How to become the leader people want to work for in challenging times
This article was originally published in Fast Company.
When we began the year, top of mind for managers was keeping their best people and handling the burnt-out quiet quitters. Today, as inflation rages and hiring plans are shelved, it is tempting to believe that the talent crisis has passed. Maybe managers don’t have to worry so much about the disconnect and isolation. Perhaps employees will be more inclined to stay put in uncertain times.
Though the Great Resignation is probably over, it would be a mistake to think the challenge has passed. You need all hands on deck to focus on priorities during a recession. That means you must reignite the fire for quiet quitters. It’s important to stay focused on people during a recession because there is still a potential to become stretched and depleted. How can you re-inspire hearts and minds and still give people a sense of balance and flexibility?
Since the pandemic, many good changes have come to the workplace, not the least of them greater attention to the people side of business. The secret during a downturn is to remember that driving an agenda doesn’t mean losing that connection with your people.
Most of us think of ourselves as people leaders, but what we intend and how others see us is often different. What we’ve learned about leaders in challenging times has been assessed through data analysis. We know leaders who help others feel purposeful and resilient have qualities that are hard to come by and, therefore, highly valued.
Stay calm, carry on
We have been assessing leaders around the globe for 10 years, and we know that when leaders are calm in a crisis, people are more likely to share their concerns and get issues resolved. The qualities of composure and restraint are essential to building trust. Composure is the ability to manage through a difficult period with calm and resolve. Restraint is managing your emotions and creating a safe space for conversation. These are two critical aspects of constructing a psychologically safe environment where people love working and are free to speak up and be themselves.
People rally around leaders who approach situations calmly and objectively. Their teams know it’s okay to speak up, admit mistakes, and raise issues. If you struggle to remain calm, it can be helpful to delay a response, walk away, and give yourself time to think. If you set the intention to create a calmer place where people can thrive, employees will notice the change. During volatile times, remember to control your emotions.
Share more about yourself
Many of us are inclined to focus on others at the expense of sharing our authentic selves, but connection is a two-way conversation. When people don’t know us, they don’t trust us. This is what is meant by authenticity. In challenging times, such as a recession, you might be tempted to hold back and not share your concerns. The impact might be that people don’t feel they can trust you because they aren’t hearing the truth.
Leaders can demonstrate authenticity by sharing what is happening at the right time while also reassuring others that there is a plan. When you can be real with people, you are more likely to hear thanks. They want to be treated as peers in the workplace.
Storytelling can also be helpful during difficult times. Stories connect you with others and help them see you as human. People crave that kind of connection and appreciate learning from others. Showing authenticity in the workplace can increase engagement by 140%.
Balance humility and confidence
Great leaders balance confidence and humility, flexing both in challenging times. Humility is understanding you don’t have all the answers. People typically notice when a leader expresses genuine curiosity about their experiences and points of view. Asking questions and listening closely enables you to learn more, act more quickly, and address issues promptly.
Confidence is the ability to guide a team to make better decisions, especially when the choices during difficult times are less than ideal. It isn’t hubris or superior knowledge but rather a thoughtful, step-by-step approach to clarifying priorities, considering the data, and taking action.
Difficult times can incapacitate teams when they aren’t sure what to do. The plan forward must be altered, and too much is unknown. Great leaders help their teams consider the options and scenarios and remain flexible as conditions change.
Be receptive to feedback
To develop these qualities and evolve your leadership style, ask for feedback from people who see you in action every day to understand your shortcomings. We all have good intentions, but often our intentions don’t translate to inform how others see us. After meetings, try asking, “How am I doing?”
Hearing people out is the next step: Consider what the feedback they’ve shared might be true, however painful. After you consider the feedback, simple shifts can make a big difference in how people experience you.
As we round the corner to 2023, remember you’ve learned a lot in leading through challenging times. Although a downturn might test that learning, draw on the lessons and stay open to feedback. We can only control how we respond as leaders, and when we respond in ways we want to be led, we help create people-centric companies.
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Meetings are a universal ritual in organizational life. While managers on average spend more than half their working hours in meetings, many leaders can’t shake the feeling that meetings are falling short of their potential. Are they advancing the work, or quietly draining energy? At BTS, we study teams not as collections of individuals, but as living systems. This perspective reveals dynamics that traditional methods often overlook. Rather than aggregating individual 360° assessments, we assess the team as a whole to examine how the team functions collectively. Applying that lens to one of the most common team activities (meetings) uncovers patterns worth paying attention to. Drawing on thousands of team assessments in our database, we focused on two meeting behaviors:
- Do teams meet regularly?
- Do team members leave meetings with clear accountabilities and next steps?
Our question: How strongly do these behaviors relate to overall team effectiveness?
What the data revealed
Using data from 1,043 respondents (team members and informed stakeholders) we ran a Bayesian analysis to evaluate the predictive power of each behavior. The results were striking:
- Both behaviors were linked to higher team effectiveness.
- But one mattered far more: leaving meetings with clear accountabilities and next steps was 3.9x more predictive of team effectiveness than simply meeting regularly.
- And teams that often or always wrap up meetings with next steps rated 0.66 points higher on a 5-point scale of team effectiveness than teams who sometimes, rarely, or never close with accountabilities - that's almost a full standard deviation higher (0.96 sd)
Meetings aren’t the problem, muddy outcomes are.
Teams often default to frequency, setting cadences of check-ins or standing meetings. Our data suggest that what differentiates effective teams from the rest is not how many meetings they hold, but what comes out of them. A team that meets less often but ends each session with clear accountabilities will outperform a team that meets frequently but leaves outcomes ambiguous. In other words, meetings aren’t inherently wasted time; they become wasted time when they don’t translate into aligned action.
A simple shift that pays dividends
The good news: improving meetings doesn’t require radical redesign. Small changes reinforce accountability and dramatically increase the value extracted:
- Close with clarity. Reserve the last 5–10 minutes of every meeting to confirm: What decisions have been made? Who owns what? By when? This habit shifts meetings from “discussions” to “decisions.”
- Make commitments visible. Use a shared action log, team board, or project tracker so next steps are transparent, and progress is easy to follow. Visibility builds accountability.
- Assign a “Closer.” Rotating this role signals that closing well is everyone’s responsibility. The Closer ensures the team doesn’t drift into vague agreements, but leaves aligned and ready to act.
When teams adopt these habits, the difference is tangible: less rehashing of the same topics, faster progress on priorities, and a stronger sense of shared ownership. These small shifts compound quickly, making meetings not just more efficient, but more energizing and effective. In a world where teams face relentless demands and limited time, focusing on how meetings end may be one of the fastest ways to improve how teams perform.
Co-authored by Cilsy Harris, Senior Vice President, CIO Insurance & Service Applications, The Hanover Insurance Group
At one time, most of us probably thought that a year into the pandemic we’d be back in the office and the virtual solution we employed as an emergency measure would be a thing of the past. However, it’s become very clear that virtual is here to stay – either as companies adopt fully-remote business models, or as is likely to be the case more often, they move to hybrid models that blend the best of remote and in-person work. Regardless of which model they choose we think smart companies will preserve the best aspects of the virtual experience to continue to create equality in communication and facilitate greater sharing of ideas.
This virtual environment has been a great equalizer. In many ways, our ability to meet and work virtually has helped us eliminate pretenses and share our authenticity to create more human connection. We’ve become less self-conscious and more down to earth in our business interactions. We’ve learned more about our colleagues’ personal lives, enabling us to recognize and truly treat each other as humans, not simply as the means by which work gets accomplished.
Creating big wins for important business goals
This new environment has created six big wins for achieving important business goals:
1. Driving engagement/connection:
Authentic connection is the secret sauce for senior executives. It’s what drives trust, engagement, and execution. Our research shows authentic leaders build trust and put others at ease by sharing their own emotions and experiences, and by revealing stories and life lessons that resonate with others’ own situations.
A byproduct of the virtual world is that some of the barriers to sharing have been removed. The close-up camera creates eye-to-eye contact and a more personal interaction. Our insight into each other’s daily lives outside the office through the view of the camera has changed the tone and ease of our connection.
Virtual meetings also foster authentic connections across geographically dispersed teams in the organization in more efficient and meaningful ways. Regularly scheduled meetings with teams in Europe, Middle East and Asia/Pacific in the morning and those in the Americas in the afternoon, create cross-pollination of ideas and connections that previously would have required weeks of travel.
2. Enabling collaboration among large groups, across geographies:
Dick Lavey, executive vice president of Agency Markets at The Hanover, relays how forums are being reinvented. “Picture a traditional sales planning meeting, held in a large, cavernous hotel room with 40+ people spread out in a big square, using microphones,” he says.
“It was intimidating for the presenter and difficult for the audience to track the dialogue. Now, this same meeting is transformed into an intimate and engaging experience for both the presenters and the meeting participants.”
Well-facilitated meetings create forums for dialogue that lead to better outcomes. The outcome of this shift is understanding that for certain events and forums, choosing a virtual model can create greater intimacy and engagement. Choosing the right forum for the purpose is our call to action.
The virtual world has delivered the impetus to rethink and reimagine how we design forums to optimize attendance and participation, and to offset some of the challenges presented by geographic location. “Events that once were considered feasible only when they were held in person, like our annual Innovation Expo, saw big gains in attendance across all geographies,” according to Will Lee, EVP and Chief Information and Innovation Officer at The Hanover.
“It also has enabled all attending Hanover employees to experience the event in the same manner, regardless of location. One of the most significant outcomes of this new approach was creating a live example of how we can design environments to make space for innovative thinking that cut across the entire organization and include all roles and levels.”
We are also able to meet with more people, more quickly. At the Hanover, our agent road shows, no longer limited by time and space, can be held on back-to-back days–in Georgia one day, Upstate NY the next, and Washington State the very next day. This meeting line-up would have been impossible in person. “We ‘cover more ground’ by not covering any ground,” says Lavey.
At BTS, we’re hosting highly collaborative senior executive team meetings and leadership development programs that enable leaders to create greater impact. After only a few half days, global executive teams decide strategic direction, tackle sticky issues, form agreement on how to better work together, make important decisions, and create strategic action plans–launching the organization on a new trajectory.
3. Attracting talent:
For Lee, finding great talent has gotten a real boost with hybrid operating models, and at The Hanover, we are seeing this have a meaningful impact. As we’ve eliminated geography as a defining factor for those hard-to-find roles in security, innovation, and even executive leadership, we’ve become an attractive employer to a much larger pool of talented candidates. Candidates are now able to choose roles based on company culture and specific opportunities, without being restricted by the proximity of the job to their homes.
4. Retaining top talent:
A client recently told me that he lost a great employee because this person was assured a role with another company in a work-from-home arrangement. Top employees have demonstrated great commitment to their work, high productivity and skillful leadership while enjoying the greater work/life balance that work-from-home enables. This has become quite important to many people of all ages, especially working parents, employees who care for elderly parents, and those helping family members with physical and mental health issues. Remote work is an increasingly valuable way to attract and retain great talent.
5. Creating efficiencies:
Even reimagining how products are launched has delivered more tangible benefits than we previously thought possible. At The Hanover, our virtual launch events have attracted much higher attendance and generated strong satisfaction ratings. At BTS, we’re able to help more clients in a single day and our clients appreciate spending less time traveling.
6. Improving interactions:
Lastly, the equalizing effect has improved many daily interactions as well.
- We’re all the same on video, take up the same space, and our stature at the table is the same. No one is at the head and no one has a second-row seat.
- Rather than having some in the room and some on video, we’re all in the same room, and we’re able to meet with our global teams, on equal footing, at any time.
- Those with differing communication and work styles, such as introverts and extroverts, find the capabilities of collaboration technology suit their ability to participate either by chat, raising their hand, or amplifying the comments of another person. Everyone can contribute and be heard.
As many companies transition to their future work models—whether they are fully-remote or hybrid—the virtual experience and confidence we have gained over the course of the pandemic will help us be even more efficient and effective.Many employees are anxious to get back to the workplaces that are the backbones of our society. We look forward to seeing faces and having meaningful in-person interactions. And, we have the opportunity to make this transition in a thoughtful way, to leverage all we’ve learned about authenticity, efficiencies, and connection through technology.
Tips for maintaining the equalizing benefits of virtual work
Here are a few tips to pull through some of the equalizing benefits as we make our way back to the office:
1. Be mindful and intentional about continuing to connect with people on a personal level.
Schedule time regularly in your calendar to get together with a small group for lunch, organize a skip-level group for coffee, or host an informal, or one-on-one conversation. Set no real agenda other than to see how people are doing, get their feedback, listen to what they are working on. Be sure to share personal stories and experiences as part of this two-way interaction.
2. Commit to creating an environment in your meetings where everyone can contribute and be heard.
Assign an individual in your team meetings, on a rotating basis, to play the role of monitor, to encourage the quiet or remote individuals to participate more, and to reign in the overly strong voices. Make a point of sitting in a different place each time to shake up the room. Set up a team chat channel for each of your regular meetings and encourage follow up comments and conversation in between meetings, for those less comfortable sharing in the room. Participate regularly yourself to model the behavior.
3. Don’t be afraid to keep the new virtual paradigm where it makes sense.
The lessons about productivity and efficiency, whether you are hosting a virtually based product launch, sales meeting, or training program, should inform how to choose the format. And fewer, shorter, more effective meetings will energize people and afford them more time to get more done.Now is the time to preserve the good that has come out of our virtual working environments, even as we migrate back to the traditional office. We will all be more engaged and connected as a result.
Under pressure to perform, how can leaders help their teams be successful even in unfavorable conditions?
Taking a coaching and mentoring approach is one way to ensure success. In almost every coaching conversation this year, leaders have shared the pressure they feel to deliver big results despite the reality of current economic headwinds and uncertainty in the business world.In one conversation, a leader described his experience:
“Given that people are feeling anxious about the economy, our senior leaders have set impossibly ambitious goals for 2023.”
He asked,
“What am I supposed to do? Tell my team that they can hit those goals—when I don’t believe it myself?”
This leaders’ reality is not unusual. Leaders are under more pressure than ever to hit their numbers and deliver shareholder value, even when it doesn’t seem realistic. So what can you do? In the case of this leader, he was deeply passionate about mentoring and coaching people of all ages – in fact, his favorite thing to do outside of work was coaching youth basketball.
I asked him:
“As a basketball coach, I imagine your team faces situations that feel like impossible odds. What do you do in that situation? Do you shrug your shoulders and tell the team they had better face the fact that they’re about to get their butts kicked?”
At first, he laughed but thought it over and responded:
“I tell the team, ‘Don’t look at the scoreboard; don’t look at the clock. Let’s just focus on doing the next thing right. Let’s go for a small win—make a great pass, go for a steal—and build on that.’”
While it may not be a great pass or a steal, when you’re faced with what feels like impossible conditions, look for the small wins. Then, chart a path forward with steps that the team can take over the next couple of weeks to head in the right direction. As you look to inspire others to get through a year of economic uncertainty, it can be tempting to raise the bar in the hope that people will rise to the occasion. Instead, try focusing on the everyday behaviors that lead to small wins. As these wins pile up, they create confidence, momentum, and progress.
By keeping everyone’s focus on small steps in the right direction, they might surprise themselves by ending up on a summit at the end of a rocky 2023.
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There’s a specific kind of strategy meeting getting scheduled right now, in nice hotels with bad coffee: the AI reset off-site.
And for good reason. In a 2026 WRITER survey, 48% of leaders described their AI rollout as, in their own words, a "massive disappointment." That's nearly half the room.
What that number really measures is the distance between what these tools can do and what people are doing with them. In our experience, that distance is almost entirely human.
Which is why the off-site is the right instinct. Making the most of that time is the harder part.
What separates an AI reset that actually changes the game from an expensive two-day conversation? In our experience, it comes down to avoiding four common design mistakes.
Mistake 1
Blaming the bots
The gap between AI investment and real adoption is almost always about people, not technology. And when adoption stalls, we usually find it's one of four things.
- They don't think it will help them
- Nobody around them is using it
- They don't feel capable
- Or they don't have real access to the tools they were promised
Four different problems, and four completely different fixes.
That's why diagnosis comes first. If you don't know which barrier you're dealing with, every intervention becomes an educated guess. And you cannot tell which one you have by staring at a dashboard. A belief gap and a skill gap look identical in a status report and need opposite interventions. Show up guessing, and you'll spend real money teaching people to use a tool they simply don't trust yet. Congratulations - you've just catered the wrong conversation.
Mistake 2
Letting leaders off the hook
One of the biggest predictors of whether change sticks is also one of the most overlooked: leadership.
If your executives show up as observers, nodding along and quietly answering email under the table, your people clock it in about four minutes.
That doesn't mean your CEO has to emcee the thing. It means they use the tools in front of everyone, participate in the conversation, and make it clear this isn't someone else's initiative.
Recently we’ve been working with a Fortune 200 global professional services firm who’s top 120 leaders were at very different points with AI. Some were redesigning entire processes. Others were using it to summarize emails, or not at all. Rather than focus on the technology, the four-hour session focused on what leaders could do with AI, applying it to a live strategic challenge and ending with a personal commitment to lead differently. The response was strong enough that the organization is now cascading the experience globally.
The lesson is simple: when leaders experience AI as a strategic capability, they're better equipped to model the behavior that makes adoption stick. Nothing you build during those two days survives without that entire chain of leadership doing its part.
Mistake 3
Chasing the wrong outcome
Without a behavioral baseline, you have no way to prove anything actually moved. No baseline, no ROI. You're just hoping the energy in the room was good, which is a wonderful feeling and a terrible metric to bring to your CFO.
But the baseline isn't just about proving the off-site worked. It's about understanding where you're starting in the first place. And you'll want that clarity, because the quiet resistance is real. In that same 2026 research, nearly a third of employees admitted to actively working around their company's AI strategy. If you don't win their belief in the room, some of them will keep politely ignoring the whole thing from their desks. You can't measure your way out of that. You have to earn your way out of it.
Which brings us to the biggest reframe of all.
Mistake 4
Leaving follow-through to chance
We've been working with a Fortune 100 medical device company on their AI strategy for three years. It started with their leadership team, a three-hour session built around what those leaders would do differently, and it landed. What became clear afterward was that the same experience needed to happen everywhere else. So, it expanded: 90-minute activations for 15,000 people, and this year intact teams redesigning their own workflows.
Three years in, that first session is the smallest part of the story.
Your event is where momentum gets created. What happens at 30, 60, and 90 days is where results get made.
If you're planning one of these and want to change what happens on Monday, not just how everyone feels on Friday, that the work we do.
We'd be glad to help you design it.
Candidates now arrive at interviews pre-coached by AI, with their resumes optimized to pass every checkpoint. Polish has stopped being a signal. The traditional hiring process was built to read exactly the cues that AI is now best at producing, and the signals hiring managers once relied on have weakened as a result. And for roles where the wrong hire carries real business consequences, losing the ability to tell who will actually perform is not a minor inconvenience. It is a material risk, and it exposes the business to unnecessary turnover, reduced performance, and heavier investment for talent growth and development.
So how do you observe the behaviors that matter most, before someone is in the role?
Not by asking better questions, but rather by putting candidates in situations designed to elicit that behavior.
The limits of predicting from paper
Credentials tell you what someone has done. Structured interviews tell you what someone says they would do. Neither lets you observe what they actually do in the moments that count.
This distinction matters most in client-facing, relationship-driven roles, where the performance gap between a strong hire and a weak one plays out in real business outcomes (revenue, retention, client growth). Organizations that hire at scale in these roles carry that gap across hundreds of decisions at a time.
The better approach is to watch candidates do the work before you hire them. Put them in simulated, role-relevant scenarios, and pair the simulation with a second, different kind of measure so no single method carries the whole decision. That combination is what lets you evaluate real performance before anyone is in the role. Organization-specific simulations provide a clear read on who is ready and capable of performing on day one. In a world of AI-supported candidate signals, the use of simulations makes the process harder to prep for. It is harder to fake. And, when designed well, it is substantially more predictive than other hiring methods.
What counts as evidence
Claims about predictive power are easy to make. Evidence for them is rarer than you would expect.
A predictive validity study, the kind that links pre-hire assessment scores to how someone actually performs once hired, is some of the hardest evidence to produce and the rarest to see. Many assessments are validated against proxies: another test, or a theoretical model of the role, rather than real results on the job. Connecting scores to concrete business outcomes and doing the statistical work to show the link holds, takes years of shared data and a level of commitment from both the assessment provider and the client that most partnerships never reach. That is precisely why it is worth asking for. A provider who can show how assessment scores track to training completion, retention, and first-year output is offering something categorically different from one who can only show a correlation with another test.
Why simulation holds up where other methods do not
When a candidate sits across from a trained assessor (someone playing the client or prospect on the other side of the conversation) and has to work through a real situation, they cannot rely on a rehearsed answer. The scenario is specific. The stakes feel real. What you see is close to what you would get on the job.
That is the value of simulation-based assessment: it does not test what candidates know about the role.
It shows how they use what they know when a real person is on the other side of the conversation, before the stakes are real.
For roles that carry significant business responsibility, this distinction is the whole game. The cost of the wrong hire in a high-stakes client-facing role is not just a missed quota for a quarter - It plays out in relationships that do not develop, clients who leave, and productivity losses that compound over time. Getting those hiring decisions right, at scale, with consistency, requires methods that are built for predictive accuracy, not just candidate experience or hiring speed.
What this means for how organizations think about hiring
Most organizations are still optimizing the wrong things in their hiring process. They invest heavily in employer branding, application flow, and interview structure, all of which matter, but less in the core question: does our hiring process actually predict who will succeed in this role?
AI has sharpened the stakes here. If every candidate can present as polished and prepared, screening based on presentation becomes less useful. What holds up is direct observation of the behaviors that the job requires.
A few principles worth building from:
- Measure what the job requires, not what is easy to measure. Cognitive tests and personality questionnaires have their place, but they do not look much like the job. The closer the assessment is to the actual work, the better it predicts performance in it.
- Ask what your assessment predicts. Training completion? Retention? First-year output? Most organizations cannot answer that question today, largely because providers have rarely been asked to prove it. It is a fair thing to ask for.
- Take the human element seriously. In a simulation, a candidate is having a real conversation, responding in real time, navigating a situation that requires judgment. Even with the help of AI, that is hard to game. And it remains one of the strongest predictors of on-the-job performance available.
The data exists to make hiring decisions more accurate, fairer, and more directly tied to business outcomes. For organizations operating in high-stakes roles at scale, there is too much on the line to rely on methods that cannot hold up to that standard.
You may be interested in BTS’ thought leadership in the five talent shifts AI is forcing now.
La IA ya forma parte del día a día de las ventas. Hoy cualquier asesor puede llegar a una reunión con datos, tendencias e insights generados en segundos. Sin embargo, disponer de más información no garantiza conversaciones de mayor valor.
A través de una experiencia real con un consultor comercial, este artículo explica por qué la inteligencia artificial funciona como un GPS: ayuda a interpretar el entorno, pero no conduce la conversación ni entiende las prioridades del cliente.
En este artículo descubrirás:
- Por qué el acceso a la información ya no supone una ventaja competitiva.
- La importancia del business acumen para interpretar los datos con criterio.
- Cómo hablar el lenguaje del cliente genera credibilidad y diferenciación.
- Por qué las relaciones B2B evolucionan hacia relaciones P2P basadas en la confianza.
- Qué capacidades consultivas seguirán siendo exclusivamente humanas incluso en la era de la IA.
La tecnología seguirá evolucionando, pero la ventaja competitiva estará en quienes sean capaces de combinar inteligencia artificial con conversaciones centradas en el cliente, pensamiento estratégico y relaciones de largo plazo.