What leaders need to do more of now, more than ever
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I happened to be going through a box of memorabilia recently – looking for a leadership book that used to sit on a shelf in my office – back when I used to go into an office to work. I did not find the book. I did find a campaign button from 1972 which said: “President Nixon, Now More Than Ever.” I laughed out loud at seeing it, appreciating the irony, given Nixon’s impeachment a year later. Don’t worry, this is not a post about politics. This is about leadership, and about how this world needs to continue to develop better leaders now, more than ever.
Many of our clients believe this. I was recently on a call with a C-Suite leader of a large, well-known company that has been hit hard by the pandemic, the economic downturn, and the continuing social unrest in our world. This company has had to lay off or furlough roughly a third of its workforce. And yet, this organization is continuing to invest in the development of some very key senior leaders. Certainly not as much as they did previously, nor as much as they would like to be doing. However, they are determined to continue to support their key leaders, none of whom have faced anything like this set of circumstances before. In fact, if I step back a bit, I see that most of our clients are doing the same thing, and they are asking us for help.
In the course of working with these leaders, we see that a lot of what they need to do now is not fundamentally different. It is about the business and executing their strategy. The main difference is how to adapt those to the current conditions, to clarify the path through to prosperity on the other side. In these times, there are 4 overarching things that leaders should be doubling down on now, to build and maintain momentum for the business.
1. First and perhaps foremost is to remain calm and composed amidst the various storms that surround us.
One of the things that first responders are taught is to a) remain calm themselves and b) spread calm to others that are involved in dangerous or dramatic situations. I experienced this first-hand during a recent session with a senior leadership team that was working through some very hard decisions around people and resources. I witnessed as the tension started to rise in the (virtual) room, with a handful of the team getting visibly agitated over these tough choices. This is normally where the facilitator steps in to calm things down. In this case, though, the CFO beat me to it. First by naming what was going on, second by sharing how hard this was for everyone, and last by reminding everyone of the common goals that the team has for its leadership of the organization. This allowed everyone the time and space to have calmer and more productive deliberations.
2. Second is to chart a clear course through and beyond these crises. This is as true for CEOs as it is for front line managers.
Focus on what we do and do not know, now. Involve others in defining what actions give us the best chance of survival and even growth. The top supply chain leader for a global industrial company has exemplified this over the past 8 months. As is the case with so many other supply networks in the pandemic, they experienced many disruptions, some of them quite serious and dramatic. In response, she mobilized her top team, who in turn collaborated with their key suppliers and internal stakeholders to build a plan to minimize the disruption. She then used the organization’s various communication channels to make everyone aware of the plan. This fast action resulted in the company being able to meet almost all of its commitments to customers. It also resulted in the supply chain organization learning new ways of doing their work – that they tell us will last long after the pandemic is past.
3. Third is to communicate with clarity and transparency.
The first two things don’t matter much if you can’t do this part well. A perfect strategy to weather these storms is almost meaningless unless the vast majority of your organization gets it, believes it and acts in concert with it. My favorite example of this is Arne Sorenson, the CEO of Marriott. Early on in the pandemic, he posted this communication to all Marriott associates worldwide. This is literally a masterpiece of executive communication by anyone’s standards. While I’ve never met Mr. Sorenson, I have talked to a number of leaders at Marriott, who expressed their admiration and respect for his continuing leadership. By the way, you don’t have to be the CEO of Marriott to practice this skill. You simply need to share what you do know, what you don’t know and paint a picture for what you want your people to do next.
4. Last is to find a way to celebrate wins, big and small.
What your stressed and worn out teams need more than anything is positive news—something good to focus on. This could be as simple as reflecting on the positive effects on our environment from burning less carbon, to one person going the extra mile in service of a client, to the big sale, to any number of good outcomes. The CEO of a growing tech company we work with has exemplified this through his increased use of video communications during the pandemic. This is a big leap for someone who has tended to shy away from the camera in the past. Under COVID, he now regularly broadcasts messages of support across his global organization. These messages include news of big client acquisitions, new software releases and promising alliance partnerships. They also include heavy doses of recognition for people at all levels for outstanding work. In interacting with people from Manila to Manhattan, his teams have shared how important and uplifting these communications are in helping them to weather these storms.
The most important thing for leaders to remember in times like these, is that good leadership – and these four critical fundamentals – are not a one-time early crisis action. Prioritize them now and make them part of how you lead and manage every day.
Related content
Related content
Leadership is the work of creating shared understanding, and language is the primary tool for doing it. Yet we spend remarkably little time examining our words. Every decision, expectation, priority, and piece of feedback reaches another person through words. If those words aren't doing the job, neither is the leadership.
The lighthouse
Some years ago, a large company hired a strategy consulting firm to rethink its leadership model. The firm came back with a beautifully produced framework built around a central metaphor: the lighthouse.
Leaders, the model declared, should be lighthouses.
The metaphor quickly found its way into playbooks, performance reviews, onboarding decks, and town halls. People repeated it with the confidence of those who had paid a lot of money for it.
There was just one problem: nobody could agree on what a lighthouse was supposed to do.
Was it warning people away from danger? Guiding them toward a destination? Standing firm while everything else changed?
Eventually, the company hired another team to translate the metaphor into specific, observable leadership behaviors.
It was an expensive way to discover that a word everyone confidently repeated wasn't creating nearly as much shared understanding asthey thought.
Why jargon prevails
- Parking lot that
- Double-click
- Close the loop
Business jargon survives because it’s largely designed to manage social risk. Using it signals, I know how this world works. It demonstrates membership, competence, and credibility.
Business is messy, and leaders don't always have complete information. Abstract language lets us project confidence while preserving flexibility.
Altitude without traction
Specific language creates accountability. The more specific you are, the easier it is for people to disagree, question your thinking, orhold you accountable. That's part of the appeal of jargon. It creates distance between the speaker and the detail. The more abstract and elevated your language, the more strategic you sound.
A 2020 study by Harvard Business School professors Laura Huang and Andy Wu, published in the Academy ofManagement Journal, analyzed over 1,000 early-stage startup pitches and found that founders who spoke in abstract, visionary terms were significantly more likely to advance in the funding process.
A separate study, published in Applied Cognitive Psychology in 2025, found the other side: jargon raises how credible a speaker appears and lowers how much the audience retains.
The very language that helps people see you as a leader can make you less effective once you're leading.
The most trusted leaders tend to be the ones who resist impressive-sounding language and say the plainest version of what they mean.
In fact, four words probably do more for a leader's standing than any carefully crafted message: I made a mistake. Not "we encountered some headwinds," not "there were learnings from this experience," but the plain version.
The cost of comfort
When a conversation gets uncomfortable at work, it almost always feels easier to soften your message than to say exactly what you mean. You hedge, add qualifiers, cushion the point with extra reassurance, or leave the hardest part unsaid. Most of the time, you mean well. You don't want to discourage someone, damage the relationship, or create unnecessary conflict. The conversation becomes less uncomfortable for a moment, but the work often becomes harder afterward.
Amy Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School and author of The Fearless Organization, found that the fear of making a negative impression pushes people to stay silent exactly when clarity is most needed. According to her research, silence is one of the most consistent predictors of teams that miss problems early and never learn from them. The friction avoided in the meeting resurfaces later, at greater cost.
KimScott, former executive at Google and Apple and author of Radical Candor, calls this ruinous empathy: softening your message to protect someone's short-term feelings comes at the cost of the clarity they need. Her argument is simple and uncomfortable: clear, direct communication, even when it is hard, is an act of care.
The quiet power of saying what you mean
None of this is an argument for bland, colorless language.Vivid, precise writing does the opposite of jargon: it sharpens meaning instead of hiding it. Before reaching for a word, pause on two questions:
- What do I mean by it?
- What will my audience hear?
A surprising amount of corporate language wouldn't survive those two questions.
Leaders have more influence over language than they often realize. Whatever tone, vocabulary, and level of directness they model becomes the standard everyone else copies. Word choice is one of the quietest ways leaders shape culture.
This matters even more as we hand our language to AI. These tools can already learn to write in our voice. The question now is whether we've been deliberate enough about that voice in the first place to like what we see.
You can't predict the future. You can be disciplined about how you face it.
That's where Future Storming comes in. Future Storming is a process for looking at the trends and signals already visible in the market, understanding how those forces connect, and thinking more clearly about where they may lead.
Recently, we've been applying that lens to talent strategy, running Future Storming sessions with talent leaders across industries to understand which forces are already reshaping how organizations find, develop, and retain the people they need. When you look across those conversations, one thing is hard to miss: AI runs through almost all of the most significant trends, and not as a future scenario. It's already reworking the talent systems most organizations have leaned on for years, often quietly, and often faster than leadership teams have had time to respond.
From these sessions, five high-likelihood, high-impact shifts have emerged as the ones every talent leader needs to be watching right now. What follows is what each of them may mean for your organization.
1. The frameworks most organizations use to define great leadership were built for a different era
Skills and competency models describe work that no longer exists in many roles or that AI now performs alongside, or instead of, humans. The gap between what organizations say they're selecting and developing for, and what the work actually requires, is widening quietly.
This creates a real problem. Organizations that don't redefine what great looks like now will be developing the wrong people for the wrong future optimizing for capabilities that are becoming less predictive while under-investing in the ones that matter most.
- Rebuild leadership profiles from a future-back perspective, starting with where the business is heading, not where it has been.
- Focus on the distinctly human capabilities AI cannot replicate judgment in ambiguous conditions, relational intelligence, ethical reasoning, the ability to set direction when there is no precedent.
- Increase the use of behavioral observation in selection and development. It's the only methodology that shows how someone actually thinks and decides under real pressure.
The signal worth chasing isn't on a resume, it's in the room in how someone handles a real situation, under genuine pressure. It's the only place where someone can't prepare their way out of being themselves.
2. Human differentiators are the last mile AI cannot close
Judgment. Empathy. Creativity. The ability to navigate genuine ambiguity. These are increasingly what separates human contribution from AI output and they're precisely the things most talent systems have always found hardest to measure.
For a long time, organizations could afford to treat these as qualities that would emerge naturally with experience. That's no longer an option. The human differentiators are becoming the job. And most organizations still aren't measuring them well.
The methods exist behavioral assessment, simulation, structured observation. And AI is now making them accessible at scale in ways that simply weren't possible before. The question isn't whether to use them. It's how to deploy them thoughtfully, with the governance and transparency that -stakes talent decisions require.
- AI-powered behavioral observation that surfaces how people actually perform in the flow of work, (i.e. judgement, decision-making, adaptability) not self-report
- Assessment that evaluated how people work with AI, not just without it because that's increasingly what the role looks like
- Simulation-based approaches that reveal thinking in action - the kind of evidence no credential or output can provide
3. The talent pipeline is broken
AI is displacing the early-career work that has traditionally served as the on-ramp into organizational life. Those tasks once gave emerging employees something more valuable than work product. They gave them foundational experiences, relationships, and judgment. The kind of judgment that eventually grows into leadership.
The impact won't show up immediately. That's exactly what makes it worth paying attention to now. Within three to six years, benches will thin and succession pipelines will require far more intentional investment. Organizations will find themselves asking why their internal talent isn't developing the way it used to.
The organizations that get ahead of this have a real opportunity to build something more deliberate, more equitable, and better suited to the capabilities the future actually requires.
- Invest in real, simulation-based experiences, putting emerging leaders into the decisions and pressures that build genuine organizational judgment, not just task exposure.
- Redefine what early-career development is, building toward the capabilities the future requires, not the ones the old job description described.
- Build feedback into the flow of work. AI behavioral observation and practice AI role plays make continuous development possible at scale. The experience that used to happen informally has to be designed now.
4. People need to re-skill faster than any development model was built to support
People need to reskill faster than any development model was built to support. Most organizational development infrastructure was built around a longer, more stable arc of skill acquisition. AI is compressing that arc significantly.
The implication isn't just that training needs to be faster. It's that the whole architecture of how organizations identify, develop, and deploy talent needs to be built for continuous recalibration not periodic refresh.
- Prioritize adaptability and learning agility over static expertise. The ability to acquire new capabilities quickly matters more than the specific capabilities someone holds today.
- Treat reskilling as a continuous organizational process, not an episodic program.
5. AI is absorbing leadership work and culture is losing it's anchor
This is the shift that's easiest to underestimate, and hardest to recover from once it arrives.
Culture is what people see leaders do. The behaviors leaders model how they make decisions, how they show up in hard moments, what they choose to reward and what they let go are how organizational culture gets transmitted. It doesn't travel through stated values. It travels through visible human behavior.
AI is absorbing the work that used to make leaders visible as humans making choices. Performance reviews written by AI. Communications drafted by AI. Coaching conversations mediated by AI. When the distinctly human work disappears, so does the signal. People don't know what to watch anymore. And culture which depends on that watching starts to fray.
The organizations that navigate this well won't be the ones that use less AI, they'll be the ones most intentional about which leadership behaviors remain visibly human, and why.
The behaviors that held culture together need to be rebuilt around what humans uniquely contribute now and that starts with getting the success profile right. That's exactly what the Future Ready Profile is built for.
Strengthen empathy-centered leadership capabilities. The human dimensions of leadership matter more, not less, as AI takes on more of the technical work.
- Strengthen empathy-centered leadership capabilities. The human dimensions of leadership matter more, not less, as AI takes on more of the technical work.
- Reinforce organizational purpose and human-centered culture as anchors.
- Treat culture as something you design, not something you inherit.
What this means
The organizations that navigate this well won't be the ones that adopted AI fastest, they'll be the ones that invested just as deliberately in the human systems around it.
These five shifts aren't warnings. They're design problems, and design problems have answers. The talent systems that come out of this moment can be more intentional, more equitable, and more fit for purpose than anything we've built before.
At BTS, this is the work we're doing every day. If you'd like to think through what any of it means for your organization, we’d love to talk.
The thinking in this article was shapped by Future Storming sessions, including a SIOP 2026 workshop, and by ongoing conversations with talent leaders navigating these shifts in real time.
Hace unos meses terminé una sesión con un equipo de ejecutivos comerciales de una institución financiera mediana. Dos días intensos: cómo prospectar, cómo estructurar conversaciones centradas en el cliente, cómo crear valor en cada interacción. El grupo salió inspirado del taller.
Tres semanas después le pregunté a uno de los mejores participantes sobre cómo le había ido aplicando las nuevas herramientas. Me miró un segundo y me dijo, con total honestidad:
“La verdad... la semana siguiente fue igual que siempre, volví al viejo sistema”
El entrenamiento de capacidades es necesario. Pero sin una cultura comercial que lo sostenga, es un esfuerzo poco rentable para las empresas.
1. Las capacidades sin contexto no sobreviven al día a día
Un ejecutivo de ventas puede salir de un taller sabiendo exactamente qué preguntar, cómo estructurar una conversación de valor, cómo posicionarse como asesor estratégico en lugar de vendedor de productos. La semana siguiente, el peso de las métricas de corto plazo, la presión por resultados y las urgencias del día a día terminan arrastrándolos de vuelta a la rutina de siempre.
McKinsey (2024) encontró que más del 70% de las iniciativas de transformación comercial no logran sus objetivos — y la principal causa no es el diseño del programa, sino la falta de condiciones organizacionales para sostener los nuevos comportamientos.
El problema no es el taller. Es lo que existe o no existe en la realidad de la estructura comercial.
2. El cambio requiere alinear seis pilares
Lo que diferencia a las empresas que realmente transforman su modelo comercial de las que solo capacitan, está relacionado con seis pilares que operan simultáneamente.
1. Patrocinio de la alta dirección que empodera en lugar de solo exigir
2. Disciplina en gestión de cuentas/clientes estratégicos, con metodología y seguimiento
3. Conversaciones centradas en el cliente, no en el portafolio de productos
4. Cada interacción con relevancia estratégica, preparadapara crear valor medible
5. Nuevos comportamientos integrados al ritmo operativodiario y la cadencia del negocio
6. Líderes comerciales presentes que sostienen la cultura, no solo la expresan
Cuando falta uno, los demás no escalan y terminan provocando un círculo vicioso.
3. El liderazgo que sostiene vale más que el que exige
El patrocinio de la alta dirección y la presencia de los líderes comerciales sonlos pilares que más frecuentemente fallan. No porque los líderes no crean en el cambio, sino porque el día a día los jala de vuelta a revisar resultados, no a construir comportamientos.
Gartner (2024) señala que los equipos comerciales cuyos líderes hacen coaching activo y visible tienen hasta un 28% mayor probabilidad de adoptar nuevos comportamientos de manera sostenida.
El entrenamiento define el rumbo y entrega el mapa; el liderazgo es lo que realmente ayuda a navegar y sostener el cambio.
Conclusión
Si tu empresa está invirtiendo en transformar la forma en que sus equipos comerciales se relacionan con los clientes, la pregunta ya no es si el entrenamiento funciona. La verdadera pregunta es: ¿qué tan preparada está la organización para sostener el cambio?
Porque el talento existe. Las habilidades se desarrollan. Pero la cultura no se improvisa; se construye todos los días, con liderazgo, alineación y consistencia.
¿Cuál de estos seis pilares es hoy el más débil en tu organización?