The average age someone becomes a manager is 30, but the average leader doesn’t receive any formal leadership training until age 42. That development gap of over a decade has major consequences on performance, engagement, and retention. For this reason, the companies that can close this gap quickly and at scale have a competitive edge.
One of the best examples of this I’ve come across is at Rivian. Despite being a relatively new car company, Rivian has over 14,000 employees, adding more than 12,000 employees in just the last five years. With such rapid growth, developing all of your leaders poses a unique challenge. Leaders hit the ground running, are being pulled in many directions, and need practical, applicable development. Despite all of these challenges, Rivian manages to reach and develop every single leader at the organization.
To learn more about how they’ve scaled leadership development, I had the chance to interview James Holdren, Leadership Development Lead Program Manager at Rivian. Holdren’s position is right at the heart of Rivian’s leadership development work. As he put it, “If you've got a direct report, you are going to see my name and face come across your screen at some point.” Rivian is an American electric vehicle manufacturer with four electric vehicles on the market: the R1T (truck), the R1S (sport utility vehicle, SUV), the Amazon Electric Delivery Van (EDV) and the Rivian Commercial Van.
Choosing Content That’s Foundational and Applicable
To choose the content for developing leaders at Rivian, Holdren followed three main guardrails:
- Topics need to focus on developable skills. “Each topic we cover in our program has to be something that can actually be trained, practiced, and improved,” Holdren said.
- Training skills need to be applicable on the job. “For example, if you’re an individual contributor, an emerging leader who’s looking to become a titled people leader, we’re not going to teach you how to conduct a performance management session,” Holdren explained. He’d rather wait until that person is promoted to start training in performance management. “I think the evidence is clear that if you can't practice the skill you're just going to forget it anyway,” he added.
- Less is more (so, emphasize foundational skills). “We definitely err on the side of going deeper on fewer things than trying to touch on a million things,” he explained. “For example, many skills are really emotional intelligence (EQ) skills. Many skills can be subsumed under these ideas of ‘Can you read emotions?’ ‘Can you conduct conversations with people?’ ‘Can you read body language?’ We go deep on things like EQ that have the most applicability across the board. For some skills that may be less foundational, we may provide supplemental resources such as eLearnings, toolkits, etc.”
Sifting through Model Muddle to Find the Emotional Center
On the topic of less is more, Holdren and his team are very careful about what he and the Rivian team call “model muddle.” “There are a million models to remember, and even though it’s my field, I can't even keep them all straight. So we don't ask our participants to memorize model after model. Instead, we ask them to linger on and memorize the emotion that comes with the skill.” This is grounded in the research that shows that when learning is attached to an emotional feeling, it's more likely to hook into the brain and stick. For example, when they’re teaching leaders how to coach, they don’t overemphasize memorization of the GROW model. Instead, they ask leaders to memorize how it feels when you want to jump in and give somebody the answer, but you instead ask a good question. “We approach coaching this way because the skill of coaching hinges on being able to not input your own solutions and help somebody get their own solutions for themselves. To help the other person become more self-sufficient. That's the actual skill that we're talking about when we talk about coaching.”
Making Leadership Development More Mandatory
Benchmark research from LEADx in 2025 found that just half of leadership development professionals believe in making leadership development mandatory. While you can go back and forth on mandatory versus not mandatory, you can also think of it as a spectrum, from “completely voluntary” to “completely mandatory,” with ample possibilities in between. Holdren’s team operates with several mandatory components that work quite well.
- You have to complete the level of training under you to get access to your current level of training. “For example, if you are a leader of individual contributors, you have to complete our self-leadership program in order to gain access to first-line leader training.” This helps level-set the organization on certain skills, and when someone goes through a development program, this rule helps ensure that people’s managers will have been through that training already.
- You have to complete your behavioral assessment to take part in your program. With the importance of behavior change measurement, Holdren’s team makes it mandatory. “We don’t allow people to enter the program without completing their behavioral assessment. That’s your ticket to entry,” he said. “We also require and provide many tools around having a conversation between the leader and the participant where they go through the program and explain the difference in their assessments with each other and explain why they graded somebody this way versus how they graded themselves.”
- Integrating development into talent management and acquisition (in progress): Holdren’s team is in the process of integrating development into their talent management and acquisition processes. “That was one of the big things we wanted to work on too, was to have sort of institutional push and pull behind this integration, because if we’re the canary in the coal mine just yelling that these things matter, that’s not going to be effective,” he explained. The team at Rivian has been very aligned with trying to integrate development into various People processes.
The North Star Message: ‘We’re Giving Our Employees Better Managers’
Time and again, one of the biggest challenges faced by leadership development professionals is proving the value of their programs. This is true of both the managers being trained and of senior leadership. Holdren and his team have been very intentional about aligning with the executive team from the start. “One of the things we have said from the start is that our goal is the same as our executives’ goal, which is to make people better at their job and to give people better managers,” he said. The executive teams have been very supportive of the overarching vision of “giving people a better manager.” “So whenever we are marketing or introducing programs to our higher leaders, we always say, ‘Hey, this is how we want to provide you with, or have given you a better manager this quarter.’ Then we point to a lot of our behavioral data,” Holdren explained.
Rather than rely on net promoter scores or attendance to show the value of his training, he emphasizes numbers like, “Managers who went through our program got 10% better at giving feedback this year than people who didn’t go through our program.” While supplementary data points like net promoter scores or attendance are shared to show a full data perspective on the programs, the emphasis is on the behavioral data as it becomes available. Supplementary data, such as anecdotal behavior change stories, net promoter scores, and attendance help act as an appetizer for the key behavioral data pieces.
Holdren also noted that “giving you a better manager” is a more general statement. Often, this changes from department to department, level to level, and even person to person. “That’s when our talent management teams and our other adjacent sister teams drill down and we figure out the targeted intervention that we need to give,” he explained.
A Blueprint for Measurable, High-Impact Results
As Rivian continues to scale, their leadership development approach offers a powerful blueprint: focus on practical, foundational skills, integrate development into broader talent systems, and stay relentlessly aligned with the business goal of creating better managers. In an environment where many leadership programs struggle to demonstrate impact, Rivian’s data-driven, emotionally intelligent approach is delivering measurable, high-impact results.
