Leadership Development Programmes (LDPs) are evolving because leadership development is a key driver for the success of organisations. We identified a gap of research towards best practices that demonstrate how a good leadership development programme should be designed and what the fundamental elements of a successful leadership development programme are. This is why this master thesis aims to investigate corporate leadership development programmes. In fact, this research assesses the prevailing state of leadership development programmes as they are conceived and executed today in order to offer aconstructive criticism and a platform for improvements. Thereby, we assess and enumerate the fundamental elements constituting leadership development programmes today, and furthermore, we assess and evaluate the criteria governing the success ofleadership development programmes. Moreover, we assess the roles played by the different actors involved in the conception, implementation and application of leadership development programmes. In search for excellence we conducted twelve interviews with three parties involved in leadership development programmes – participants, HRD professionals and training providers. We conducted our research and analysed our collected data based on the methodological approach of grounded theory according to Corbin and Strauss (2008). We found out that leadership development needs more than a programme. Therefore, in this work we demonstrate important criteria, which contain and represent what should be considered, when designing and providing leadership development programmes in organisations.