Here is a scenario most learning and development (L&D) professionals will recognize. The organization has invested seriously in its people through leadership development programs, coaching, skills academies, well-being initiatives and upgraded onboarding. Despite this, engagement scores remain stubbornly flat, managers are still burning out and top talent is still leaving. And the organization is asking L&D to fix it.

The instinct is to ask what the training is missing. A different question worth considering is whether training is the right solution to the problem being presented.

Research is beginning to suggest it isn’t. Not because L&D is doing the wrong things, but because the problem generating the turnover and the disengagement sits upstream of anything a training program can reach.

The Investment Paradox

SHRM’s 2026 Employee Benefits Survey found that executive and leadership coaching is now the fastest-growing professional development benefit, offered by 55% of organizations and rising. Driven, in SHRM’s own words, by a “dire need for capable managers and leaders.”

Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report, tells the other side of the story. Global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, its second consecutive annual decline and the lowest level since 2020. More worryingly, manager engagement has collapsed by 9 percentage points since 2022 and hovers at 22% just above the level of employee engagement. The organizations investing more in their people are not seeing a commensurate return in engagement, retention or performance.

This is not a training design or delivery problem; it is a diagnostic one. Employees are not leaving because they lack skills or development opportunities, they are leaving because they cannot find meaning and fulfilment in the work they have been trained to do.

What the Research Shows About Why People Leave

Gallup’s Q12 Meta Analysis in 2024, spanning 736 research studies, 347 organizations and 3.3 million employees, includes the following question: “The mission or purpose of my company makes me feel my job is important.”

Purpose connection is a direct constituent of the engagement score. And engagement is one of the strongest predictors of retention Gallup has measured. For example, teams in the top quartile on engagement show 51% lower turnover than those in the bottom quartile.

Gallup’s own causal analysis, published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, confirms the direction: Engagement predicts retention outcomes, not the reverse. The chain runs from purpose connection to higher engagement to lower turnover and we have seen these results play out in the organizations we support.

The question for L&D is therefore not only “what training should we design?” but “is the purpose itself clear, credible and genuinely embedded in how this organization operates?”

The Upstream Problem L&D Cannot Solve Alone

In our work with boards and executive teams, we map purpose activation as a six-phase journey: Awaken, Act, Articulate, Align, Amplify and Assure. Most organizations invest heavily in the first three: developing the purpose, crafting the language and launching it with energy. The Align phase is where the momentum stalls. This is where purpose becomes an active filter for real decisions, such as which projects get funded, which get stopped, who gets hired and how performance is evaluated.

This matters directly for L&D because the Align phase is precisely where training investment either lands or doesn’t. A leadership development program delivered inside an organization that has not done the work of Align is a program delivered without a destination. Participants develop capabilities, frameworks and confidence, and then return to a workplace where none of those things are visibly connected to what the organization is actually trying to become. The development investment evaporates not because the training was wrong, but because the organizational container it was poured into has no coherent shape.

One of our clients, a government organization, confronted this directly. Before commissioning a new leadership capability program, they conducted a full audit of every inflight strategic initiative, mapping each against their stated organizational purpose. Over 12 months, they wound down 30% of active projects. Only then — once the organizational direction was genuinely clear — did they invest in the leadership development that would take people there. The result was a measurably lower attrition among the leaders who went through the program.

What L&D Can Do

This does not mean L&D is powerless in the face of a purpose problem. It means the role of L&D needs to expand in two directions simultaneously: inward, to design learning that actively connects to organizational purpose; and upward, to ask the questions that surface whether that purpose is genuinely activated.

On the design side, there are practical shifts worth making:

• Audit your programs against the purpose question. Can participants in every program you deliver articulate, in their own words (not the official organizational language), how this development connects to why the organization exists? If not, that is a design gap worth addressing before the next cohort starts.
• Build the purpose filter into decision-making simulations. The Align phase requires leaders to practice applying purpose to real trade-offs. Leadership development that includes case studies, simulations or live projects where participants explicitly apply purpose as a decision criterion builds the very capability most organizations are missing.
• Use onboarding as a purpose activation moment, not just an orientation. The first 90 days are the highest-leverage window for purpose connection. Most onboarding programs cover systems, processes and culture history. Very few help new joiners articulate what the organization’s purpose means for the choices they will make in their specific role. That gap is where early attrition is seeded.
• Measure purpose connection explicitly. If you are not measuring whether participants feel connected to organizational purpose before and after your programs, you are missing the leading indicator most directly correlated with retention. One question — adapted from Gallup’s survey — is worth adding to every program evaluation: I understand how my work contributes to what this organization exists to do.

On the upward side, L&D is well-positioned to ask the questions most senior leadership teams need to hear:

• Has our purpose been genuinely activated or have we articulated it and moved on?
• Are our performance frameworks aligned to purpose, or do they quietly reward contradictory behaviors?
• When did a senior leader last make a visible decision that cost something because it was the right thing for our purpose?

These are not comfortable questions. But they determine whether every program L&D delivers will land or dissolve.

The Reframe Worth Making

The disconnect between increased investment in people and continued turnover is not evidence that training doesn’t work. It is evidence that the problem generating the turnover is not primarily a training problem. Skills matter. Leadership capability matters. Well-being infrastructure matters. But none of them produce sustainable engagement and retention when the organization has not yet answered honestly, operationally and visibly, the foundational question of what it exists to do.

The most effective thing an L&D function can do for retention right now is not to design a better program. It is to help the organization become the kind of place that the best programs are designed to serve — one where purpose is not on the wall, but in the work.