Grow Your Own Leaders, or Bring In Outside Help?

Deciding whether to hire a leadership consultant or develop your people in-house is one of the most common questions I hear from owners and executives across Durham Region and the Greater Toronto Area. You know your leaders need to grow. The question is whether to build that capability inside your own walls or bring in outside expertise to help. Both paths can work, and both can waste money if chosen for the wrong reasons.

I have spent more than 35 years in senior executive roles at organizations including Honeywell, Johnson Controls, and Armstrong Fluid Technology, and I have sat on both sides of this decision. I have built development programs from the inside, and I now help organizations from the outside through Leadership Management International programs. So let me give you an honest framework rather than a sales pitch, because the right answer genuinely depends on your situation.

Why Is This Decision So Hard to Get Right?

The difficulty is that leadership readiness is already stretched thin in most organizations, which raises the stakes on every development dollar. According to DDI's Global Leadership Forecast 2025, only 20% of HR leaders say they have leaders ready to fill their most critical roles, and internal candidates can fill just 49% of critical positions immediately. When your bench is that thin, you cannot afford to spend a year building an internal program that does not work, and you cannot afford to hand your leaders to an outside provider who does not understand your business.

The gap is not only about readiness. It is about whether your current leaders are equipped to develop others at all. McLean and Company's Employee Engagement Trends Report 2026 found that only 23% of employees rated their leaders as highly effective at developing and supporting their people, drawing on more than 254,000 employees across 240 organizations. If that describes your managers, then simply asking them to grow the next generation on their own, with no outside support, is unlikely to work.

When Does Developing Leaders Internally Make the Most Sense?

Let me make the honest case for building internally first, because for some organizations it is clearly the right call. Developing your own program tends to win when several of these are true.

• You have real in-house expertise. If you have seasoned leaders who can genuinely teach and mentor, and a learning function equipped to design modern, engaging development, you can capitalize on talent you already have.
• You need scale and consistency. When you are developing many people at once and want everyone learning the same skills aligned to your culture, an internal program can be scalable and cost-effective over time, with a lower cost per person as more people go through it.
• Cultural fit is everything. Internal content reflects exactly how your organization operates, in your language, using your tools and real situations.
• You can protect the time. Building and maintaining a quality program takes content, structure, and sustained ownership. If you have the capacity to do it well, internal development pays off.

The honest risk of building internally is that programs done without enough expertise or time tend to drift into generic, check-the-box training that leaders quietly disengage from. Internal programs also struggle with personalization and with a hard truth: employees do not always feel safe being fully candid with someone inside their own reporting line.

When Should You Bring In a Leadership Consultant?

Now the honest case for the other side. Bringing in outside expertise, often in the form of a leadership consultant, tends to win when several of these are true.

• You lack the internal capability. If your team is small, or your learning function is stretched, designing and scaling a program from scratch may simply exceed your capacity. A leadership consultant lets you move faster and avoid burning out your own people.
• You need results sooner. An outside partner brings a fully developed curriculum, proven assessments, and seasoned facilitators without the months it takes to build all of that in-house.
• The outside perspective matters. An external partner is not part of your company's politics or history, so they can see and say things an insider cannot. Sometimes leaders only truly hear a message when it comes from outside the organization.
• You want proven frameworks. You gain access to development approaches refined across many organizations and kept current with the latest research, rather than reinventing them yourself.

The honest risk of buying is that an outside provider may not understand your brand, your culture, or your specific situation, and generic external training that is not tailored to your organization can miss the mark just as badly as a weak internal program. That is exactly why customization matters so much, and it is the question you should press any external partner on hardest.

What Does the Best-of-Both-Worlds Approach Look Like?

In my experience, the strongest answer for most small and mid-sized organizations is not build or buy. It is a deliberate blend that uses a leadership consultant for what outside partners do best and your own leaders for what only they can do. Here is how that hybrid typically works.

1. Bring in the partner for core development. An external partner delivers the foundational leadership content, assessment, and structured practice, giving you a proven curriculum without the build time.
2. Reinforce internally, right away. Your own leaders follow the external sessions with internal discussions that connect the concepts directly to your tools, your culture, and this week's real challenges.
3. Run cohorts, not one-offs. Send groups of leaders through together so they build shared language and support each other, then pair them with internal mentors who reinforce the learning between sessions.
4. Tie it to real work. Anchor development in genuine stretch assignments and live business problems, so leaders apply new skills where it counts rather than practising in the abstract.
5. Measure and own it together. The external partner brings the framework and objectivity; your executives own the accountability, define the pipeline metrics, and keep the effort alive after the program ends.

This blend gives you the outside expertise and proven frameworks of buying, the cultural fit and internal ownership of building, and a much lower risk of the whole effort fizzling out. It is exactly the model I use with organizations across the GTA.

What Should I Be Honest With Myself About Before Deciding?

Before you choose, I would be straight about a few things, because no program of either kind can fix a decision made for the wrong reasons. Do not build internally just because it looks cheaper on a spreadsheet. A poorly run internal program that leaders disengage from is far more expensive than it appears once you count the wasted time and the readiness you failed to build. And do not bring in a leadership consultant expecting a quick fix. Even the best external partner cannot manufacture readiness overnight, and no outside provider can succeed if your executives treat development as optional or refuse to own the follow-through.

Be honest, too, about what neither option can do. Neither building nor buying will work without genuine executive sponsorship, real accountability for managers to develop their people, and the willingness to give leaders stretch opportunities with real stakes. The program, internal or external, only improves the odds. Your organization choosing to make leadership development a true priority is what actually determines the result. When that commitment is real, a well-chosen approach delivers a strong return: across prior engagements, this kind of focused leadership development has produced a return on investment of typically 10:1 or better, though every organization is different and results depend on your situation.

If you want help thinking through which path fits your organization, the practical next step is a straightforward conversation about your specific roles and your specific people. You can learn more about Malcolm Gurley and see why organizations choose Gurley Leadership Solutions.