The best RTO strategies start with who, not what

Meetings are a universal ritual in organizational life. While managers on average spend more than half their working hours in meetings, many leaders can’t shake the feeling that meetings are falling short of their potential. Are they advancing the work, or quietly draining energy? At BTS, we study teams not as collections of individuals, but as living systems. This perspective reveals dynamics that traditional methods often overlook. Rather than aggregating individual 360° assessments, we assess the team as a whole to examine how the team functions collectively. Applying that lens to one of the most common team activities (meetings) uncovers patterns worth paying attention to. Drawing on thousands of team assessments in our database, we focused on two meeting behaviors:

• Do teams meet regularly?
• Do team members leave meetings with clear accountabilities and next steps?

Our question: How strongly do these behaviors relate to overall team effectiveness?

What the data revealed

Using data from 1,043 respondents (team members and informed stakeholders) we ran a Bayesian analysis to evaluate the predictive power of each behavior. The results were striking:

• Both behaviors were linked to higher team effectiveness.
• But one mattered far more: leaving meetings with clear accountabilities and next steps was 3.9x more predictive of team effectiveness than simply meeting regularly.
• And teams that often or always wrap up meetings with next steps rated 0.66 points higher on a 5-point scale of team effectiveness than teams who sometimes, rarely, or never close with accountabilities - that's almost a full standard deviation higher (0.96 sd)

Meetings aren’t the problem, muddy outcomes are.

Teams often default to frequency, setting cadences of check-ins or standing meetings. Our data suggest that what differentiates effective teams from the rest is not how many meetings they hold, but what comes out of them. A team that meets less often but ends each session with clear accountabilities will outperform a team that meets frequently but leaves outcomes ambiguous. In other words, meetings aren’t inherently wasted time; they become wasted time when they don’t translate into aligned action.

A simple shift that pays dividends

The good news: improving meetings doesn’t require radical redesign. Small changes reinforce accountability and dramatically increase the value extracted:

• Close with clarity. Reserve the last 5–10 minutes of every meeting to confirm: What decisions have been made? Who owns what? By when? This habit shifts meetings from “discussions” to “decisions.”
• Make commitments visible. Use a shared action log, team board, or project tracker so next steps are transparent, and progress is easy to follow. Visibility builds accountability.
• Assign a “Closer.” Rotating this role signals that closing well is everyone’s responsibility. The Closer ensures the team doesn’t drift into vague agreements, but leaves aligned and ready to act.

When teams adopt these habits, the difference is tangible: less rehashing of the same topics, faster progress on priorities, and a stronger sense of shared ownership. These small shifts compound quickly, making meetings not just more efficient, but more energizing and effective. In a world where teams face relentless demands and limited time, focusing on how meetings end may be one of the fastest ways to improve how teams perform.

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.

AI is reshaping how work gets done—automating tasks, accelerating decisions, and raising expectations for speed and precision. Strategy is shifting faster than structures can adapt, leaving many leaders operating in systems that weren’t built for what’s being asked of them now. Employees are asking more of their managers—while the business is asking more of them, too. And leaders are stuck navigating it all with development priorities, operating norms, and support systems that weren’t designed for this level of speed, ambiguity, or stretch.

As expectations rise, leadership capability is under scrutiny.

But are development efforts evolving fast enough to meet the moment?

Where priorities and expectations diverge

Most leadership development programs today emphasize foundational strengths:

• Executive presence
• Personal purpose
• A growth mindset
• Empowering others
• Stretching others

In contrast, senior executives in the BTS study identified a different set of capabilities as most critical for leaders right now:

• Accountability
• Transparency
• Enterprise thinking
• Divergent thinking

The contrast reveals a disconnect between what development programs are building—and what executives believe their organizations need most from their leaders today.

How did we get here?

The expectations placed on leaders—especially at the middle—have always evolved alongside the business landscape.

In the 1990s, leadership development focused on emotional intelligence and team empowerment. The 2000s brought globalization and lean operating models, with a sharper focus on efficiency and agility. Then came digital transformation, agile ways of working, and flatter, more matrixed structures.

Each wave expanded the leadership mandate—asking leaders to become connectors, coaches, and change agents.

What’s different now is the pace and proximity of change. Strategy no longer shifts annually—it flexes monthly. And mid-level leaders are no longer simply executing someone else’s vision. They’re expected to interpret it, shape it, and deliver results through others—in real time.

At the same time, the psychological contract of work has changed. Employees want more meaning, flexibility, and support—and they often look to their managers to provide it. Add in the rise of AI and the frequency of disruption, and the expectations placed on leaders have outpaced what many development efforts were designed to support.

What’s driving the disconnect?

What we’re seeing isn’t disagreement—it’s a difference in vantage point, shaped by the distinct challenges each group is solving for. This isn’t about misaligned intent—it reflects different priorities and pressures.

Talent and learning teams often prioritize foundational capabilities because they’re proven, scalable, and critical to developing confident, human-centered leaders. These programs are designed to grow potential over time.

Executives, meanwhile, are focused on the immediacy of execution—strategy under strain, shifting priorities, and the need for alignment at speed. Their focus reflects where progress is stalling now.

Both perspectives matter. But when they remain disconnected, development risks falling out of sync with business reality—and the gap is most visible at the middle, where expectations are rising fastest.

What’s the takeaway for talent leaders now?

This moment offers more than a gap to close—it offers insight into how leadership needs are evolving.

What if the differences between these two capability lists aren’t in conflict, but in sequence? Foundational strengths help leaders show up with purpose and empathy. Enterprise capabilities help them lead across systems and ambiguity. The opportunity isn’t to choose between them—it’s to connect them more intentionally.

What’s uniquely now is the acceleration. The stretch. The pressure to reduce friction and support faster alignment. Talent leaders aren’t just being asked to build capability—they’re being asked to build momentum. That means designing development experiences that reflect complexity, enable cross-functional thinking, and help leaders decide and adapt in real time.

It also means listening more closely. The capabilities executives are calling for aren’t just wish lists—they’re signals. Signals of where transformation slows, and where leadership must evolve for strategy to move forward.

This isn’t about shifting away from what works—it’s about expanding it. To connect what leaders already do well with what the business needs next—and to do it in ways that are grounded, human, and built for today’s pace.

Shifting momentum

Leadership development isn’t just a pipeline priority. It’s a strategic lever for how your organization adapts, aligns, and accelerates through change.

This research doesn’t just reveal a skills gap—it surfaces a systems opportunity. The disconnect between talent priorities and executive expectations highlights where momentum gets lost, and how leadership development can close the space between vision and execution.

Talent leaders are uniquely positioned to reconnect the dots—between individual growth and enterprise outcomes, between what leaders learn and how they lead, between what the business says it needs and how that shows up in behavior.

So the next question isn’t just: What should we build?

It’s: How do we enable leaders to build it into the business—faster?

Every organization is navigating this differently. If you’re revisiting your development priorities or rethinking what leadership looks like in your context, let’s connect. We’re happy to share what we’re seeing—and learning—with others facing the same questions.

Technology choices are often made under pressure - pressure to modernize, to respond to shifting client expectations, to demonstrate progress, or to keep pace with rapid advances in AI. In those moments, even experienced leadership teams can fall into familiar traps: over-estimating how differentiated a capability will remain, under-estimating the organizational cost of sustaining it, and committing earlier than the strategy or operating model can realistically support.

After decades of working with leaders through digital and technology-enabled transformations, I’ve seen these dynamics play out again and again. The issue is rarely the quality of the technology itself. It’s the timing of commitment, and how quickly an early decision hardens into something far harder to unwind than anyone intended.

What has changed in today’s AI-accelerated environment is not the nature of these traps, but the margin for error. It has narrowed dramatically.

For small and mid-sized organizations, the consequences are immediate. You don't have specialist teams running parallel experiments or long runways to course correct. A single bad platform decision can absorb scarce capital, distort operating models, and take years to unwind just as the market shifts again.

AI intensified this tension. It is wildly over-hyped as a silver bullet and quietly under-estimated as a structural disruptor. Both positions are dangerous. AI won’t magically fix broken processes or weak strategy, but it will change the economics of how work gets done and where value accrues.

When leaders ask how to approach digital platforms, AI adoption, or operating model design, four questions consistently matter more than the technology itself.

• What specific market problem does this solve, and what is it worth?
• Is this capability genuinely unique, or is it rapidly becoming commoditized?
• What is the true total cost - not just to build, but to run and evolve over time?
• What is the current pace of innovation for this niche?

For many leadership teams, answering these questions leads to the same strategic posture. Move quickly today while preserving options for tomorrow. Not as doctrine, but as a way of staying adaptive without mistaking early commitment for strategic clarity.

Why build versus buy is the wrong starting point

One of the most common traps organizations fall into is treating digital strategy as a series of isolated build-vs-buy decisions. That framing is too narrow, and it usually arrives too late.

A more powerful question is this. How do we preserve optionality as the landscape continues to evolve? Technology decisions often become a proxy for deeper organizational challenges. Following acquisitions or periods of rapid change, pressure frequently surfaces at the front line. Sales teams respond to client feedback. Delivery teams push for speed. Leaders look for visible progress.

In these moments, technology becomes the focal point for action. Not because it is the root problem, but because it is tangible.

The real risk emerges operationally. Poorly sequenced transitions, disruption to the core business, and value that proves smaller or shorter-lived than anticipated. Teams become locked into delivery paths that no longer make commercial sense, while underlying system assumptions remain unchanged.

The issue is rarely technical. It is temporal.

Optimizing for short-term optics, particularly client-facing signals of progress, often comes at the expense of longer-term adaptability. A cleaner interface over an ageing platform may buy temporary parity, but it can also delay the more important work of rethinking what is possible in the near and medium term.

Conservatism often shows up quietly here. Not as risk aversion, but as a preference for extending the familiar rather than exploring what could fundamentally change.

Licensing as a way to buy time and insight

In fast-moving areas such as AI orchestration, many organizations are choosing to license capability rather than build it internally. This is not because licensing is perfect. It rarely is. It introduces constraints and trade-offs. But it was fast. And more importantly, it acknowledged reality.

The pace of change in this space is such that what looks like a good architectural decision today may be actively unhelpful in twelve months. Licensing allowed us to operate right at the edge of what we actually understood at the time - without pretending we knew where the market would land six or twelve months later.

Licensing should not be seen as a lack of ambition. It is often a way of buying time, learning cheaply, and avoiding premature commitment. Building too early doesn’t make you visionary, often it just makes you rigid.

AI is neither a silver bullet nor a feature

Coaching is a useful microcosm of the broader AI debate.

Great AI coaching that is designed with intent and grounded in real coaching methodology can genuinely augment the experience and extend impact. The market is saturated with AI-enabled coaching tools and what is especially disappointing is that many are thin layers of prompts wrapped around a large language model. They are responsive, polite, and superficially impressive - and they largely miss the point.

Effective coaching isn’t about constant responsiveness. It’s about clarity. It’s about bringing experience, structure, credibility, and connection to moments where someone is stuck.

At the other extreme, coaches themselves are often deeply traditional. A heavy pen, a leather-bound notebook, and a Royal Copenhagen mug of coffee are far more likely to be sitting on the desk than the latest GPT or Gemini model.

That conservatism is understandable - coaching is built on trust, presence, and human connection - but it’s increasingly misaligned with how scale and impact are actually created.

The real opportunity for AI is not to replace human work with a chat interface. It is to codify what actually works. The decision points, frameworks, insights, and moments that drive behavior change. AI can then be used to augment and extend that value at scale.

A polished interface over generic capability is not enough. If AI does not strengthen the core value of the work, it is theatre, not transformation.

What this means for leaders

Across all of these examples, the same pattern shows up.

The hardest decisions are rarely about capability, they are about timing, alignment, and conviction.

Building from scratch only makes sense when you can clearly articulate:

• What you believe that the market does not
• Why that belief creates defensible value
• Why you’re willing to concentrate risk behind it

Clear vision scales extraordinarily well when it’s tightly held. The success of narrow, focused Silicon Valley start-ups is testament to that.

Larger organizations often carry a broader set of commitments. That complexity increases when depth of expertise is spread across functions, and even more so when sales teams have significant autonomy at the point of sale. Alignment becomes harder not because people are wrong, but because too many partial truths are competing at once.

In these environments, strategic clarity, not headcount or spend, creates advantage.

This is why many leadership teams choose to license early. Not because building is wrong, but because most organizations have not yet earned the right to build.

This article was originally publish on Rotman Management

IN OUR CONSULTING WORK with teams at all levels—especially senior leadership—my colleagues and I have noticed teams grappling with an insidious challenge: a lack of effective prioritization. When everything is labeled a priority, nothing truly is. Employees feel crushed under the weight of competing demands and the relentless urgency to deliver on multiple fronts. Requests for prioritization stem from both a lack of focused direction and the challenge of efficiently fulfilling an overwhelming volume of work. Over time, this creates a toxic cycle of burnout, inefficiency and dissatisfaction.

The instinctive response to this issue is to streamline, reduce the number of initiatives, and focus. While this is a step in the right direction, it doesn’t fully address the problem. Prioritization isn’t just about whittling down a to-do list or ranking activities by importance and urgency on an Eisenhower Decision Matrix; it also requires reshaping how we approach work more productively.

In our work, we have found that three critical factors lie at the heart of solving prioritization challenges: tasks, tracking and trust. Addressing these dimensions holistically can start to address the root causes of feeling overwhelmed and lay the foundation for sustainable productivity. Let’s take a closer look at each.

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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.

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