Top trends emerging from COVID-19 and their lasting impact on leadership

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.

In times of major organizational change, structure alone doesn’t guarantee success.

The difference-maker is leadership—leadership that takes into account the uncertainty, the lack of clarity, and the need to engage and support your teams in new ways and propels the organization forward.

Our research and work with organizations undergoing complex transformations has underscored the fact that leadership before, during, and after reorganization requires careful attention to how you react and show up to others. It means doubling down on showing up with clarity when roles are undefined; building trust while systems are still forming; and translating structural blueprints into real-world behavior.

Through each phase, one theme remains constant: thriving in transformation isn’t about having all the answers—it’s about how you lead in the fog, under pressure, and beyond the launch. The leaders who do this well don’t just survive change—they shape and define what comes next.

Today, change isn’t just constant—it’s compounding.

AI is reshaping roles. Supply chains remain volatile. Customer expectations evolve faster than annual planning cycles can keep up. In this context, a strategy that looks great on paper often falls apart in practice. Imagine a team, for instance, who spent months crafting a detailed strategy—every milestone mapped, every risk assessed. But when conditions shifted, their well-laid plan quickly felt more like a burden than a beacon. Sound familiar?

This is a reality many organizations face. The traditional top-down approach to strategy, where a select few create the plan and hand it down, is cracking under the pressure of a faster, more complex world. Organizations need a strategy that’s dynamic, resilient, and, most importantly, actionable by everyone. To make this a reality, today’s leaders must bring strategy to life through a more inclusive, flexible model that empowers teams to contribute and adapt in real time.

In this new approach, strategic planning is about more than a set of priorities and goals—it’s about creating a two-way dialogue with people across the organization, building a culture of ownership, and embedding adaptability at every level. Here’s how to reinvent strategy in a way that turns it from an isolated exercise into a collective movement, creating a fast track to impact and ownership.

Create feedback loops closer to the customer

In conventional strategy sessions, plans are often crafted behind closed doors, only to be revealed once they’re fully formed. This approach may feel efficient, but it leaves out insights from those closest to the work—and to customers. Without input from these critical perspectives, strategies risk being disconnected from the realities on the ground.

This doesn’t mean handing over the strategy process to every employee or crowd-sourcing big decisions. Leaders still set the direction. The key is being intentional about when and where employee input will sharpen the strategy. Rather than starting with a blank slate, offer specific, targeted opportunities for feedback—especially from those on the front lines.

From: Senior leaders make the strategy and inform employees of the plan

To: Employees are engaged at critical moments early in the strategy planning process

An example: A SaaS company set an ambitious goal to double in size within three years—but early alignment was missing. Leaders were energized by big ideas but lacked a shared direction. To clarify the path forward, they created a set of strategic alternatives rooted in a clear purpose. Rather than relying solely on executive input, they brought in next-level leaders to pressure test early ideas and offer real-world feedback. These leaders piloted key parts of the strategy in their markets and then offered insights from their experiences that helped sharpen the long-term strategy. By intentionally involving the right people at the right moments, the organization gained clarity faster—and built stronger alignment early on.

By building feedback loops at the right moments, you can:

• Capture frontline insights that executives may not see, enriching the strategy.
• Generate early buy-in by giving employees a voice in shaping the “how” of the strategy where they are better positioned to know what will work.
• Align daily work with strategic goals by allowing employees to test the strategy and spot where it will work—and where it won’t.
• Create an environment where teams feel empowered to surface new insights and adapt.

A participatory approach at the right times along the strategy process doesn’t just inform the strategy—it makes it stronger and more grounded in real challenges, empowering employees to shape an outcome that feels both ambitious and achievable.

Cultivating ownership at every level

Even the best strategy is only as effective as the people who execute it. Ownership at all levels is essential to driving speed and adaptability, but it doesn’t happen by accident. When employees have clarity on how the strategy aligns to their individual roles and on the decisions they can own, they feel empowered and motivated to contribute to its success. This sense of ownership fosters a nimble, resilient organization.

By building purpose and clarity into every level of the plan, leaders can:

• Empower informed decisions at the right level that support company goals.
• Create momentum by showing employees their impact early on.
• Encourage continuous learning and adaptability anchored in the customer and market.
• Shift from static planning to an iterative, progress-driven mindset.

When employees see how their roles connect to larger goals and feel like they have the authority to make decisions, they are more willing—and prepared—to take ownership. This alignment, combined with a focus on purpose, drives momentum even in a shifting landscape.

From: Strategy execution is top-down, with decisions held at the leadership level.

To: Employees at all levels have clarity on how their roles connect to the strategy and where they can make decisions, fostering ownership and speed.

An example: One global healthcare company, having grown rapidly through acquisition, struggled with a fractured strategy—each business unit pulling in a different direction. Their turning point came not from a better plan, but from a unifying purpose. By helping teams see how they fit into a bigger vision, people could start seeing themselves in the future of the company. This shared purpose became a powerful driver of ownership—especially when disruption hit. When a major supply chain issue emerged just months later, teams didn’t splinter. Instead, they used that shared purpose as a compass, identifying new ways to deliver value and keep momentum going.

Align strategy and culture

All too often, strategy and culture are treated as separate domains. Yet, no matter how robust your strategic plan, it can only succeed if it aligns with the organization’s cultural norms and ways of working. For example, adopting a more agile operating model might mean shifting the culture toward quicker decision-making and cross-functional teamwork.

To create alignment between strategy and culture, leaders should:

• Identify key behaviors and ways of working that support strategic objectives—and those that are getting in the way.
• Focus on how these behaviors show up in everyday actions and decisions, and start making small shifts that reinforce what’s needed to execute the strategy.
• Experiment and iterate, and as you see success, formalize new ways of working.

When strategy and culture move in harmony, they generate powerful momentum. Strategy becomes part of the organization’s DNA, reinforcing behaviors that propel the company toward its goals.

From: Strategy and culture are treated as separate priorities.

To: Strategy and culture are intentionally aligned, with behaviors, ways of working, and decision-making reinforcing strategic goals.

An example: A company formed through a series of acquisitions faced a challenge: culture fragmentation. With each acquired unit operating by its own norms, there was no shared way of working—and no clear basis for making strategic tradeoffs. Before any strategy could take hold, leadership recognized that the organization needed a common foundation. The breakthrough wasn’t a new plan, but a cultural one: reconnecting people to why they were part of the same company and what future they were building together.

By identifying consistent ways of working across teams and aligning on a shared purpose, they built the cultural scaffolding needed to execute strategy effectively. When external conditions changed, teams responded not with confusion, but with cohesion. Cultural alignment became the engine that made adaptive strategy possible.

Build in flexibility and adaptability

Even the best strategies need room to flex. But too often, organizations treat adaptability as an exception—something reactive, triggered only when disruption hits.

In a world where the conditions you plan for rarely match the ones you execute in, flexibility can’t be an afterthought—it must be a built-in feature of how strategy takes shape and stays alive.

The problem? Most strategy processes are built for control, not change. They prioritize precision over learning, timelines over feedback, and reporting over reflection. The result: strategies that look solid on paper but crack under real-world pressure.

Everyone talks about agility. It’s become a fixture in executive keynotes and strategy decks. But what’s often missing is the how—the operating system that actually enables teams to move quickly and stay aligned when conditions shift.

To build that system, leaders need to rethink not just their planning cadences, but the behaviors, structures, and decision-making norms that shape how strategy is executed day to day.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

• Empower teams to surface real-time insights and propose tactical shifts—so strategy stays grounded in frontline reality.
• Support rapid adjustments without losing strategic direction—aligning short-term moves with long-term outcomes.
• Strengthen leaders’ resilience and decision-making under pressure—so they can lead through ambiguity without stalling progress.
• Establish structured feedback loops and clear decision rights—so teams know when to escalate, when to adjust, and when to act.

These shifts aren’t abstract ideals—they’re already reshaping how leading organizations approach strategy execution. One global logistics company, facing rapid expansion and constant external pressure—from shifting customer expectations to volatile supply chains—recognized that reacting faster wasn’t enough. They needed to design for adaptability from the start.

Instead of relying on rigid quarterly plans, they implemented a 30-, 60-, and 90-day strategy rhythm. These weren’t status updates—they were structured checkpoints designed to challenge assumptions, surface real-time insights, and recalibrate execution before small issues became big ones.

So, when disruption came—as it inevitably does—the teams didn’t freeze or fall behind. They flexed with purpose and kept moving, not because they had all the answers, but because they were built to shift. Adaptability wasn’t a reaction—it was how the organization worked, by design.

A new era of strategic planning

Strategic planning today isn’t about crafting the “perfect” plan—it’s about building the capability to learn, adapt, and align at scale. What’s different now? Disruption is no longer episodic—it’s constant, compounding, and often coming from directions leaders didn’t anticipate. AI is rewriting roles. Markets move overnight. And decision-making is no longer confined to the top—it’s distributed across teams, functions, and geographies.

In this environment, traditional planning cycles collapse under pressure. The organizations that thrive won’t be the ones with the most polished strategy deck—they’ll be the ones with the strongest strategic muscles: the ability to sense, shift, and stay aligned in real time.

By replacing rigid plans with dynamic systems, leaders can activate strategy as a living, participatory process—shaped by insight from every level, reinforced through culture, and tested through execution.

Because in a world that won’t wait, the real advantage isn’t having the right answers upfront—it’s building an organization that knows how to respond when the questions change.

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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