The ‘pig cycle’ of people development.

By J.D. Geertsema

In good times, when markets are growing and margins are healthy, budgets for team development are readily available. Companies invest in leadership and staff development initiatives, individual coaching, and culture workshops. There is ample time and appetite for reflection, strategy, and long-term capability building.

Then the environment shifts. Growth slows, a major client is lost, costs increase, geopolitical risk rises, or a crisis hits. Suddenly, everything labeled “development” is put under scrutiny. Projects are postponed, training budgets are cut, and leadership programs are quietly shelved.

The paradox is obvious: the moment when organizations most need strong leadership is often the very moment they stop building it.

This article explores how this cycle works, why it is so damaging, and what business leaders can do – practically – to break it.

Introduction: The unseen pattern behind many crises.

When organizations face pressure – declining margins, supply disruptions, geopolitical instability, or a major transformation – attention naturally shifts to cost control. Leaders look for quick wins and visible savings. In that process, one item almost always appears immediately attractive to cut: leadership and people development.

“Let’s pause the programs for a year.”
“Let’s reduce external coaching.”
“Let’s postpone the new change management workshops.”

I recently witnessed one of our clients abruptly pausing their already started change workshops and dedicated training program in which sales leaders and account professionals were supposed to learn how to adjust to and implement a new strategy that was officially launched a while earlier. Our client had decided to transform their organization from a long and successful history of product excellence to a customer centric focus, which includes major organizational changes and requires their people to develop a vastly different attitude and new skillset in approaching the market.

I am assuming that our client’s C-level leaders understood the idea behind this major strategic change, but due to immediate cost-cuts the local leaders and their teams were effectively left in the dark of how to interpret and execute the strategy, and so were the company’s customers. The result was chaos, frustration, asymmetric or wrongful implementation, and demoralization among leaders and staff at all levels.

When financial results fall short, such cost-cutting decisions may at first glance seem logical. Yet, taken together, they form a pattern that quickly erodes the future capability of the organization.

This is what we call the pig cycle of people development: a repeating cycle of (over-) investment in good times and under-investment in bad times, leading to chronic instability in leadership strength.

The classic pig cycle – and its people equivalent.

The original pig cycle comes from agricultural economics. When pig prices are high, farmers invest in more pigs. Because it takes time to raise them, the increased supply suddenly floods the market a few years later, abruptly causing prices to fall. As a result, farmers then cut production, leading eventually to shortages and rising prices again. The cycle keeps repeating, driven by delayed responses and short-term reactions.

In organizations, we can observe a similar pattern:

• Investments: when results are positive, there is appetite for leadership programs, strategy workshops, coaching, and cultural initiatives. These activities are framed as investments in the future. The mood is open and optimistic.
• Cost cuts: when results deteriorate or external shocks hit, the focus shifts to survival. Development is reclassified as “nice to have.” Budgets are cut, initiatives are postponed, and attention narrows to immediate operational issues.
• Damage-control: a few years down the line, the organization struggles with weak middle management, limited change management capability, a fragile culture, a talent drain, and a lack of capable successors. Another crisis hits – and leadership capacity is not where it needs to be. The cost of repairing the damage eventually is a multitude of what would have been the cost of keeping investing in leadership- and staff development in tough times.

The cause of this self-inflicted damage is obvious. It is the direct result of past cuts. Just like in the agricultural pig cycle, delayed effects hide the correlation between today’s decisions and tomorrow’s inevitable outcomes.

Why leadership development is most critical in difficult times.

It is tempting to think of staff development as a reward for good performance: when things go well, many companies offer people training as “nice-to-have” incentives. However, instead of considering it as luxury bonus, leadership- and staff development is to be considered a risk management and performance enhancement tool. It becomes even more important as complexity and stress increase.

Difficult times demand leaders who:

• Are available for their people.
• Translate uncertainty into clear direction.
• Balance cost management with long-term strategy.
• Maintain trust in the face of restructuring or layoffs.
• Recognize and address burnout, fear, and cynicism.
• Make decisions with incomplete, conflicting information.
• Align diverse stakeholders behind tough choices.

These skills are not innate. Some leaders have more natural aptitude than others, but even they benefit from structured learning, reflection, and feedback.

If we stop development just when the demands on leaders are highest, we create a structural mismatch: expectations go up while support and preparation go down. Over time, this leads to poor decisions, avoidable conflict, demoralization, and typically the loss of talented people who might otherwise have stayed and grown.

The hidden impact of “pausing” development.

The decision to pause or cut development sends signals far beyond the finance department.

• To leaders: it communicates that their role is mainly operational: to close gaps, hit numbers, and absorb pressure. It de-prioritizes reflection, learning, and the development of better ways to lead.
• To employees: it communicates that people-related issues are secondary. Investment in their growth becomes conditional on external circumstances, not a consistent value.
• To the culture: it reinforces a short-term mindset. People learn that when things get difficult, the organization retracts, rather than engaging in constructive learning and adaptation.
• To the market: over time, customers and partners feel the difference between an organization with strong, stable leadership and one with erratic, overburdened decision-makers.

These effects don’t appear on a single quarterly report, but they accumulate. They show up in engagement scores, retention rates, innovation levels, and the organization’s ability to execute complex change.

Breaking the pig cycle: practical choices for leaders.

Breaking the pig cycle of people development does not mean maintaining every program at all costs. It does mean making conscious, strategic choices instead of automatic cuts.

Here are some practical steps:

• Define leadership capability as a strategic asset: articulate clearly which capabilities your organization needs to navigate the coming 3–5 years: leading change, cross-functional collaboration, crisis communication, data-informed decision-making, stakeholder management, etc. Treat these as non-negotiable assets, not as optional extras.
• Protect a core development budget: even in difficult times, keep a protected baseline for leadership development, especially for those in critical roles. You may scale down luxury elements (locations, travel, external speakers), but protect the essence: learning, reflection, and skill-building.
• Integrate development with real work: shift from “training as an event” to development embedded in current business challenges. Use active transformation projects, restructuring, or new market entries as the context in which leaders learn. This increases relevance and reduces the perception of development as something separate from “real work.”
• Focus on leading change and leading crisis: prioritize topics that directly support performance under pressure, such as leading in uncertainty, communicating in crisis situations, managing energy, resilience, and well-being – for leaders and teams, handling resistance and difficult conversations, and making decisions under ambiguity.
• Lead by example; senior leaders should visibly participate in development activities, coaching, and reflection. This signals that learning is not remedial or reserved for lower levels. It is part of what it means to lead.

This way, development is not just about generic leadership skills; it becomes a direct enabler of current strategic needs.

The long-term payoff.

Organizations that break the pig cycle of people development benefit in several ways:

• Faster, more coherent change execution: leaders can translate strategy into meaningful local actions.
• Higher resilience under stress: leaders and teams handle pressure without immediately burning out or disengaging.
• Stronger talent pipelines: future leaders are identified and prepared over time, not in panic when vacancies arise.
• More stable culture: values such as learning, accountability, and respect are reinforced through consistent investment in people.

Most importantly, these organizations are better positioned not only to survive crises but to use them as catalysts for renewal and competitive advantage.

The pig cycle through the lens of Human Logic™

Viewed through the Human Logic™ framework, the pig cycle of people development is a systematic way in which organizations increase behavioral imbalance and amplify the fundamental fears of their leaders.

When pressure rises and development is cut, leaders tend to move into their stress behaviors:

• Driver-style leaders become more controlling, impatient, and task obsessed. Their fundamental fear – losing control or being seen as weak – is triggered. Without development, they receive little support in learning how to combine decisiveness with sufficient empathy.
• Expressive-style leaders become more impulsive, scattered, and reactive. Their fear of being ignored or losing influence pushes them to speak and act in a more erratic way, often without enough structure or follow-through. Without guidance, their energy is not channeled into constructive change leadership.
• Analytical-style leaders withdraw into data, details, and risk avoidance. Their fear of making a wrong decision leads to delays and over-analysis. Without development, they are not encouraged to balance their need for certainty with the organization’s need for timely decisions.
• Amiable-style leaders become overly accommodating, conflict-avoidant, and protective of harmony. Their fear of rejection or relational breakdown makes it difficult to deliver difficult messages or drive tough changes. Without support, they carry the emotional load of the organization without sufficient authority or tools.

Leadership development – especially around leading change and leading in crisis – helps each style work with, rather than against, its fundamental fears. It supports leaders in expanding their social versatility and resilience, instead of falling back on one-dimensional coping strategies.

When organizations cut leadership- and staff development, they are unintentionally:

• Reinforcing one-sided behavior: people double down on what feels natural, even if it is dysfunctional under stress.
• Reducing constructive tension between styles: balanced teams, where different styles constructively challenge and complement each other, require a shared language and mutual understanding. The right development programs provide exactly that.
• Increasing the risk of toxic patterns: under pressure, unbalanced styles can fuel toxic micro-cultures: controlling Driver clusters, passive-aggressive Analytical groups, chaotic Expressive pockets, or overly compliant Amiable teams.
• Undermining long-term cultural health: fundamental fears remain unaddressed. Instead of being acknowledged and managed, they are masked by rational arguments about budgets and priorities.

Breaking the pig cycle of people development, from a Human Logic™ perspective, means:

• Continuing to build awareness of behavior styles even in tough times.
• Helping leaders recognize their own stress behaviors, and their fundamental needs and primal fears.
• Strengthening social versatility exactly when relationships are under strain.
• Ensuring that each quadrant’s strengths are present in critical decisions: Driver: clarity and courage, Expressive: vision and engagement, Analytical: rigor and risk awareness, and Amiable: care and cohesion.

In other words, it is not only about more development, but also about the right kind of development: the type that helps real people, with real fears and real strengths, lead others through very real uncertainty.

Organizations that keep investing in interpersonal skills are not just “nicer” workplaces. They are more robust, more adaptable, and better equipped to navigate whatever comes next – because their leaders are not trapped in the pig cycle of fear and reaction but supported in leading with intention, empathy, and balance.

Conclusion: a choice about the future.

Every leadership team faces the temptation to cut development when the environment becomes difficult. The question is not whether such cuts are possible. The question is what price you are willing to pay for those cuts later.

As a leader, you have a choice: you can either treat leadership development as a cost center that expands and contracts with the business cycle, or you can treat it as strategic infrastructure: the foundation that enables your organization to navigate crisis, lead transformation, and maintain resilience under pressure.

The latter however requires courage and clarity. We have the following recommendations to make that choice work:

• Commit to people development continuity: even if you adjust scale or format, maintain a core of leadership development that does not disappear in difficult times.
• Focus on capabilities that matter in crisis: prioritize change management skills, leading people under stress, effective communication, decision-making under pressure, social versatility, and emotional resilience.
• Lead by example: actively participate in development yourself. Signal visibly that learning is not remedial, but a core part of leadership responsibility.
• Link development to real challenges: use current transformation, restructuring, or market challenges as a “learning laboratory” for leaders, rather than treating development as separate from business.

The pig cycle of people development is not inevitable. It is the result of choices – often made quickly, under pressure, without a full view of their long-term consequences.

As a business leader, you can choose differently. You can decide that leadership development, particularly around leading change and crisis, is not an optional extra but a core part of your organization’s resilience.

The storms will come. The only question is whether your leaders will be ready – or whether you will discover, too late, that you cut exactly what you needed most.