Award-bearing transnational professional development training has received little attention in the literature. By taking a longitudinal mixed-methods approach, this project's researchers investigated the ways in which participants on a World Bank-funded programme practised leadership at the start of their training, before revisiting them a year later to find out what, if any, changes had resulted. It was discovered that the award-bearing design had been very influential in endowing the participants with concepts that they enthusiastically adopted, but that, over time, the concepts had undergone a process of simplification, largely driven by incongruities between the concepts and the cultural environments to which they had been applied. It is recommended that award-bearing programmes might more readily take into account the individual and contextual circumstances of their participants at the planning stage.