The development of high potentials within global companies remains a challenge in leadership development in the face of increasingly dynamic environments. Despite this, we know surprisingly little about the practices business schools and corporations follow when it comes to Global Leadership Development Programs (GLDP). In this article, we derive critical success factors of the components of a GLDP leveraging evidence of 90 conducted panel interviews with global human resources experts and qualitative analysis of 33 GLDPs, 20 high‐level executive storytelling about competences and practical key elements leading successful and results‐driven change in their global companies, and 12 interviews with executive education directors. We examine within a grounded theory approach two overall under‐explored questions. What is a successful GLDP? Moreover, how to design it? What are the critical success factors in designing a GLDP? We derive a checklist to help implement future GLDPs within their global organizations. Our findings and discussion outline future research recommendations and provide advice for GLDP designers within Executive Education or HR Development contexts.