Disconnect between talent priorities and executive expectations

A while back I heard a few people talking about public speaking. Person A was talking about their anxiety about making presentations. Trying to make him feel better, Person B said, “Public speaking is just like riding a bike!”

That got my attention.  It seemed to be a comforting little sound bite. The only problem was that it was wrong.  Public speaking is not like riding a bike. But it got me thinking about leadership communication and learning in general.

What does it mean if we say that something is like learning to ride a bike?  We’re saying that it’s a skill that initially may seem pretty difficult to learn… but once we figure it out, we can do it successfully without thinking—even if we don’t do it at all for years at a time. It’s the reassuring idea that you’ve acquired a skill that you will never lose.

There’s no question that we all learn many skills that are like riding a bike. Driving is a good example. Most of us were white-knuckle drivers when we first got behind the wheel, but what about now? On long highway drives, I sometimes snap out of a daydream and realize I have no memory of anything that happened on the road in the last 15 minutes. That’s because I don’t have to think about driving when I do it—not unless there is intense traffic or some other unusual circumstance.

Many other skills are the same—reading, typing, doing simple math in your head, and so on.   But quite a few sophisticated skills are quite unlike riding a bike.  In other words, there are skills that are definitely learnable and where your level of mastery can improve substantially. However, you’ll probably never be really great at these skills without vigilant, ongoing practice, preparation, reflection, and reinforcement.

Some examples that come to mind with leadership communication: Selling, managing change, inspiring your teams, and, yes, public speaking. What’s so different about these areas?  A few things:

• They involve an audience. If you were making your first speech in several months or years, would you find that you could do it almost unconsciously? I couldn’t. You can never be on auto-pilot when you’re delivering any sort of message to an audience. Just as the saying goes that you can never step in the same river twice, no two audiences are ever the same—even if you’re speaking to your internal teams each quarter. All sorts of circumstances change regularly, and you have to consciously adjust your message to address the ever-evolving needs of your audience.

• To maintain performance at a high level, sophisticated skills require ongoing practice. Yo-Yo Ma may be the world’s best cellist, but he estimates that he still puts in roughly 2,000 hours of practice each year. That’s an average of 5.5 hours daily.  If he stopped practicing altogether, he obviously could still play the cello.  But he wouldn’t be the best cellist for much longer.

• Skill mastery typically requires continual learning and reinforcement over time. Practice is critical, but it’s not sufficient. When you think about areas such as selling, motivating, and public speaking, there is always more to learn. There is evidence now that 90% of what we learn at a workshop, for example, dissipates within one year. To ensure the needle keeps moving in the right direction, you need to be a perpetual student. That may involve reading about the subject, hearing about it, going to a workshop, and getting expert advice. Whether you’re a tennis pro, a psychiatrist, or a VP of Sales, having a coach to help you with your real-time challenges can have an enormous impact to give you that reinforcement over time.

As a leader, you’ll no doubt hear from companies that want to offer you “quick-fix” solutions for perpetual leadership development challenges—areas such as executive presence, employee engagement, and public speaking.

But lasting, meaningful mastery is not a quick fix.  Sophisticated skills need reinforcement: A better motto for these skills would be “use it or lose it.” Because some things are quite unlike riding a bike,

‍

We have more tools, technologies, and data than ever, yet talent challenges are only growing more complex.AI is reshaping how work gets done, shifting roles and the skills required. Remote and hybrid models continue to redefine how teams collaborate, lead, and build culture. Economic pressure is forcing organizations to do more with less, making talent efficiency a business necessity. And employee expectations are rising people want more purpose, growth, and flexibility than ever before.These shifts aren’t just complicating the landscape; they’re rewriting the rules.For years, talent operated one step removed, supporting strategy, but not shaping it. That worked when business was linear and predictable. Strategy was set at the top, cascaded down, and talent filled the gaps.But that world is gone.Today, strategy shifts in real time. You can’t launch a new go-to-market plan, integrate an acquisition, or drive cultural change without people who are aligned, capable, and ready to deliver. And that readiness can’t be an afterthought, it has to be future-back.That’s why a new kind of talent leadership is emerging, one that moves beyond standalone programs and focuses instead on building integrated systems. It’s a shift from reacting to problems to anticipating what the business will need next; from patching broken processes to designing for performance from the start.In this model, talent strategy is no longer fragmented. It becomes a connected ecosystem where hiring, development, performance, and culture work in sync, aligned to business priorities and built to deliver results. In this environment, integrated talent strategy isn’t just good HR, it’s how business gets done.

The AI revolution and its real-world talent application

AI is revolutionizing how organizations attract, develop, and retain talent. From automating performance reviews and job descriptions to enabling personalized career path development, the promise of AI is clear. However, many warn of a trough of disillusionment. Reality often falls short due to insufficient data, immature infrastructure, and misaligned objectives between business leaders, talent leaders and across functions. Without a clear problem definition, technology risks accelerating misalignment instead of solving meaningful challenges.Organizations must first define the outcomes they seek whether efficiency, insight, engagement, or growth before deploying technology solutions. As AI adoption expands, success will depend on whether organizations match the right tools to the right problems. Having the discipline to make this evaluation will be game-changing when it comes to delivering impact.

Skills-based organizations: substance or semantics?

The rise of skills-based models reflects both a desire for innovation and a rebranding of long-standing HR practices. While the framing may have shifted, the underlying work—job analysis, development planning, and performance alignment remains constant. Many of today’s talent challenges aren’t new; they’re longstanding issues being reframed under new labels.To move the conversation forward, leaders must avoid fixating on language and instead focus on what truly drives performance when it comes to talent models: clear role expectations, relevant development paths, and contextualized application of skills. Prioritizing the right core activities will deliver the talent performance you need, regardless of what it’s called.

Manager capability as the linchpin

The most innovative talent strategies still rely on a critical success factor: the people  manager. Whether it’s performance enablement, development conversations, or cultural reinforcement, execution hinges on manager capability.. The success of most talent initiatives ultimately depends on whether managers are equipped to implement them effectively. Manager enablement is the operational layer that determines whether talent strategies deliver impact or stall. Managers also shape the day-to-day experiences that influence engagement, growth, and retention . Investing in scalable, practical, and embedded manager development is essential to unlock the potential of any talent system. Currently this remains a challenge to plan and execute in many companies, while some at the leading edge have leaned into this and are making progress. Looking forward, organizations that prioritize preparing their managers for delivering what’s next will yield more rapid results for the business.

Integrated talent management: moving from silos to systems

Gone are the days when talent functions could operate in isolation. Today’s organizations require an integrated approach that connects succession planning, workforce strategy, learning, performance, and employee experience. For business leaders, the structure of HR functions is secondary to receiving actionable guidance that accelerates hiring and performance outcomes.Achieving true integration means moving beyond siloed initiatives and building a connected system where talent strategies reinforce one another across data, design, and delivery. It’s not about where each piece sits, but how well they work together to deliver consistent, business-relevant outcomes. For example, when identifying successors for executive roles, the best organizations take a systemic approach. They leverage business leader input to nominate high-potentials based on a consistent set of standards. They add rigorous assessment of people and business capability (often using external support) to reduce bias, confirm potential for more complex roles, and identify gaps. They then employ tailored development, run in partnership among the business, talent, and learning with external support, to address identified gaps. This multi-faceted approach incorporates perspectives from the business and HR while leveraging best practices from inside and outside the company, and ties outcomes to business imperatives.

Bringing “Integrated Talent” to life in your organization

Integrated talent refers to the intentional alignment and coordination of all talent-related functions such as hiring, learning, succession, performance, rewards, and workforce planning under a unified strategy that directly supports business goals. Instead of fragmented programs running in parallel, integrated talent strategies are designed and executed as a cohesive system, with shared data, consistent language, and a focus on outcomes that matter to the organization. It’s about designing for the whole employee lifecycle, not just optimizing parts of it in isolation.The most effective partnerships, including those with consultants and external experts, often blur internal and external boundaries, delivering seamless support to business leaders.

Key recommendations for talent leaders to move to an integrated talent approach

So what does it take to lead effectively in this environment? Several key priorities are emerging:

• Understand the evolving business context: Start with a clear understanding of the organizational environment, where the business strategy is going, and the role of culture in supporting growth, before proposing solutions.
• Customize with purpose: Balance tailored approaches with scalable standards to drive consistency.
• Build your internal base: Credibility is built by understanding internal politics, brand sensitivities, and cultural norms.
• Elevate the employee experience: Amid ongoing disruption, meaning, purpose, and psychological safety are essential stabilizers. Make this a priority, and the business will follow.
• Build meta-skills: Leadership development must focus on adaptability, resilience, empathy, and systems thinking; the capacities needed to lead through complexity.
• Develop an enterprise mindset: Today’s talent leaders must be business-centric, fluent in financial and strategic conversations, and capable of integrating disparate talent functions to construct a coherent whole. They must translate data into compelling narratives and foster strong partnerships both within HR and across the enterprise.

Most importantly, talent leaders must see themselves not just as HR professionals, but as organizational architects, designing the systems, cultures, mindsets and experiences that enable growth.

Conclusion: Talent strategy integration isn’t a trend. It’s your edge.

The world of work is not simply changing. It is being fundamentally redefined. Integrated talent strategy is no longer a future aspiration; it is a current imperative. To deliver on this mandate, talent leaders must: align their strategies tightly with business priorities; build managerial capability at scale; and use technology with precision and discipline. They must create strong, trusted partnerships across internal and external boundaries, and focus on clarity over complexity. The siloed HR model has reached its limits. The future belongs to those who embrace integrated talent strategy as a core business driver.

In late 2023, we set out to answer a question we kept hearing from clients:

How do you prepare for what’s next—when “next” keeps changing?

That question has only become more urgent in 2025. Today’s leaders are navigating rapid shifts—from AI’s integration into nearly every role to volatile markets and a growing disconnect between employee expectations and organizational readiness. Planning feels harder than ever—because the future keeps accelerating while our tools and assumptions stay anchored in the past.

Too often, strategic planning is built on outdated logic: start with what’s already in motion, layer on incremental improvements, and forecast trends forward. But in today’s environment, that approach isn’t just ineffective—it’s risky. It reinforces legacy thinking. It prioritizes what’s easy over what’s essential. And it creates strategies built for a version of the world that no longer exists.

That’s why we took a different approach. We gathered a team of I/O psychologists, academics, and senior talent leaders—not to react to trends, but to reimagine what the future of talent, leadership, and learning might truly demand.

To guide the process, we used a method we often apply with clients: future-back thinking.

What is future-back thinking?

Future-back thinking flips traditional strategy. Rather than starting with today’s constraints, it begins with a bold vision of future success—and works backward to define what it will take to get there.

This approach helped us look past short-term pressures and surface deeper signals. It made the future feel more actionable—and more human.

It also reminded us why innovation is so rare: Most organizations are wired to protect what’s familiar. We prioritize feasibility, optimize what exists, and assume continuity. In uncertain times, we tweak around the edges instead of reimagining what’s possible.

Future-back thinking breaks that cycle. It turns ambiguity into alignment—and strategy into design.

It starts with a better question:

What will the future demand—and what will we wish we’d done sooner?

Because it’s not about being right. It’s about being ready.

Five bold predictions—and how they became reality

When we applied future-back thinking to the future of talent and learning, five provocative themes emerged. Each was grounded in signals we were already starting to see—but at the time, they felt ambitious.

We captured them in our original blog, Navigating the New Dawn of Talent Strategy—a look at what might shape how organizations attract, develop, and lead talent over the next 3–5 years.

Now, just two years later, those signals have become strategy. Here’s how the predictions stack up against today’s reality:

1. Skills × jobs (the remix)

Then: We predicted that rigid job architectures would give way to more fluid, capability-based models—ones that reflect how people actually grow and how business needs evolve.

Now: That shift is well underway. Many organizations have begun redesigning roles around transferable skills and capabilities, creating more dynamic paths for growth, mobility, and performance.

2. AI-powered learning

Then: We anticipated GenAI would unlock personalized, real-time learning at scale, integrated into the flow of work.

Now: GenAI is now embedded in many organizations’ learning ecosystems—powering smart coaching, adaptive learning paths, and knowledge retrieval in the flow of work.

3. Diversity as differentiation

Then: We forecasted a shift from DEI as a compliance mandate to DEI as a core driver of innovation, adaptability, and growth.

Now: High-performing organizations are building cognitive and cultural diversity into teams, treating it as a strategic advantage—not a checkbox.

4. AI as a leadership partner

Then: We imagined a future where AI would augment—not replace—leaders, supporting better decisions, planning, and communication.

Now: That’s exactly what’s happening. Leaders are using AI to model scenarios, synthesize insights, and communicate with more speed and clarity.

5. Decentralized, human-centric leadership

Then: We projected leadership would decentralize, moving closer to the front line and defined by mindset more than title.

Now: Leading organizations are scaling leadership behaviors across levels and embedding psychological safety, inclusion, and empowerment into day-to-day work.

These predictions weren’t about chasing trends. They were about imagining what the future might require—and preparing for it before it arrived.

That’s the power of future-back thinking: it doesn’t just forecast change. It helps leaders design for it.

Start thinking differently now

Most strategic plans start by looking around—at what exists, what’s already in motion, what feels feasible. But the brain doesn’t just collect data. It builds habits. It channels information into familiar paths. And it reinforces what it already knows.

That’s good for speed. But bad for imagination.

Future-back thinking challenges that. It deliberately disrupts those neural paths. Instead of adjusting today’s structures, it starts at the endpoint: a bold future state. Then it reverse-engineers the shifts required to get there.

This shift—from refining the familiar to reimagining what’s possible—is what organizations need now.

Here are three provocations to help you start:

1. What assumptions are we treating as facts? The most dangerous limits are the ones we no longer see.
2. What would someone from a completely different world do? (A customer, a child, Beyoncé?) Try role-storming to unlock new angles.
3. What if we had no legacy systems to maintain—what would we build from scratch? Imagine a blank slate.

These questions aren’t just creative warm-ups. They help you unstick your strategy from old grooves—and build what’s essential.

Because in a world that’s constantly changing, the biggest risk isn’t getting it wrong. It’s staying stuck.

How BTS helps leaders and teams think beyond today

Our brains—even at their most capable—get stuck in “rivers of thinking,” defaulting to what feels safe instead of what the future demands.

At BTS, we help organizations break that cycle.

Future-back thinking is more than a framework—it’s a provocation. A way to disrupt habitual planning, reframe challenges, and design from a place of possibility.

We work with leaders and teams to:

• Break from old patterns by surfacing the assumptions quietly guiding decisions
• Align around vivid, future-state scenarios that challenge status-quo thinking
• Role-storm bold ideas into strategic options that unlock creativity
• Simulate future decisions to build confidence and agility
• Build the mindsets and capabilities your strategy requires

Because the real risk isn’t change. It’s standing still.

Too often, organizations invest time and energy planning for a version of the world that no longer exists. They reinforce legacy mindsets, delay bold moves, and miss the moment.

Future-back thinking offers a way out. It gives leaders a structured way to reimagine what’s possible, align teams around the future, and start building toward it—now.

Let’s build what’s next—together. Learn how we help organizations prepare for the future.

You’re buckling in for an overseas flight in a brand-new Boeing 777. The pilot comes on the PA: “Ah, ladies and gentlemen, our flight time today will be six and a half hours at a cruising altitude of 33,000 feet. And I should mention that this is the first time I have ever flown a 777. Wish me luck.”

Before setting foot in the real world, pilots, military personnel and disaster response teams use intense simulations to learn how to respond to high-intensity challenges.Why should we place corporate leaders and their teams in situations without first giving them a chance to try things out? The risks are huge — new strategy investments can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. BTS offers a better way to turn strategy into action: customized business simulations.

‘Now I Know What it’s Like to be CEO’

A customized business simulation of your enterprise, business unit or process, using real-world competitive dynamics, places leaders in a context where they step out of their normal day-to-day roles and gain exposure to the big picture. Participants make decisions in a risk-free environment, allowing them to experience critical interdependencies, execution best practices and the levers they can use to optimize their company’s key performance indicators. It takes the concept of a strategy and makes it personal, giving each individual the chance to see the direct impacts of their actions and the role they play in strategy execution.

Leading corporations are increasingly turning to business simulations to help build strategic alignment and execution capability when faced with the following business challenges:

• Key performance objective and new strategy implementation.
• Accelerating strategy execution and innovation.
• Improving business acumen and financial decision making.
• Transforming sales programs into business results accelerators.
• Leadership development focused on front-line execution.
• Implementing culture change as tied to strategy alignment.
• Modeling complex value chains for collaborative cost elimination.
• Merger integration.

Within minutes of being placed in a business simulation, users are grappling with issues and decisions that they must make — now. A year gets compressed into a day or less. Competition among teams spurs engagement, invention and discovery.

The Business Simulation Continuum: Customize to Fit Your Needs

Simulations have a broad range of applications, from building deep strategic alignment to developing execution capability. The more customized the simulation, the more experience participants can bring back to the job in execution and results. Think about it: why design a learning experience around generic competency models or broad definitions of success when the point is to improve within your business context?  When you instead simulate what “great” looks like for your organization, you exponentially increase the efficacy of your program.

10 Elements of Highly Effective Business Simulations

With 30 years of experience building and implementing highly customized simulations for Fortune 500 companies, BTS has developed the 10 critical elements of an effective business simulation:

1. Highly realistic with points of realism targeted to drive experiential learning.
2. Dynamically competitive with decisions and results impacted by peers’ decisions in an intense, yet fun, environment.
3. Illustrative, not prescriptive or deterministic, with a focus on new ways of thinking.
4. Catalyzes discussion of critical issues with learning coming from discussion within teams and among individuals.
5. Business-relevant feedback, a mechanism to relate the simulation experience directly back to the company’s business and key strategic priorities.
6. Delivered with excellence : High levels of quality and inclusion of such design elements as group discussion, humor, coaching and competition that make the experience highly interactive, intriguing, emotional, fun, and satisfying.
7. User driven: Progress through the business simulation experience is controlled by participants and accommodates a variety of learning and work styles.
8. Designed for a specific target audience, level and business need.
9. Outcome focused , so that changes in mindset lead to concrete actions.
10. Enables and builds community: Interpersonal networks are created and extended through chat rooms, threaded discussions and issue-focused e-mail groups; participants support and share with peers.

Better Results, Faster

Well-designed business simulations are proven to significantly accelerate the time to value of corporate initiatives. A new strategy can be delivered to a global workforce and execution capability can be developed quickly, consistently and cost-effectively. It’s made personal, so that back on the job, participants own the new strategy and share their enthusiasm and commitment. This in turn yields tangible results; according to a research report conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by BTS, titled “Mindsets: Gaining Buy-In to Strategy,” the majority of firms struggle to achieve buy-in to strategy, but those that personalize strategy throughout their organization significantly outperform their peers in terms of profitability, revenue growth and market share.

Business Simulations: Even More Powerful in Combination

Comprehensive deployment of business simulation and experiential learning programs combines live and online experiences. The deepest alignment, mindset shift and capability building takes place over time through a series of well-designed activities. Maximize impact by linking engagement and skill building to organizational objectives and by involving leadership throughout the process.

Putting Business Simulations to Work

Simulations drive strategic alignment, sales force transformation, and business acumen, financial acumen and leadership development, among other areas. A successful experiential learning program cements strategic alignment and builds execution capability across the entire organization, turning strategy into action. Results can be measured in team effectiveness, company alignment, revenue growth and share price.

Learn more about business simulations

Learn how BTS Business Simulations can help with your initiatives.

Fill out the form below to have a BTS representative contact you.

‍

I recently read an HBR article discussing why the traditional approach to leadership development doesn’t always work.

It stated that instead of traditional methods, the best way to identify, grow and retain leaders to meet today’s demands is to “Let them innovate, let them improvise and let them actually lead.”

Over the past 30 years, as we’ve partnered with clients facing a vast range of challenges, we’ve seen the truth behind this – that people learn best by actually doing. That’s why business simulations are such a powerful tool: they allow people to do and lead within a risk-free environment, and condense years of on-the-job learning experience into a few days, or even hours.

We also know that learning is not just a “one and done” situation – it is a continuous experience. In many cases, a learning journey, which blends a variety of learning methodologies and tools over time, is the most powerful means of shifting mindsets, building capabilities and driving sustained, effective results.What a learning journey looks like depends entirely on the context of your organization. What challenges are you addressing? What results are you driving for? What does great leadership look like for your organization?

To bring this to life, imagine the following approach to a blended learning journey for aligning and developing leaders – in this scenario, within a financial services firm: Financial technology has “transformed the way money is managed. It affects almost every financial activity, from banking to payments to wealth management. Startups are re-imagining financial services processes, while incumbent financial services firms are following suit with new products of their own.”

For a leading financial services company, this disruption has led to a massive technology transformation. With tens of thousands of employees in the current technology and operations group, the company will be making massive reductions to headcount over the next five years as a result of automation, robotics and other technology advances.

This personnel reduction and increased use of technology is both a massive shift for the business as well as a huge change in the scope of responsibility that the remaining leaders are being asked to take on moving forward. As such, the CEO of the business unit recognizes the need to align 175 senior leaders in the unit to the strategy and the future direction of the business, and give them the capabilities that they need to effectively execute moving forward.

To achieve these goals, BTS would build an innovative design for this initiative: a six-month blended experience, incorporating in-person events, individual and cohort-based coaching sessions, virtual assessments and more. Throughout the journey, data would be captured and analyzed to provide top leadership with information about the participants’ progress – and skill gaps – on both an individual and cohort level, thus setting up future development initiatives for optimal success.

The journey would begin with a two-day live conference event for the 175 person target audience, incorporating leader-led presentations about the strategy. The event would not just be talking heads and PowerPoint slides, but rather would leverage the BTS Pulse digital event technology to increase engagement and create a two-way, interactive dialogue that captures the participants’ ideas and suggestions. Participants also would use the technology to experience a moments-based leadership simulation that develops critical communications, innovation and change leadership capabilities, among other skills.

romAfter the event, participants would return to the job to apply their new learnings. On the job, each participant would continue their journey with four one-on-one performance coaching sessions, in addition to a series of peer coaching sessions shared with four to five colleagues. They also would use 60-90 minute virtual Practice with an Expert sessions to develop specific skill areas in short learning bursts, and then practice those skills with a live virtual coach. Throughout the journey, participants would access online, self-paced modules that contain “go-do activities” to reinforce and encourage application of the innovation leadership and other skills learned during the program.

As a capstone, six months after the journey has begun, every participant would go through a live, virtual assessment conducted via the BTS Pulse platform. In three to four hours, these virtual assessments allow live assessors to evaluate each leader’s learnings from the overall journey and identify any remaining skill gaps. The individual and cohort assessment data would then lead to and govern the design of future learning interventions that would continue to ensure the leaders are capable of implementing the strategy.

As you can see, this journey design leverages a range of tools and learning methodologies to create a holistic, impactful solution. It’s not just a standalone event – each step of the journey ties into the one before, and the data gathered throughout can be used well into the future in order to shape the next initiative .

Great journeys or experiences like this can take many forms. In addition to live classroom and virtual experiences, there is an ecosystem of activities, such as performance coaching, peer coaching, practice with an expert, go-dos, self-paced learning modules, and more, that truly engage leaders and ensure that the learnings are being reinforced, built upon, practiced and implemented back on the job. We find that these types of experience rarely look the same for every client. There are many factors that determine which configuration and progression will make the most sense. There is one common theme that we have found throughout these highly contextual experiences, however – that the participant feedback is outstanding and the business impact is profound.

‍

Leading with Purpose, Part 1

Most CEOs I speak with are not 100% at peace with their company’s purpose. As the market, their people and their business evolve, so will their purpose. As some of the best companies of past and present show us, there is strength, and even magic, in a great company purpose. What is also clear, however, is that this magic does not come from just having a “purpose” or “vision,” but rather from how well a company is executing against their purpose.

When Southwest Airlines (which has been profitable for 45 consecutive years, and on FORTUNE’s list of World’s Most Admired Companies for 24 straight years) was first starting out, their mission was to make flying affordable.¹ They rallied their people on the idea that a grandmother should be able to affordably buy a ticket, at the drop of a hat, to get on a flight to see her new grandchild. This simple mission led to the “Southwest Effect,” which transformed the airline industry, and continued to be a lens with which the Southwest leadership team made key decisions.

Today, Southwest’s vision has evolved: “To become the world’s most loved, most flown, and most profitable airline.” And they are executing on this vision. They continue to drive superior shareholder returns against all industries on the S&P 500 (as they have for the past 44 years), and in 2018 were named the top low-cost airline in JD Powers customer survey reports for the second year in a row.

As the Southwest example highlights, great company purpose combined with a leadership team who will build the work-flows, culture, processes and metrics to live up to it can be an enormous employee motivator. But we have also experienced, both at BTS and with our global clients, that a good company vision and purpose on their own are not sufficient – employees need them to be even more personal to them as an individual. I remember a lunch I had twelve years ago with a 24-year old new hire who was my direct report. After some small talk he looked at me and said, “Why are you here? Why have you spent seven years with the same company?”

I’ll never forget that lunch. It was the first time I had been asked the question, and it was the beginning of a new decade where our employees were much louder and more active about wanting to reflect and spend time on our mission and purpose, linking it to their personal values and the impact they strived to have in the world. Luke, that 24-year old new hire, has made me and our company better as a result of his question.

In the last decade, there has been a growing emphasis in the business world on finding a deeper motivation to unlock greater meaning at work. For some this may sound ‘fluffy,’ or as one executive we spoke to commented, “Is this just the next version of the pursuit of vision and values? It sounds great on paper but too often makes little real difference as it tends to stay on the wall, rather than live in your heart.”

Yet your people spend the majority of their life at work and with colleagues. At its best, a sense of purpose is a way of bringing meaning to their work and understanding the contributions they are making to the company, as well as greater society. It makes sense, then, that employees who are clear on their personal and professional purpose end their work day invigorated and proud of what they’re doing instead of exhausted by mindless work that is bereft of real meaning.

According to a recent PWC study, 79% of business leaders believe that purpose is central to business success – but only 34% use their organization’s purpose as a guidepost for their leadership team’s decision-making. Signs that your workplace may be lacking organizational purpose are distracted employees and a lack of comradery. These are significant factors – so why don’t more organizations devote time to developing clear purpose and values? Well, developing organizational purpose is no easy task, and much of it starts with your own personal purpose. If you’re unsure of what exactly your own personal purpose is, have no fear – in the next two installments of this blog series, we will offer simple steps to help you uncover your personal and organizational purposes and get closer to leading through the lens of purpose.