Leadership development programs are easy to launch and hard to prove. Most organizations can point to a curriculum; far fewer can show it changed how leaders actually behave on the job. TTA, a learning and development talent and solutions provider, announced this week that its collaboration with McGrath RentCorp earned a 2026 Brandon Hall Group™ HCM Excellence Gold Award® for Best Leadership Development Program, recognition built around exactly that harder standard: measurable, on-the-job behavioral change rather than completed course modules.
The award centers on LEADS, McGrath RentCorp’s leadership development program, built in partnership with TTA’s learning strategy and instructional design teams. McGrath is a nearly $1 billion business-to-business rental company founded in 1979, with more than 1,300 employees across 37 states supplying modular buildings, portable storage and electronic test equipment. That’s a workforce spread across regional operations rather than concentrated in a single headquarters, a structural reality that shapes what a leadership program actually needs to accomplish: consistency across dispersed teams and managers who may rarely interact face-to-face.
TTA’s role was to translate McGrath’s leadership priorities, culture and people into a working curriculum, not simply license off-the-shelf training content. The resulting program, delivered through McGrath’s learning management system, combines self-paced modules, assessments, structured reflection, practical exercises and group learning activities. Its Leadership & Communication track focuses on a specific set of competencies: emotional intelligence, communicating with empathy, and what the program calls levels of listening, skills that are conceptually simple to describe and notoriously difficult to actually teach in a way that survives contact with a real management conversation.
That gap between teaching a concept and changing behavior is where most leadership development programs quietly fail, and it’s also the design problem LEADS was built around. Rather than treating reflection and practice as separate stages bolted onto a lecture-style curriculum, the program interleaves them, giving participants structured opportunities to apply what they’ve learned to actual workplace situations before moving forward. Industry data supports the emphasis: research compiled from LinkedIn Learning, ATD and other sources has consistently found that manager development training delivers the highest L&D return on investment of any program type, Paul Okhrem while only 35% of companies currently measure learning impact beyond simple completion rates, Paul Okhrem a measurement gap that makes award programs like Brandon Hall’s evaluation process more meaningful precisely because it forces organizations to demonstrate results, not just participation.
Maria Melfa, President and CEO of TTA, framed the recognition as validation of the collaborative process behind the program rather than the award itself. She credited McGrath’s leadership for treating development as a genuine organizational priority rather than a compliance checkbox, language that reflects a broader shift underway in corporate L&D: the expectation that leadership training produce demonstrable change in how people manage, not just a certificate of completion.
Brandon Hall Group™ CEO Mike Cooke described the HCM Excellence Awards as having earned their standing in the industry specifically because winning requires evidence. Entries go through evaluation by independent senior industry experts, analysts and practitioners, assessed across innovation, design, functionality, impact and measurable results, a rigor Cooke said distinguishes genuinely earned recognition from self-reported success stories that are common in the corporate training space.
That distinction matters more than it might initially appear. Leadership development ROI is notoriously difficult to isolate, since strategy shifts, market conditions and staffing changes all move business metrics at the same time a training program is running, making it hard to attribute outcomes cleanly to the curriculum itself. Programs that can point to independently verified, competency-specific outcomes, rather than composite industry benchmarks or best-case anecdotes, carry more weight with executives deciding where to allocate a shrinking training budget in an environment where, according to separate Gartner research, most HR leaders report struggling to demonstrate clear business value from newer technology investments.
For enterprise HR and talent development teams evaluating their own leadership pipelines, the LEADS program offers a useful reference point less for its specific curriculum than for its structure: a partnership model where an external learning strategy provider builds a program around an organization’s existing culture and operational reality, rather than importing a generic leadership framework wholesale. Given how dispersed McGrath’s workforce is across 37 states, the program’s reliance on a centralized learning management system paired with local, on-the-job application is a structure other geographically distributed companies, particularly in industrial, logistics and equipment rental sectors, may find directly applicable.
Market Landscape
The recognition arrives as corporate L&D budgets face growing scrutiny, with global learning and development spending running around $370 billion annually even as measurement gaps persist across the industry. As enterprise organizations increasingly integrate AI-driven learning analytics from platforms tied to ecosystems like Microsoft and Salesforce, programs like LEADS that combine structured curriculum with behavioral measurement stand out precisely because they address a documented industry weakness: proving that leadership training changes how people actually lead, not just what they’ve completed.
Top Insights
- TTA and McGrath RentCorp won a 2026 Brandon Hall Group™ HCM Excellence Gold Award® for Best Leadership Development Program, recognizing their LEADS curriculum for measurable leadership behavior change.
- LEADS combines self-paced learning, assessments, reflection and group activities, targeting core competencies including emotional intelligence and empathetic communication across McGrath’s 1,300-plus employees.
- Industry research shows manager development delivers the highest L&D ROI of any training category, while only 35% of companies measure learning impact beyond completion rates, underscoring why measurable programs stand out.
- The Brandon Hall Group’s HCM Excellence Awards require independent evaluation across innovation, design, functionality and measurable impact, distinguishing earned recognition from self-reported training success.
- The program offers a replicable model for geographically distributed organizations seeking to standardize leadership development across dispersed regional teams.
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