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Here's how most businesses try and develop leaders. They draw up a list of desirable leadership behaviours (which are sometimes called competencies). They assess their people against this list, to identify strengths and weaknesses. Then they send their people on some kind of training or development programme to remedy the weaknesses.

If your organisation uses this approach it's in good company – an overwhelming majority of organisations try to develop leaders this way. There's just one problem. It doesn't work.

In a classic 2002 study of leadership, Warren Bennis and Robert Thomas interviewed 40 top leaders from business and the public sector to identify how they'd learnt to be a leader. None of the leaders mentioned formal leadership development programmes run by their organisation. All of them attributed their leadership abilities to having encountered, and successfully overcome, some great challenge in their lives. Bennis and Thomas call these challenges crucibles.

People didn't stop developing as leaders once they'd successfully emerged from their crucible.  Many leaders described how the right kind of organisational culture had helped them to hone and enhance their leadership skills, but without that crucible experience, many doubted that they'd have been leaders at all.

Not everyone faces up to life's challenges in the same way. Some people learn and grow as a result of life's challenges. Others are diminished by them. How an individual responds to challenge is largely genetic.

In 2003 Terry Moffit and Avshalom Caspi studied the genetic makeup of 847 adults who had faced major setbacks with jobs, relationships, housing, health or money. They were particularly interested in gene 5-HTT, which in humans comes in pairs with either a short or a long version. Those with two long versions of the 5-HTT gene (about a third of the adults in the study) almost all bounced back after the negative events. Those with one long and one short version (about half) had a moderate risk of depression. But the 17% who had the two short versions nearly all suffered clinical depression as a result of their negative experiences. Other research, on both humans and monkeys, has confirmed the impact of 5-HTT gene variations on a person's ability to deal with challenge.

Now just because someone has the two short variations of 5-HTT doesn't mean they will suffer from depression – the combination of genetics and environment is subtle and complex. But it does mean that someone with this genetic makeup is far more likely to find life's challenges daunting and depressing, rather than positively developmental.

Nor am I saying that 5-HTT is the leadership gene. Many other attributes implicated in leadership – including confidence and risk taking – also have a strong genetic component.

Richard Arvey at the University of Minnesota took a more direct approach when he studied the leadership achievements of 646 identical and non identical twins. Since identical twins share 100% of their genes, and non identical around 50% he was able to identify the genetic component of leadership. His conclusion was that 39% of leadership abilities was genetic.

What is clear is that leadership abilities are most powerfully formed by a combination of genetic predisposition and crucible experiences – not by sending someone onto your company's leadership development programme.

So if you are responsible for developing leaders in your organisation, what should you do?

Your first step is to focus much more attention at selecting leaders of the future. This means thinking long term, something human beings are notoriously bad at.

Your second step is to stop promoting people into leadership roles when they lack leadership talent. Even more radically, you might even consider removing people from leadership roles if they really haven't got the talent for it.

Your third step is to create an organisational climate that nurtures leaders. Although a great deal of leadership talent is probably hard wired into people by the time they join your organisation, your organisation's culture is crucial; does it  nurture that latent talent, or extinguish it?

Leaders are people who challenge the status quo. Does your organisational culture encourage challenge, innovation, risk taking and experiment?

Leaders are people who think long term, who can articulate a compelling vision for the future. Does your organisational culture encourage long term, visionary thinking?

Leaders are people who genuinely engage others. Does your organisational culture genuinely engage people?

If your organisational culture encourages and rewards this kind of behaviour, it will help those with leadership talent to develop and use it. If it doesn't, people with leadership talent will either leave the organisation, or stay and whither away. It's hard to say what's worse.

If your organisational culture already supports the development of leaders, you can probably scrap your formal leadership development programmes and save yourself some time and money. But if your organisational culture doesn't support the development of leaders you need to change it. The question is: how?

Changing organisational culture isn't easy, but it can be done.

When Co-operative Food merged with Somerfield stores in 2009 the challenge facing MD Tim Hurrell and his HR director Debs Gleeson was to create a new organisational culture that drew on the best aspects of the two separate organisations: blending the Co-operative's commitment to community and fair trade with Somerfield's strong focus on leadership and commerciality. Here's what worked. Role modelling was key, especially by people at the top of the organisation. Getting the right systems and procedures in place was critical – if you want to encourage challenge, long term thinking and engagement you need, for example, a performance management system that rewards such qualities. People who live the new culture needed lots of reinforcement and people who violate the new culture needed to change – or be removed from the organisation. Telling the right kind of stories around the organisation communicates what's expected far more than a simple set of written values. What are the levers you can pull in your organisation to bring about the kind of culture you want?

Leadership is important. Developing leaders for your organisation is important. Competency based leadership development programmes are fairly easy to do, but are ineffective. Changing the organisational culture is hard, but much more effective at developing leaders. Do you want to do the easy wrong thing or the hard right thing?