CEO succession: Avoiding the unanticipated Domino Effect
A large financial services company promoted a key leader into the position of CEO. Two of their peers were also vying for the top job. Almost immediately, the other two executives left the company. This created an unexpected leadership vacuum that cascaded within their respective departments, where no one on either team was able to step up into the suddenly vacant leadership spots. The lack of “ready now” successors required the company to look outside to replace those executive leadership roles, significantly disrupting their critical strategic transformation effort and creating additional chaos at the top of the company at a time when they could ill afford to slow momentum.
Similarly, a global manufacturing company promoted a key leader into the CEO role who lacked sales and marketing experience – an area where his predecessor had deep expertise. This expertise was a critical driver in the company’s success to date, and the gap at the top was stalling revenue growth and impeding the new CEO’s ability to deliver on the Board’s expectations. In order to fill the CEO’s knowledge gap, the company reorganized the head of sales and marketing role so that it was led by two executives instead of one. This unanticipated restructuring created confusion across the C-Suite and the rest of the sales and marketing organization regarding roles and responsibilities, which compounded their challenges in driving growth. The unexpected increased salary costs accompanying the additional executive role further impacted the bottom line, as well.
What these two examples illustrate is the Domino Effect. The Domino Effect occurs when a star performer is promoted, and there is no “ready now” successor to fill the role they are vacating. With so much attention placed on getting a new CEO into the role, the Domino Effect can cascade down through the organization and is an often hidden and unanticipated outcome that can hinder even the most capable chief executive from successfully taking the reins.
Assessing the impact of the Domino Effect
Conventional wisdom and the literature suggest that CEOs sourced internally outperform CEOs that are sourced externally. For example, in Harvard Business Review’s “Best CEOs of the World” top 100 list, 84% came from internal promotions1. The majority of leaders who ascend to the CEO role are COOs, CFOs, divisional CEOs, and some are “leapfrog” leaders identified below the C-Suite2. A question that has not been addressed is: what happens to the performance of the company when there are no internal candidates for the new CEO’s previous role? In other words, what is the impact of the Domino Effect on company performance?
To answer this question, we compared the S&P 500 twenty best performing companies3 with the twenty worst performing companies4 based upon percentage change in stock price.
What happened at the Best Performing companies?
Within the top 20 best performing companies, 75% of the CEOs were internal with 5 of the CEOs being founders of the company and 10 being promoted into the role. For their former positions, from which they were promoted, four were filled by internal candidates, and two were replaced with external candidates. Examining the leadership teams on the company’s websites, it appears that in three incidences, the role that the CEO vacated no longer exists. In one case the role was restructured and split into two different positions.
What happened at the Worst Performing companies?
70% of the CEOs at the worst performing companies came through promotions or being founder led (12 and 2 respectively), which is nearly identical to the best performing companies. All things being equal, one would expect a similar trend regarding the number of internal vs. external replacements for the CEOs’ previous roles from which they were promoted. However, we found that there were differences. Only three of the backfilled positions were placed by internal candidates and four were placed by external hires. In three of the companies, the position no longer exists, and two of the companies restructured the position.
Understanding the impact: disruption and worsening performance
The research shows little difference between the best and worst performing companies in relation to internal promotions and external hires for the CEO position. However, we do see more organizational disruptions in the replacement of the previous roles held by the CEO. A disruption is defined here as either the company was required to hire from the outside, restructure the role, or eliminate the role altogether. All of these create added turmoil and challenge for the new CEO as they try to move quickly to onboard and start delivering impact.
We found that disruptions were present in 60% of the top-performing companies, compared to 75% of the poorest performing companies. While more research is needed to uncover the nuances, our research suggests that companies with a stronger bench for newly promoted CEOs’ previous positions have less organizational disruption and outperform those who do not have a strong bench.
Tackling the Domino Effect before it falls
While CEO succession garners the greatest amount of the spotlight in the press, among board members, and in public sentiment of the health of a company, our research underscores the need for CEOs, CHROs, and Boards to focus on the Domino Effect as part of their C-Suite succession process. That is, creating a bench of potential successors targeted specifically for the CEO’s previous role, and the roles deeper within the organization that could replace those who are being elevated in the company at the time of the new CEO transition.
Consider these best practices to get ahead of the Domino Effect:
- Build the backfill into the identification process. When identifying potential candidates for the CEO, simultaneously consider who may replace that candidate for their current role.
- Focus on the role rather than the person. You may not be able to replace the next CEO’s position with one individual, but you may be able to replicate their skills with people who can excel in the role with complimentary skills.
- Expand the purview of success profiles. Create success profiles for the CEO and those roles that are likely feeder pools for CEO. Ensure that the success profiles are future focused rather than focused on what is important today. Business realities change over time. What makes someone successful today may be different than what is required in the next 3 to 5 years.
- Leverage the power of data for determining future success. As you look at your bench, use structured assessment processes to assess individuals against the success profile, reduce the risk of biases towards individuals, and determine their readiness to address the future business challenges that the organization will face.
- Comprehensively build the right bench. Look broad and deep within the organization when identifying potential successors. You may find those “leapfrog” leaders who would otherwise be overlooked.
- Continually refresh your succession slate. Given the cascading impacts of the Domino Effect, it is more important than ever to ensure your slate is up to date with viable candidates for higher level positions. Consider doing so on at least an annual basis.
- Ensure that succession is seen as a strategic imperative across the leadership of the organization rather than a single event of placing a new CEO. The CEO and the CHRO should own the succession process, the Board should be involved, and the focus should stay equally on the CEO role and the successor leadership roles throughout the organization.
Finding, placing, and ramping up a new CEO is a momentous decision with big outcomes at play – for the CEO’s own success and the viability of the organization. If you embrace the opportunity to turn the Domino Effect into a strategic gameplan, you will be positioned both for accelerated success and impact.
References
1 Harrell, E. Succession Planning: What the Research Says. Harvard Business Review December 2016
2 Harvard Business Review Staff. November 2009. The Best Performing CEOs in the World. Harvard Business Review 41-57.
3 https://www.fool.com/investing/2023/10/10/invest-sp-500-stocks-market-portfolio/
4 https://finance.yahoo.com/news/20-worst-performing-p-500-200036146.html
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Day 42: A newly hired Group Strategy Director is still at her desk at 9:00 p.m. She was brought in to lead a major transformation - one that’s been discussed for months but never clearly defined. She was hired because she’s capable, and there’s often an unspoken belief that capable leaders should just “get it” and move.
Her inbox is overflowing. Priorities keep shifting. Her peers are polite but distant - unclear on her mandate, protective of their turf, and too busy to engage deeply. Conversations stay surface-level.
She’s been invited in - but not set up to succeed.
It’s a common story: a strong leader, dropped into a high-stakes role without the clarity, structure, or support to land well.
Whether new to the company or stepping into a bigger role, many executives spend their critical first months navigating complexity alone - while being expected to deliver from day one.
Research has held steady for years: around 40% of leadership transitions fail within 18 months when the right support isn’t in place.
Too often, companies focus on choosing the right person - then overlook what it takes to truly integrate them. Without structured, human-centered support, even the most capable leaders struggle to succeed.
Why this matters more now
Transitions have always been high-stakes moments. But in today’s climate, the pressure is rising and the timelines are shrinking.
Leaders are stepping in during disruption - not stability.
Most aren’t inheriting status quo - they’re hired to fix or accelerate something.
Hybrid work delays trust-building and blurs cultural cues.
Visibility is high. Expectations form early and often.
In short: less room for error. More risk when it goes wrong.
Different paths. Same risks.
It’s tempting to think internal promotions are easier. But each path comes with invisible traps:
External hires lack historical context and relationships yet are expected to drive change.
Internal promotions bring familiarity but struggle to reset relationships and lead differently.
In both cases, leaders are often left navigating ambiguity alone once onboarding ends.
What’s missing
Most organizations do onboarding. Few do transitions. And that’s where things break down.
What’s often overlooked:
- A clear and aligned mandate
- Shared definitions of success across key stakeholders
- Insight into unspoken cultural and political dynamics
- Active sponsorship from the manager
- A longer runway to build trust and momentum
- Board-level clarity and engagement for senior roles
The result? Leaders are under pressure to perform - while still finding their footing.
The quiet rejection
Leaders are often hired to shift the system. But once inside, they encounter subtle resistance:
- Their pace feels too fast.
- Their questions challenge norms.
- Their style doesn’t match unspoken rules.
Suddenly, trust is withheld. Expectations shift. Peers disengage - but don’t say why. The very qualities that got them hired now work against them. Confidence erodes. Performance stalls. And promising transitions quietly derail.
This isn’t just an onboarding issue. It’s a readiness issue - on both sides.
The cost of getting it wrong
A failed executive transition doesn’t just impact the individual - it ripples across the organization. It stalls momentum, fractures teams, delays results, and undermines trust in leadership.
It’s also expensive. Between lost productivity, re-recruitment, and missed goals, the cost can easily reach several times the leader’s salary.
When transitions go off course, it’s not just a talent issue - it’s a business one.
What needs to change
Organizations that get transitions right do five things well:
- Treat transitions as enterprise critical. Ask: What’s at stake beyond this one role?
- Define success together. Ask: Are expectations aligned across leader, manager, and stakeholders?
- Equip the manager to lead the transition. Ask: Are they prepared to sponsor - not just evaluate?
- Provide real support - not just warm welcomes. Ask: Have we created space for the leader to reflect, adapt, and build capability?
- Extend support beyond day 90. Ask: What happens after the honeymoon ends?
The gray zone
Most leadership transitions don’t fail during onboarding - they stall in the murky middle. That stretch between onboarding and full performance. Too late for checklists, too early for formal reviews, and too often overlooked.
This is when the leader is highly visible but still gaining footing. The system assumes they’re up and running. But what they actually need is time to reflect, context to navigate, and support to show up differently.
Without that space, small misalignments become big ones. First impressions stick. And promising transitions quietly derail - not because the leader isn’t capable, but because they’re left to navigate complexity alone.
This “gray zone” isn’t anyone’s job to manage - and that’s the problem.
The role of transition coaching
Transition coaching provides a confidential, strategic space to:
- Navigate unspoken dynamics
- Build confidence and clarity
- Reflect and recalibrate in real time
As Greg Smith, CEO of Teradyne, put it:
“We’re investing in executive coaching because we want our senior leaders to lead with confidence from day one—not figure it out by month six.”
And the research backs it up. Coaching accelerates traction, strengthens alignment, and improves long-term performance.
But it only works when paired with system-level readiness: aligned stakeholders, engaged managers, and a clear plan for integration.
Final thought
Transitions aren’t just about setting a leader up to succeed. They’re a mirror for whether your organization is ready to evolve.
Because every new leader brings change - and every transition is a test of how well your system absorbs it.
If you’re hiring or promoting this year, the question isn’t just “is this the right person?”
It’s “are we ready to change with them?”
BTS helps leaders - and the systems around them - thrive through transition. Let’s talk.
Sources
- McKinsey & Company (2023), Leadership Transitions: Making the Move from Operational to Strategic
- Harvard Business Review (Ciampa & Watkins, 1999), Right From the Start
- CEB/Gartner Executive Research (2016), Why Successful Executives Fail
- DDI Global Leadership Forecast (2021), Assessing the Risks in Leadership Transitions
- McGill, P., Clarke, P., & Sheffield, D. (2019). From “blind elation” to “oh my goodness, what have I gotten into”: Exploring the experience of executive coaching during leadership transitions into C-suite roles. International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring. Oxford Brookes University.
- Greg Smith, CEO of Teradyne, as quoted in BTS webinar (2025)
- International Coaching Federation (ICF, 2021), The Value of Coaching in Leadership Transitions
In a world where transformation often feels complex and distant, real progress is often sparked at the community level, through leaders who create change from within.
In Senegal, a partnership between BTS Spark and Tostan, a nonprofit dedicated to community-led development across Africa, is bringing this idea to life. It’s a reminder that sustainable leadership isn’t built by imposing new systems. It grows when people are equipped to lead themselves.
A ground-up approach to lasting change
Since 1991, Tostan—whose name means "breakthrough" in Wolof—has partnered with rural African communities to advance human rights, health, literacy, and economic development. Its Community Empowerment Program (CEP) weaves together practical knowledge and human rights education, enabling communities to define and pursue their own visions of progress.
Across eight countries and more than five million lives, Tostan’s approach has led to deep-rooted changes, including the voluntary abandonment of harmful traditional practices. Not by directive, but by choice.
It’s an approach that shows leadership capacity isn’t something to be delivered from outside. It’s something to be nurtured from within.
Meeting communities where they are
In 2024, BTS Spark deepened its collaboration with Tostan through an in-person leadership workshop, led by a BTS Spark consultant, following a year of virtual engagement.
The visit coincided with a leadership transition at the executive level—a pivotal moment requiring clarity, continuity, and resilience. Through targeted coaching and workshops, BTS Spark worked alongside Tostan’s leaders to support the transition and strengthen leadership capacity at every level of the organization.
The focus wasn’t on delivering a model. It was on listening, amplifying existing strengths, and equipping leaders to navigate complexity with confidence.
Practical tools for complex challenges
As part of the ongoing collaboration, BTS Spark also provided custom-designed micro-simulations focused on sectors vital to community sustainability: climate resilience, microfinance, and agriculture.
These micro-sims offer leaders a chance to engage with real-world decision-making challenges in a safe, practical environment—an approach that mirrors how leadership development increasingly happens: not through theory alone, but through repeated, real-world application.
It’s a reminder that growth is rarely linear. It’s built through practice, reflection, and adaptation over time.
Building leadership that endures
The work between BTS Spark and Tostan reflects a broader truth:
Leadership isn’t confined to titles, industries, or regions. It emerges where people are given the tools, trust, and space to act.
Sustainable change, whether in communities or organizations, happens when leadership capacity is strengthened closest to where challenges are lived every day.
The partnership also highlights the power of investing in local capability: focusing on what’s already working, building resilience from within, and preparing leaders not just to meet today’s challenges, but to shape tomorrow’s opportunities.
Moving forward: Scaling with purpose
The work in Senegal is continuing to evolve. BTS Spark and Tostan are exploring ways to extend leadership development to more communities, deepen their impact, and continue supporting transformation through shared expertise and partnership.
It’s a model rooted in respect, collaboration, and the belief that leadership is most powerful when it reflects the realities and aspirations of the people closest to the work.
A talent leader’s guide to critical role planning
To thrive amid massive changes from economic upheavals to AI transformation, today’s organizations must be able to adapt, recover, and grow stronger in the face of adversity – they must build resilience.
What truly makes an organization resilient? It’s not just strategic plans or operational efficiency; fundamentally, it’s about people. Resilient organizations are those that recognize the critical roles within their teams, nurture talent, and create a culture where adaptability and innovation are the norms.
At the recent Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) Annual Conference in Chicago, BTSers Lynn Collins, Maia Whelan, and their esteemed panelists led a compelling discussion: Critical role strategy for organizational resilience. The session focused on how identifying and nurturing critical roles can help organizations build resilience in today’s rapidly evolving business landscape. This blog explores actionable strategies from the panel discussion for talent leaders looking to redefine critical role planning and build organizational resilience.
What is a critical role?
A critical role isn’t confined to the executive level. Effective leadership and organizational success depend significantly on roles scattered throughout your organization.
Middle managers, for example, serve as essential bridges between strategy and operational execution: they ensure that the organization’s broader objectives are translated into actionable tasks that teams can understand and implement. Project leads are also at the helm of initiatives that can redefine the business landscape for a company. They deploy new technologies, spearhead market expansions, manage diverse teams, and maintain project coherence to drive transformation.
The challenge with critical role planning, therefore, lies in the fluid nature of what constitutes a ‘critical role’. Agility in reevaluating and recalibrating these roles allows organizations to respond dynamically to new challenges and opportunities. In the pharmaceutical industry, as companies increasingly shift their focus towards biologics, the roles responsible for managing these technologies become increasingly important. Similarly, in the financial sector, roles that steer digital transformations are pivotal.
Identifying and fortifying these critical roles is paramount. This involves not only recognizing the key positions, but nurturing the talent within through a thoughtfully crafted, future-focused talent development strategy.
Nurturing talent is the key for organizational resilience
Investing in talent goes beyond filling positions; it’s about preparing your organization to face future challenges while bolstering current capabilities. This investment significantly impacts turnover, retention, and promotion rates, contributing positively to both the individuals involved and the organizational culture at large.
At BTS, we see common themes with our clients across industries:
- Talent strategy is essential for safeguarding organizational resilience. This includes adopting a digital mindset, not just externally by hiring new talents, but also internally upskilling existing employees to meet new challenges.
- Enhancing emotional intelligence is equally vital in enabling the workforce to manage stress and adapt to changes effectively.
- Strengthening business acumen across all levels of the organization is also crucial for fostering resilience. Employees are better equipped to make informed decisions that align with strategic goals when they develop a keen understanding of business operations and market dynamics.
This comprehensive approach—combining technological proficiency, emotional intelligence, and business insight—ensures that teams are not only competent but also agile and strategic in the face of ongoing challenges.
6 ways talent leaders should think differently about critical roles
Here’s what you can do to think outside the box to enhance both individual and organizational performance through critical role strategy:
- Broaden the definition of critical roles: Talent leaders should evaluate roles based on their actual impact on the organization, rather than focusing on organizational hierarchy.
- Foster role flexibility: Encourage a culture of adaptability by regularly reassessing and recalibrating critical roles. This ensures roles can be defined to align with evolving strategic needs and current business priorities, keeping the organization agile and responsive to change.
- Use data-driven role analysis: Use data to track the effectiveness of critical roles in real-time and adjust role criteria based on evidential data rather than intuition.
- Create a proactive talent acquisition strategy: Talent leaders should engage in continuous talent scouting, not just when a role becomes vacant. This involves understanding the talent landscape and building relationships with potential candidates before the need arises.
- Decentralize talent decisions: Empower local managers and teams to make critical talent decisions to ensure that those who are closest to the work have a say in who fills pivotal roles. This approach can lead to more informed and effective placement decisions. To maintain rigor and ensure consistency, establish clear guidelines and accountability frameworks. This helps maintain high standards across all decisions and strategically aligns talent management with broader organizational goals.
- Enhance diversity in critical roles: Actively work to increase diversity within critical roles. This involves not only recruiting a diverse workforce, but also creating pathways for diverse talent to advance into these roles. Diverse perspectives can lead to more innovative solutions and resilience against market disruptions. Comprehensive mentorship initiatives, equitable advancement opportunities, and ongoing diversity trainings ensure that all talented individuals have the chance to significantly contribute to the organization.
These strategies are designed to help talent leaders transform their organizations into agile entities capable of anticipating and responding to rapid changes. This fosters a culture that not only values but thrives on adaptability, proactive talent development, and strategic foresight.
Invest in your people
As a talent leader, your influence is pivotal in steering your organization towards greater resilience. By redefining and enriching critical roles and the talent that fills them, you’re not just preparing your organization to face future challenges but to excel amidst them.
This requires a commitment to pushing the boundaries of traditional talent management by:
- Taking innovative approaches to career development
- Using predictive analytics to better understand and deploy talent in critical roles
- Embedding continuous growth and feedback into your culture
Such efforts ensure that critical roles are not only filled with competent individuals but are also continuously evolving to meet the demands of a dynamic business environment. By doing so, you transform resilience into a powerful competitive advantage, ensuring your organization remains agile, forward-thinking, and robust.
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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?