreturn-on-investment from such programs. It is not clear whetherexecutives who cited that reason were expressing skepticism of thevalue of their leadership development training or simply sayingthat the lack of concrete data on their impact made it difficult toconvince other company leaders to put more resources behindthem.

Peter Walsh, senior director of marketing and corporate learningfor Harvard Business Publishing, told BenefitsPRO that somecompanies, particularly smaller ones, rely less on formalleadership development programs than informal interactions betweenleaders and employees. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, hesays.

“Informal learning such as coaching, mentoring and providingregular feedback to employees can ago a long way in developingfuture leaders. It’s actually the biggest piece — 70 percent — ofthe recommended learning and development model that blends formal,informal and on-the-job experience,” he said.

“But,” he adds, “some kind of formal strategy is important todoing learning well. Building a house without a foundation is not agood idea; the same goes for learning.”