What Actually Happens When You Try to Turn Executives Into Effective Instructors
I spent about four years running internal leadership programs at a mid-sized tech company, and one of the most persistent problems I ran into was that high-performing executives simply could not transfer what they knew to other people. They had expertise. They had results. They had no idea how to make anyone else understand it. The gap between being good at your job and being able to teach your job is massive, and most organizations ignore it until they waste thousands of hours trying to fix it with generic communication workshops. The approach developed by Alannah Morley works from a premise that catches a lot of people off guard: the barrier isn't usually content knowledge or even public speaking ability. It is something much more technical and harder to see. Executives who have risen quickly tend to operate at a level of pattern recognition that becomes automatic. They make decisions based on chunks of information they can no longer explicitly trace. When asked to teach, they cannot decompose their own thinking because the decomposition happened subconsciously years ago. This is called the curse of expertise, and it is the single most common reason senior leaders fail when they try to mentor or train others. Morley's framework addresses this by treating instructional skill as a separate competency from subject matter expertise. The method involves what she calls reverse-engineered teaching sequences, which means instead of starting with what the executive knows and trying to simplify it, you start with the actual mistakes learners make and work backward to the decision points that prevent those mistakes. This flips the entire process. Executives who normally lead with answers spend the first sessions analyzing failure modes. It is uncomfortable for them because it requires admitting that their own intuitive leaps are not replicable without explicit scaffolding.
Here is what the actual training structure looks like in practice. Phase one runs for about three weeks and focuses entirely on diagnostic observation. The executive sits in on sessions where beginners attempt the tasks they normally handle. They are not allowed to help. They are supposed to take notes on where confusion accumulates. Most of the time, the executive is genuinely surprised by how many steps they skip without realizing it. I watched a VP of operations watch a junior analyst fumble through a workflow she had designed, and she could not identify a single point where the analyst went wrong until she recorded herself explaining the process and then listened to the recording. The gap between what she thought she was communicating and what actually came out was stark. Phase two introduces chunking and checkpoint design. Executives learn to break their expertise into discrete decision nodes rather than narrative explanations. A decision node is a specific moment where the learner must choose a path, and each node needs a clear criterion for making that choice. This is not theory. The executives produce actual decision trees for their core workflows. The output is usually a series of one-page guides that map choices to outcomes. The best ones take two or three iterations to get right because executives initially want to include every edge case, which defeats the purpose. Phase three is where the actual teaching happens, but it is heavily structured. Each executive delivers short lessons of about ten to fifteen minutes on a single decision node, followed by a guided practice session where learners immediately apply it. The feedback loop is rapid. The executive learns to read confusion in real time and adjust their framing. This phase typically runs for six to eight weeks with weekly coached practice sessions.
There is a specific problem that comes up repeatedly, and I found a workaround for it that nobody really talks about. Senior executives who are used to being the smartest person in the room often revert to lecturing during the teaching phase. They default to a presentation style because it feels natural and maintains their sense of authority. I dealt with this by implementing a hard rule: no slides during practice sessions. If you cannot explain a concept without visual crutches, you do not understand how to teach it yet. The friction was real. People pushed back. But removing slides forced the executives to develop verbal clarity and pacing skills that slide decks quietly allow them to avoid. After about four weeks of this constraint, their actual teaching quality improved more than it had in the previous two months of free practice. Another counter-intuitive detail is that the framework deliberately separates coaching from training. Coaching addresses individual performance gaps. Training addresses systematic knowledge transfer. Most executives conflate the two, which means they give personalized advice when the learner actually needs a repeatable process. The curriculum makes this distinction explicit from week one, and having that vocabulary helps executives recognize when they are falling into the coaching trap during instructional sessions. The results are measurable if you track the right things. In programs I have seen run this method, learner retention of core procedures typically jumps from around forty percent to sixty-five to seventy percent within the first cohort. Time to proficiency for new hires in the trained executive's domain drops by roughly thirty to forty percent compared to previous hiring cycles. These numbers are not dramatic, but they are consistent, and they compound across cohorts because the decision trees and teaching materials accumulate.
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I should be clear about where this approach does not work. It requires executive participants who are willing to be bad at something publicly. If someone is deeply attached to their identity as the go-to expert, the program will fail for them regardless of the framework. There is no workaround for that. You either have leaders who can tolerate the discomfort of not being the primary source of answers, or you do not. Forcing reluctant participants through it usually wastes three months and produces frustration on both sides. The program also assumes a baseline of organizational support. Executives need actual time away from their normal responsibilities to complete the phases, and they need access to learners who are willing to be the practice audience. If your culture treats any hour not spent on revenue-generating work as wasted time, this will not land. I have seen it fail in those environments, and the failure is predictable. If your organization has executives who are genuinely struggling to develop talent internally and you are tired of sending them to generic leadership seminars that do not change behavior, this is worth investigating. The core insight that expertise and teaching ability are separable skills is not new, but the structured approach to building that second skill set is something most companies skip entirely. I would recommend starting with a small pilot group of two or three executives who already show some willingness to mentor. The ones who resist will tell you early, and you can drop them without embarrassment before investing the full commitment.
The curriculum and supporting materials are available through Morley's official channels. Searching for her name alongside instructional design or executive training will get you to the primary resource. There is no free version of the full program, but there are some introductory materials that give you a reasonable sense of whether the framework fits your situation before you commit resources.
