Top trends emerging from COVID-19 and their lasting impact on leadership
During this strange period of isolation, both leaders and individual contributors alike have experienced significant challenges affecting the way they work and connect with their teams.
While terms like “remote employees” and “virtual teams” were commonplace before the crisis, COVID-19’s impact on the workplace has expanded their meaning exponentially. This new reality has accelerated three major trends for individual contributors and three additional trends for leaders that will substantially impact the future of work as the world moves out of the crisis.
Three trends amplified by COVID: For individual contributors
1. Technological proficiency is requisite for success.
While the ability to comfortably navigate new technology has long been a core requirement in the workplace, COVID has made this skill imperative. Workers must now fully embrace new hardware and software tools as the primary conduit for connection, communication, collaboration, productivity and value creation. Anyone still dragging their feet and using workarounds to camouflage a lack of proficiency with new technology will struggle even after organizations return to a physical workplace.
2. “Adapt or die” is the critical mindset to embrace.
For years, leaders have been talking about being “agile” – agile projects, agile leadership, agile strategy, the list goes on. Now that agility has been called into question, and people who can thrive in this way of thinking and working will be highly valued. This divide is already apparent. Those rapidly adapting and prototyping new ideas are seeing success, while those that are waiting or hoping for things to simply “go back to the way they were” are getting left behind. To be successful in today’s environment and into the future, individual contributors must be able to shift quickly to new roles, projects, teams, or wherever the business needs them most.
3. Personal lives and work lives have never been more intertwined.
Many people have had to adapt to a new working environment – home. It is now commonplace to see people’s children (who have also been challenged to adapt) on video conferences, or hear dogs barking on conference calls. Spouses and partners have had to learn how to juggle parenting responsibilities while making time for video calls. In a post COVID environment, more workers will continue to work from home, enjoying the reduced commute and travel times they experienced during the crisis. Corporations will encourage this, as the productivity gains and cost savings will entice them to limit office investment and support funding workers’ home offices. As offices reopen, the ability to manage work life-personal life integration will continue to be a necessary skill.
Overall, success for both leaders and individual contributors during this time depends on their ability to embrace new technologies, willingness to adapt to change, and ability to smoothly integrate personal life and work life.
Three trends amplified by COVID: For leaders
Beyond these skills, leaders within large organizations also need to be aware of the following:
1. Empathy is now more important than ever.
Empathy, defined as the core ability to understand the feelings of others, has become fundamental during this challenging time. Leaders must understand their peoples’ personal context – their health, the safety of their family and friends, and their current mental state – before engaging them with work expectations. The immediacy of this skill will subside eventually, but moving forward, leaders will be expected to continue to consistently lead with empathy. The prolonged and persistent impact of COVID on everyone’s families, fortunes and work routines will demand that leaders demonstrate an authentic concern for their people’s well-being as well as their productivity. At the same time, leaders are still responsible for delivering business results through their people and teams. Thus…
2. Providing effective feedback is fundamental for success.
While crucial before the crisis, without the everyday, informal communication that occurs in the physical workplace, the quality and the frequency of feedback has become even more important. In the current remote environment, people are experiencing fewer social interactions than ever before. This isolation tends to breed anxiety, which can lead to feelings of insecurity. As such, employees will need more feedback on their work – both congratulatory and constructive – to build and maintain their confidence and sense of purpose. Over time, individual contributors will become accustomed to more frequent, meaningful communication, and once the crisis is over, leaders who fail to deliver this will lose the engagement and trust of their teams.
3. Quality communication is key.
Today’s leaders need to be excellent communicators, regardless of the medium. COVID has challenged leaders to be more adept at using technology like Zoom and Slack, but mastering the art of communication is omnipresent. Experts agree that technology, social media, the increased volume of data and data sources have diminished peoples’ attention spans. So now, as leaders are being challenged to share complex concepts through virtual methods, the ability to articulate clearly and concisely in a compelling way that influences others has become table stakes. The need for effective communication through spoken and written word was already important before COVID, but the crisis has augmented this requirement substantially.
In essence, leaders that currently excel – those who demonstrate empathy while still holding people accountable for performance, and communicate complex ideas in a clear and compelling way – will continue to do so in the post-COVID workplace. If you’re a leader struggling to lead your team during this challenging time, consider shifting your approach to embrace these behaviors; they will allow you to engender the highest levels of trust, attract and retain the best talent, and deliver results more consistently, today and in the future.
High value skills in a post-COVID 19 world
For individual contributors
- Proactive adoption of technology
- Adaptation to Change
- Successful Integration of Work and Personal Life
For leaders
- Demonstration of Empathy
- Higher Quality and Volume of Feedback
- Ability to Communicate Complex Ideas Clearly
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High-performing teaming
Work today is too complex for individuals to succeed in isolation. Almost every critical decision, innovation, or transformation depends on teams working effectively together. Leaders rely on their teams to deliver results. Teams, in turn, rely on their leaders to create the conditions where performance is possible. This exchange, what leaders need from their teams, and what teams need from their leaders, sits at the heart of what we call teaming.
When teaming is strong, leaders get what they need from their teams [creativity, resilience, execution] and teams get what they need from leaders [direction, support, and the conditions to thrive]. It’s how strategy becomes action, how uncertainty becomes opportunity, and how businesses stay competitive in a fast-changing world.
Team meetings: A missed lever for performance?
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.
Reorg ready roadmap: What great leaders do before, during, and after the change
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.
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From top-down to judgment all around: The AI imperative for organizations
Each business revolution has reshaped not only how businesses operate, but how they organize themselves and empower their people. From the industrial age to the information era, and now into the age of artificial intelligence, technology has always brought with it a reconfiguration of authority, capability, and judgment.
In the 19th century, industrialization centralized work and knowledge. The factory system required hierarchical structures where strategy, information, and decision-making were concentrated at the top. Managers at the apex made tradeoffs for the greater good of the enterprise because they were the only ones with access to the full picture.
Then came the information economy. With it came the distribution of information and a need for more agile, team-based structures. Cross-functional collaboration and customer proximity became competitive necessities. Organizations flattened, experimented with matrix models, and pushed decision-making closer to where problems were being solved. What had once been the purview of a select few, judgment, strategic tradeoffs, and insight became expected competencies for managers and team leads across the enterprise.
Now, AI is changing the game again. But this time, it’s not just about access to data. It’s about access to intelligence.
Generative AI democratizes access not only to information, but to intelligent output. That shifts the burden for humans from producing insights to evaluating them. Judgment, which was long the domain of a few executives, must now become a baseline competency for the many across the organization.
But here’s the paradox: while AI extends our capacity for intelligence, discernment, the human ability to weigh context, values, and consequence, is still best left in the hands of human leaders. As organizations begin to automate early-career work, they may inadvertently erase the very pathways and opportunities by which judgment was built.
Why judgment matters more than ever
Deloitte’s 2023 Human Capital Trends survey found that 85% of leaders believe independent decision-making is more important than ever, but only 26% say they’re ready to support it. That shortfall threatens to neutralize the very productivity gains AI promises.
If employees can’t question, challenge, or contextualize AI’s output, then intelligent tools become dangerous shortcuts. The organization stalls, not from a lack of answers, but from a lack of sense-making.
What organizations must do
To stay competitive, organizations must shift from simply adopting AI to designing AI-aware ways of working:
- Build new learning paths for judgment development. As AI replaces easily systematized tasks, companies must replace lost learning experiences with mentorship, simulations, and intentional development planning.
- Design workflows that require human input. Treat AI as a co-pilot, not an autopilot. Embed review checkpoints and tradeoff discussions. Just as innovation processes have stage gates, so should AI analyses.
- Make judgment measurable. Assess and develop decision-making under ambiguity from entry-level roles onward. Research shows the best learning strategy for this is high-fidelity simulations.
- Start earlier. Leadership development must begin far earlier in career paths, because judgment, not just knowledge, is the new differentiator.
What’s emerging is not just a flatter hierarchy, but a more distributed sense of judgment responsibility. To thrive, organizations must prepare their people not to outthink AI, but to out-judge it.
BTS acquires Nexo to strengthen its position in Brazil and Latin America
P R E S S R E L E A S E
Stockholm, May 5, 2025
STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN – BTS Group AB (publ), a leading global consultancy specializing in strategy execution, change, and people development, has agreed to acquire Nexo Pesquisa e Consultoria Ltda., Nexo, a boutique consulting firm headquartered in São Paulo, Brazil.
Nexo has been growing continuously since it was founded in 2017. With revenues of approximately 12 million Brazilian Reales (approx. 2.1 million USD) in 2024, and a highly capable team of 21 members, Nexo has built a strong reputation for delivering transformative projects in strategy, innovation, leadership, and culture.
Nexo collaborates with a great portfolio of clients across sectors such as financial services, consumer goods, and technology, assisting both local and global companies in navigating uncertainty, unlocking creativity, and activating strategy through people. Their work encompasses culture transformation, leadership development, employer value proposition, innovation culture, and vision alignment – supported by proprietary methodologies and frameworks.
BTS currently operates in Brazil servicing both local and multinational clients with a team of 13 employees. By acquiring Nexo, BTS not only increases the Group’s footprint in Brazil but also adds significant capabilities in culture and transformation services. Nexo’s client base has limited overlap with BTS, creating strong growth potential and synergy opportunities.
“Nexo is known for helping leaders and organizations tackle some of the most complex, human-centered challenges with creativity, empathy, and strategic clarity and the Nexo team is loved by their clients,” says Philios Andreou, Deputy CEO of BTS Group and President of the Other Markets Unit. “Their products and services complement and elevate our existing offerings, especially in culture transformation, and we are thrilled to welcome the Nexo team to BTS.”
“We’re excited to join BTS. We’ve long admired BTS’s approach and unique portfolio to support large organizations and leaders in connecting strategy with culture across the organization,” says Andreas Auerbach, co founder of Nexo. “Becoming part of BTS, allows us to scale our impact and bring more value to our clients while staying true to our values and culture,” adds Mariana Lage Andrade, co-founder of Nexo.
Upon completion of the transaction, Nexo’s business and organization will merge with BTS Brazil. Nexo’s founders will assume senior management roles in the joint operation.
The acquisition includes a limited initial cash consideration. Additional purchase price considerations will be paid between 2026 and 2028, provided Nexo meets specific performance targets. A limited portion of any such additional purchase price considerations will be paid in newly issued BTS shares. The transaction is effective immediately.
BTS’s acquisition strategy continues to focus on broadening our service portfolio, expanding our geographic reach, and enhancing our capabilities to support future organic growth in a fragmented market.
For more information, please contact:
Philios Andreou
Deputy CEO
BTS Group AB
philios.andreou@bts.com
Michael Wallin
Head of investor relations
BTS Group AB
michael.wallin@bts.com
+46-8-587 070 02
+46-708-78 80 19
High-performing teaming
Work today is too complex for individuals to succeed in isolation. Almost every critical decision, innovation, or transformation depends on teams working effectively together. Leaders rely on their teams to deliver results. Teams, in turn, rely on their leaders to create the conditions where performance is possible. This exchange, what leaders need from their teams, and what teams need from their leaders, sits at the heart of what we call teaming.
When teaming is strong, leaders get what they need from their teams [creativity, resilience, execution] and teams get what they need from leaders [direction, support, and the conditions to thrive]. It’s how strategy becomes action, how uncertainty becomes opportunity, and how businesses stay competitive in a fast-changing world.