Scaling leadership development without losing relevance with Melanie Calle

#10 with Melanie Calle, Senior Manager of L&D at Kontoor Brands. When a global business undergoes massive change, it becomes clear that traditional training alone isn't enough to help leaders keep up. Melanie shares how her team is shifting their approach to focus on peer learning and reflection, helping leaders make sense of new realities together rather than just consuming information.

Other themes in this episode include:

• Designing for leadership at every level: Melanie explains why leadership skills should not be reserved for formal managers alone. At Kontoor Brands, leadership starts with self-leadership and expands into influencing across teams, functions, and global contexts.
• Balancing scale with relevance: The conversation explores how global leadership programmes can stay consistent without becoming generic. Melanie shares how learning at your own pace, live workshops, and local facilitation can work together to make learning feel practical and personal.
• Embedding learning into real work: Rather than treating leadership development as something separate from the business, Melanie highlights the importance of immediate use cases, peer dialogue, and manager feedback that connect learning directly to everyday challenges.
• Creating psychological safety in global cohorts: Melanie discusses how vulnerability, anonymous reflection, and structured dialogue help leaders open up about real struggles. That openness becomes the foundation for stronger peer learning and more honest ways to develop new skills.
• Shifting L&D from provider to connector: The episode also looks at how L&D’s role is changing in large organisations. Instead of simply facilitating training, L&D increasingly acts as the bridge that links business priorities, leaders, teams, and all the ways people learn together.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to leadership development in transformation
00:57 Melanie’s career journey from recruitment to global L&D
02:22 Daily learning habits and building a 5:15 a.m. routine
04:19 Best advice: progress over perfection
05:02 Balancing personalization and scale in global learning
07:36 What leaders need that traditional leadership development misses
08:48 Why everyone is a leader
09:32 Learning through application, peers, and manager involvement
12:09 Building common language and shared leadership foundations
14:05 How Kontoor Brands designs leadership programmes across levels 16:07 Using self-paced learning and workshops together
17:27 Creating psychological safety for real dialogue
19:08 Bringing global cohorts together across regions
20:04 Why leadership development had to become more social
21:46 Making learning practical with real cases and using AI to practice
23:47 The role of leadership development during business transformation
24:35 Helping leaders translate vision into team-level action
28:01 Why L&D is now connecting different parts of the business
28:42 Building business partnership across 17,000 employees
32:03 The future skills L&D leaders need most
35:46 Final reflections and closing

Takeaways

• Start with self-awareness: Leadership development becomes more effective when people first understand their own tendencies, habits, and learning patterns. That self-understanding creates a stronger foundation for changing how we act.
• Design for application, not just understanding: Learning sticks when leaders can immediately test ideas in real situations, reflect on what happened, and try again. The workplace itself should become the practice ground.
• Make managers part of the learning journey: Programmes create momentum, but real change deepens when direct leaders observe, reinforce, and give feedback in simple ways that fit into everyday work.
• See L&D as the bridge between business needs: In times of transformation, the value of L&D is not only in content or facilitation. It is in connecting business needs, people, tools, and shared learning processes so skills can grow at scale.

Join the L&D Leaders Community at ldleaders.net. Free, curated community where leaders come together to share what's actually working, ask the harder questions out loud, and build relationships with peers who genuinely get it.