The Netflix Model of Leadership Training for Managers

82% of people who step into a management role in the UK do so with zero formal leadership training, according to research from the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) and YouGov.¹ Most are what CMI calls “accidental managers”: promoted for being good at their old job, then left to work out the new one alone. Even the training that does exist has a completion problem. A multi-hour workshop or a six-module e-learning course usually gets started once and finished never.

Netflix does not have this problem. It gets people to sit through eight-hour seasons voluntarily, one episode at a time. Here is what leadership training for managers looks like when it borrows that model, and what happened when one growing company put it into practice.

Why Most Leadership Training Never Gets Finished

The 82% figure above isn't the only uncomfortable number in leadership development right now. LinkedIn's 2025 Workplace Learning Report found that 71% of organizations already offer some form of leadership training.² Most of it goes unfinished.

The same CMI research quantifies what that costs. 28% of employees have left a job because of a negative relationship with their manager, and a further 33% said poor management left them less motivated to do their job.¹ An undertrained manager is often the reason good people quit, not a rounding error in a training report.

That gap has a name: the forgetting curve. Psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus documented it more than a century ago, and current microlearning research keeps confirming it. People lose most of what they learn in a single long session within days, unless they get spaced, repeated exposure to the material.³ A 2025 study in the Journal of Informatics Education and Research found that structured microlearning improved knowledge retention for just over half of participants (50.5%), and more than 75% said it improved how they applied new skills at work.⁴

Put those two findings together and you get a simple explanation: most leadership training fails on pacing, not content. It gets delivered in one long sitting, at a time the manager didn't choose, on a topic too broad to actually stick.

The Netflix Model: What It Actually Means for Leadership Development

Netflix's format works for reasons that map directly onto how adults pick up a new skill.

Sequential episodes, not one long feature

A season is broken into 30-50 minute episodes that each resolve a piece of the story while setting up the next one. Applied to leadership training, that means one short lesson on giving feedback, then one on running a 1:1, then one on handling conflict — each finishable in a single sitting, each building on what came before. For a breakdown of the individual skills a program like this should cover, see Top 5 Leadership Theories: A Guide to Leading Effectively.

On-demand, not scheduled

Nobody waits for Netflix to air an episode at 8pm on a Tuesday. Leadership training should work the same way: available on a phone between meetings or during a commute, not only when a training calendar says so.

A feed that adapts to the learner

Netflix's recommendation engine nudges viewers toward what they're likely to watch next, based on what they've already finished. AI-powered learning platforms can do the same with leadership content: surfacing the next skill gap a manager actually needs to close, instead of pushing an entire cohort through an identical curriculum. AI for Leadership Development: Building Tomorrow's Leaders Today goes deeper on how this kind of personalization works in practice.

What This Looks Like in Practice: Ivy Farm's First-Time Managers

I've sat in on enough of these training rebuilds to have a favorite example, and it's Ivy Farm's. The Oxford-based cultivated meat company, with roughly 50-60 employees, ran into the classic version of this problem: training new managers meant pulling an entire cohort into three-hour classroom sessions — “herding cats,” as Chief People Officer Debra Syme put it — then waiting more than two months for the next course slot to open up.⁵

The company switched to a sequential, self-paced model built on bite-sized 5Mins modules, paired with a flipped-classroom structure. Managers worked through short lessons independently, then met as a group for one hour every two weeks to talk through what came up in practice.

Thirteen first-time managers went through the program. The cohort saved roughly 20 training days combined, time that would otherwise have gone into scheduling and running classroom sessions.⁵

That's the Netflix model doing its job: short, sequential content that fits into a real week, plus just enough live interaction to make it stick.

Worth flagging

Self-paced modules alone would not have been enough. Ivy Farm's fortnightly group sessions did the part a video can't — giving new managers a place to say “this happened to me this week” out loud. Skip that half and the sequencing alone won't save the program.

How to Build a Netflix-Style Leadership Training Program

Building Your Own First Season

The 82% of managers currently operating without formal training didn't choose to skip it. In most cases, nobody built a program that fit into their week. A Netflix-style structure — sequential, bite-sized, available on-demand — fixes the access problem and the completion problem at the same time.

If you're building or rebuilding a leadership program, start small. Pick one skill gap that shows up across your management team, break it into four or five short modules, and sequence them like the first season of a show worth finishing. You can explore 5Mins' leadership development solution, browse the course collection, or start a free trial to see what a first season looks like for your own managers.