Why a coaching mindset could be essential for leading during uncertain times

How do you empower your teams during this challenging time? A coaching mindset is critical. Melissa DeRoche, Global Head of Coaching at BTS, shares why.
June 1, 2020
5
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This article was originally published in Thrive Global here.

It’s up to leaders to cultivate the right coaching mindset to lead their teams through this health crisis.

This time of unprecedented change leaves many feeling overwhelmed, stressed, and frustrated. For leaders, however, it’s now mission-critical to dial up support for your team members. Bringing a coaching mindset to the way you lead them will help you actively accompany your people through these extraordinary and uncertain times.

To leverage the power of a coaching mindset, you’ll need to believe people have potential and can grow, trust that others will rise to do their best when stretched, and embrace curiosity rather than jumping in to fix others’ mistakes. That’s not to say there aren’t moments when fixing is important. But now more than ever, a coaching mindset will help you empower your teams and allow them to see things in new ways, creatively adjust to the new normal, and foster meaningful connections.

These factors are all crucial for business success and personal well-being.

Cultivating a Team Mentality Remotely

Trust, safety, and comfort are important for any team — remote or not. And if we really think about it, the focus of coaching is on conversations. With that in mind, the following tips should help get you started:

1. Set the table. If you’ve ever set a holiday table or prepared for an event, you know how much thought goes into setting the scene. That same care should apply when you manage remote teams. You need to set the right conditions to come together with some regularity. Otherwise, it’s nearly impossible to lead successfully.

Establish clear guidelines and expectations, and detail the exact start and end times of your meetings. Co-create with your teams about how you want the meetings to feel and what you want to accomplish. If you have yet to have this discussion about the “how” of virtual working, it’s a real opportunity to use a coaching mindset to take what you’ve learned about what’s working and what could be even better if you shifted things around.

When leading virtually, I prefer the less-is-more approach and keep meetings to 50 minutes or less (unless they come with scheduled breaks). Going this route often requires a little more preparation from all attendees. By creating and sending pre-reads, you’ll leave time for lively discussion. Also, the 50-minute meeting gives everyone a 10-minute gift to reset for the next one.

2. Focus on genuine conversations. A coaching mindset is incredibly valuable when leading remotely. Challenge employees to think differently about problems rather than giving the solution yourself. Connect, stay curious, and engage in dialogue. Get people talking and give them room to reflect, explore, and grow.

Coaches also do more than challenge their teams — they provide support. Although time might feel limited, devote a few minutes of your meetings to discuss something other than work or schedule micro check-in meetings to ensure everyone feels connected to the team as a whole.

3. Prioritize presence. Your presence is always critical, but it’s even more so when you’re working virtually. If you fail to “show up” and are distracted during meetings, your people know it and will model what you are doing. This behavior directly impacts the team’s engagement and productivity.

Take stock of the environment employees must now work in and check in on how their transition to remote work is going. What this looks like is entirely up to you, but I ask questions like these: How can I help? What’s working for you? What can I be doing better? What tools do you need to make this work for you? Are there any resources I should make available to you?

Consider that many employees must now work and home school children. Likewise, nearly everyone is shouldering a psychological burden right now (in fact, nearly a quarter of employees worry about going stir-crazy in the midst of COVID-19). So it’s OK to adapt your expectations with the times. Be flexible with yourself and others, change up meeting times, put a pause on certain projects and start new ones, and learn new skills together.

As we experience a global pause, you have an unmatched opportunity to take a fresh look at what’s next for yourself and others. Adopting a coaching mindset is liberating and allows you to meet the challenges of today while staying open to future possibilities.

Learn how to design conversations that actually move decisions forward.
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September 25, 2025
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Team meetings: A missed lever for performance?
BTS research shows meetings with clear accountabilities boost team effectiveness 3.9x, turning routine meetings into real performance drivers.

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.

Blog
August 12, 2021
5
min read
Virtual is the great equalizer: How to leverage this collaborative powerhouse
This virtual environment has been a great equalizer. In many ways, our ability to meet and work virtually has helped us eliminate pretenses.

Co-authored by Cilsy Harris, Senior Vice President, CIO Insurance & Service Applications, The Hanover Insurance Group

At one time, most of us probably thought that a year into the pandemic we’d be back in the office and the virtual solution we employed as an emergency measure would be a thing of the past. However, it’s become very clear that virtual is here to stay – either as companies adopt fully-remote business models, or as is likely to be the case more often, they move to hybrid models that blend the best of remote and in-person work. Regardless of which model they choose we think smart companies will preserve the best aspects of the virtual experience to continue to create equality in communication and facilitate greater sharing of ideas.

This virtual environment has been a great equalizer. In many ways, our ability to meet and work virtually has helped us eliminate pretenses and share our authenticity to create more human connection. We’ve become less self-conscious and more down to earth in our business interactions. We’ve learned more about our colleagues’ personal lives, enabling us to recognize and truly treat each other as humans, not simply as the means by which work gets accomplished.

Creating big wins for important business goals

This new environment has created six big wins for achieving important business goals:

1.  Driving engagement/connection:

Authentic connection is the secret sauce for senior executives. It’s what drives trust, engagement, and execution. Our research shows authentic leaders build trust and put others at ease by sharing their own emotions and experiences, and by revealing stories and life lessons that resonate with others’ own situations.

A byproduct of the virtual world is that some of the barriers to sharing have been removed. The close-up camera creates eye-to-eye contact and a more personal interaction. Our insight into each other’s daily lives outside the office through the view of the camera has changed the tone and ease of our connection.

Virtual meetings also foster authentic connections across geographically dispersed teams in the organization in more efficient and meaningful ways. Regularly scheduled meetings with teams in Europe, Middle East and Asia/Pacific in the morning and those in the Americas in the afternoon, create cross-pollination of ideas and connections that previously would have required weeks of travel.

2.   Enabling collaboration among large groups, across geographies:

Dick Lavey, executive vice president of Agency Markets at The Hanover, relays how forums are being reinvented. “Picture a traditional sales planning meeting, held in a large, cavernous hotel room with 40+ people spread out in a big square, using microphones,” he says.

“It was intimidating for the presenter and difficult for the audience to track the dialogue. Now, this same meeting is transformed into an intimate and engaging experience for both the presenters and the meeting participants.”

Well-facilitated meetings create forums for dialogue that lead to better outcomes. The outcome of this shift is understanding that for certain events and forums, choosing a virtual model can create greater intimacy and engagement. Choosing the right forum for the purpose is our call to action.

The virtual world has delivered the impetus to rethink and reimagine how we design forums to optimize attendance and participation, and to offset some of the challenges presented by geographic location. “Events that once were considered feasible only when they were held in person, like our annual Innovation Expo, saw big gains in attendance across all geographies,” according to Will Lee, EVP and Chief Information and Innovation Officer at The Hanover.

“It also has enabled all attending Hanover employees to experience the event in the same manner, regardless of location. One of the most significant outcomes of this new approach was creating a live example of how we can design environments to make space for innovative thinking that cut across the entire organization and include all roles and levels.”

We are also able to meet with more people, more quickly. At the Hanover, our agent road shows, no longer limited by time and space, can be held on back-to-back days–in Georgia one day, Upstate NY the next, and Washington State the very next day. This meeting line-up would have been impossible in person. “We ‘cover more ground’ by not covering any ground,” says Lavey.

At BTS, we’re hosting highly collaborative senior executive team meetings and leadership development programs that enable leaders to create greater impact. After only a few half days, global executive teams decide strategic direction, tackle sticky issues, form agreement on how to better work together, make important decisions, and create strategic action plans–launching the organization on a new trajectory.

3.   Attracting talent:

For Lee, finding great talent has gotten a real boost with hybrid operating models, and at The Hanover, we are seeing this have a meaningful impact. As we’ve eliminated geography as a defining factor for those hard-to-find roles in security, innovation, and even executive leadership, we’ve become an attractive employer to a much larger pool of talented candidates. Candidates are now able to choose roles based on company culture and specific opportunities, without being restricted by the proximity of the job to their homes.

4.   Retaining top talent:

A client recently told me that he lost a great employee because this person was assured a role with another company in a work-from-home arrangement. Top employees have demonstrated great commitment to their work, high productivity and skillful leadership while enjoying the greater work/life balance that work-from-home enables. This has become quite important to many people of all ages, especially working parents, employees who care for elderly parents, and those helping family members with physical and mental health issues. Remote work is an increasingly valuable way to attract and retain great talent.

5.   Creating efficiencies:

Even reimagining how products are launched has delivered more tangible benefits than we previously thought possible. At The Hanover, our virtual launch events have attracted much higher attendance and generated strong satisfaction ratings. At BTS, we’re able to help more clients in a single day and our clients appreciate spending less time traveling.

6.   Improving interactions:

Lastly, the equalizing effect has improved many daily interactions as well.

  • We’re all the same on video, take up the same space, and our stature at the table is the same. No one is at the head and no one has a second-row seat.
  • Rather than having some in the room and some on video, we’re all in the same room, and we’re able to meet with our global teams, on equal footing, at any time.
  • Those with differing communication and work styles, such as introverts and extroverts, find the capabilities of collaboration technology suit their ability to participate either by chat, raising their hand, or amplifying the comments of another person. Everyone can contribute and be heard.

As many companies transition to their future work models—whether they are fully-remote or hybrid—the virtual experience and confidence we have gained over the course of the pandemic will help us be even more efficient and effective.Many employees are anxious to get back to the workplaces that are the backbones of our society. We look forward to seeing faces and having meaningful in-person interactions. And, we have the opportunity to make this transition in a thoughtful way, to leverage all we’ve learned about authenticity, efficiencies, and connection through technology.

Tips for maintaining the equalizing benefits of virtual work

Here are a few tips to pull through some of the equalizing benefits as we make our way back to the office:

1.   Be mindful and intentional about continuing to connect with people on a personal level.

Schedule time regularly in your calendar to get together with a small group for lunch, organize a skip-level group for coffee, or host an informal, or one-on-one conversation. Set no real agenda other than to see how people are doing, get their feedback, listen to what they are working on. Be sure to share personal stories and experiences as part of this two-way interaction.

2.   Commit to creating an environment in your meetings where everyone can contribute and be heard.

Assign an individual in your team meetings, on a rotating basis, to play the role of monitor, to encourage the quiet or remote individuals to participate more, and to reign in the overly strong voices. Make a point of sitting in a different place each time to shake up the room. Set up a team chat channel for each of your regular meetings and encourage follow up comments and conversation in between meetings, for those less comfortable sharing in the room. Participate regularly yourself to model the behavior.

3.   Don’t be afraid to keep the new virtual paradigm where it makes sense.

The lessons about productivity and efficiency, whether you are hosting a virtually based product launch, sales meeting, or training program, should inform how to choose the format. And fewer, shorter, more effective meetings will energize people and afford them more time to get more done.Now is the time to preserve the good that has come out of our virtual working environments, even as we migrate back to the traditional office. We will all be more engaged and connected as a result.

Blog
April 12, 2023
5
min read
Think small to accomplish big things in 2023
Taking a coaching and mentoring approach is one way to succeed despite the current uncertainty in the business world.

Under pressure to perform, how can leaders help their teams be successful even in unfavorable conditions?

Taking a coaching and mentoring approach is one way to ensure success. In almost every coaching conversation this year, leaders have shared the pressure they feel to deliver big results despite the reality of current economic headwinds and uncertainty in the business world.In one conversation, a leader described his experience:

“Given that people are feeling anxious about the economy, our senior leaders have set impossibly ambitious goals for 2023.”

He asked,

“What am I supposed to do? Tell my team that they can hit those goals—when I don’t believe it myself?”

This leaders’ reality is not unusual. Leaders are under more pressure than ever to hit their numbers and deliver shareholder value, even when it doesn’t seem realistic. So what can you do? In the case of this leader, he was deeply passionate about mentoring and coaching people of all ages – in fact, his favorite thing to do outside of work was coaching youth basketball.

I asked him:

“As a basketball coach, I imagine your team faces situations that feel like impossible odds. What do you do in that situation? Do you shrug your shoulders and tell the team they had better face the fact that they’re about to get their butts kicked?”

At first, he laughed but thought it over and responded:

“I tell the team, ‘Don’t look at the scoreboard; don’t look at the clock. Let’s just focus on doing the next thing right. Let’s go for a small win—make a great pass, go for a steal—and build on that.’”

While it may not be a great pass or a steal, when you’re faced with what feels like impossible conditions, look for the small wins. Then, chart a path forward with steps that the team can take over the next couple of weeks to head in the right direction. As you look to inspire others to get through a year of economic uncertainty, it can be tempting to raise the bar in the hope that people will rise to the occasion. Instead, try focusing on the everyday behaviors that lead to small wins. As these wins pile up, they create confidence, momentum, and progress.

By keeping everyone’s focus on small steps in the right direction, they might surprise themselves by ending up on a summit at the end of a rocky 2023.

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August 24, 2026
5
min read
Selling changed. Did your kickoff?
Most sales kickoffs are roadmap readouts. Here is how to design one that changes what sellers do when they walk back into the field.

In 2012, 74% of SaaS account executives hit quota. Today, it's just 48%.

It's tempting to chalk that up to a software problem. But the pattern is broader. Alexander Group found that just 49% of core sellers across nine industries hit or exceeded quota in 2023.

But here's the kicker: the average seller in that study still reached 89% of target.

Across industries and benchmarks, attainment has been drifting down, but this isn't a story about a handful of great sellers carrying the number while everyone else is falling dramatically behind. The typical seller is getting close to quota.

Sellers aren't suddenly incapable of selling, the context around selling has changed.

Buyers still need sellers… they just need them differently

1. Seller's aren't guiding a single buyer anymore

B2B deals now involve six to 10 stakeholders, and enterprise purchases can involve 17 or more. About 77% of buyers describe their last purchase as complex or difficult.

The seller's job is increasingly to help a group reach a decision, not simply help one person make one.

2. The seller's information advantage is shrinking

The seller's information advantage is shrinking

Buyers now use about 10 interaction channels during a purchase, roughly twice as many as in 2016. AI is accelerating that shift, giving buyers more ways to research, compare and pressure-test options before they ever engage a seller.

The value of simply knowing more than the buyer is disappearing.

3. Buyers can avoid seller friction for longer

About two-thirds of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free buying experience. It's easier than ever to research a category, build a shortlist and develop a point of view without talking to sales.

That means sellers have to earn their way into the conversation by adding value, not just showing up.

4. Sellers are becoming sense-makers

Buyers aren't necessarily struggling to find information. They're struggling to determine what to trust, what matters and what to do with it. In fact, 69% say they turn to sales reps to validate AI-generated insights.

Which brings us to the kickoff

All of this has big implications for the one moment each year when we bring the entire commercial organization together to prepare for the year ahead.

The good news? You don't need to scrap the kickoff, you just need to redesign it.

That's work we do with clients all the time, across sales kickoffs and other high-stakes moments where strategy needs to become action.

And, in the spirit of not gatekeeping the good stuff, here are three things every kickoff designed to change behavior needs:

Before

Start with the change, not the agenda

This is where many sales kickoffs go wrong. They start with the event: strategy update, product roadmap, messaging, breakouts, keynote. The agenda becomes the organizing principle.

Flip it.

Start with the behavior you need to change, then design the kickoff around it.

That means thinking beyond the room itself. What needs to happen before people arrive? What do they need to experience and practice during the event? And what needs to happen after they get back to work?

Find the real constraint

Most revenue leaders have a hypothesis about what's holding their teams back. Few have enough data to know.

We ran a readiness diagnostic for a financial services client preparing for an AI leadership event. The leadership team came in expecting the biggest barrier to be skepticism: Would sellers actually believe AI could help them sell differently?

They were wrong.

Sellers and leaders already believed in the value of AI. The real gap was much more practical: confidence and ability. People understood the promise but weren't yet sure how to use it in their day-to-day work or bring it into a client conversation.

That changed the intervention completely. Instead of spending the event convincing people that AI mattered, we could spend the time helping them actually use it.

That's what a good diagnostic buys you: permission to change the plan.

A useful diagnostic doesn't need to be complicated. Ours can take 15 to 20 minutes per person and, when deployed across the full population, give leaders a ranked view of the constraints by region, function or level.

It also gives you a baseline for the behavior you're trying to change. Without a clear starting point, there's no way to know whether the kickoff actually moved the needle.

Get leaders ready before the room

Leader preparation shouldn't be a briefing the night before. If leaders aren't aligned on the change, the room won't be either.

Before the wider team arrives, leaders need to understand the data, the capability gap and, most importantly, what they need to do differently to close it.

The strongest version we've run gives leaders a dedicated session ahead of the main event. They arrive aligned on what needs to change, why it matters and how they'll reinforce it with their teams.

The test: Can every leader explain what their team needs to change, how kickoff will help and what they'll do differently afterward?

If not, you're asking the organization to change before its leaders are ready to lead the change.

During

Get people working, not watching

Most events fail for a pretty unglamorous reason: People sit and watch.

If you want behavior change, the room needs to feel more like the work and less like a conference.

A simple experiential architecture works:

  1. Start with the real work. Put people into a live or simulated situation before explaining the framework.
  2. Let them see the gap. Pause and reflect before introducing the solution. Let the insight come from the room.
  3. Give them something to try. Introduce the model, tool or methodology when people have a reason to use it.
  4. Practice before they leave. Don't assume understanding will translate into behavior. Let people try the new behavior while they're still in the room.

Skip the practice and you have awareness. Practice it and you have a shot at behavior change.

Put your leaders to work too

Leaders should facilitate, participate, join teams at the tables and model the behaviors they're asking others to adopt.

If executives are on stage for 20 minutes and gone by lunch, you've designed a broadcast.

People notice the gap between what leaders say matters and what they actually spend their time doing.

The test: Did leaders do the same work they're asking their teams to do?

After

Build reinforcement into the work

This is where a lot of the investment quietly disappears.

Managers today are carrying more people and more work than ever before. Gallup reports that average team size rose from 10.9 direct reports in 2024 to 12.1 in 2025. Yet managers remain one of the biggest variables in whether new behaviors stick, with Gallup estimating they account for 70% of the variance in team engagement.

So don't give managers another program to administer.

Make the first 90 days part of the design

  • Weeks 1–2: Translate the kickoff into 90-day commitments with clear owners and dates. Give leaders an executive synthesis they can use with their teams.
  • Days 30–60: Bring managers together in peer groups of six to eight to compare what's working. Give them simple guides they can use in 1:1s and pipeline reviews.
  • Day 90 and beyond: Connect the new behaviors to business-led check-ins and actual performance.

Make leaders accountable for what happens next

Leaders set the expectation, managers coach it, executives model it, and the organization measures it.

No platform substitutes for a manager asking about the behavior in a 1:1.

The test: 90 days out, can a participant remember the last time their manager asked about the behavior?

If they can't, kickoff probably didn't stick.

The opportunity is bigger

The best kickoffs don't just get everyone aligned on the year ahead. They create a shared understanding of what selling requires now, give people a chance to practice it, and make it easier to carry that behavior back into the work.

If you remember nothing else from this blog, I'll leave you with a simple but powerful question to take into the planning process for your next event:

When your sellers walk back into the field on Monday, what will they be able to do that they couldn't do before?

If you have a good answer, you're probably on the right track.

Blog
August 19, 2026
5
min read
Everybody's planning an AI reset off-site. Four mistakes will sink most of them.
Planning an AI reset off-site? The agenda decides everything. Four common design mistakes, and how to build two days that change what your company is capable of.

There’s a specific kind of strategy meeting getting scheduled right now, in nice hotels with bad coffee: the AI reset off-site.

And for good reason. In a 2026 WRITER survey, 48% of leaders described their AI rollout as, in their own words, a "massive disappointment." That's nearly half the room.

What that number really measures is the distance between what these tools can do and what people are doing with them. In our experience, that distance is almost entirely human.

Which is why the off-site is the right instinct. Making the most of that time is the harder part.

What separates an AI reset that actually changes the game from an expensive two-day conversation? In our experience, it comes down to avoiding four common design mistakes.

Mistake 1

Blaming the bots

The gap between AI investment and real adoption is almost always about people, not technology. And when adoption stalls, we usually find it's one of four things.

  1. They don't think it will help them
  2. Nobody around them is using it
  3. They don't feel capable
  4. Or they don't have real access to the tools they were promised

Four different problems, and four completely different fixes.

That's why diagnosis comes first. If you don't know which barrier you're dealing with, every intervention becomes an educated guess. And you cannot tell which one you have by staring at a dashboard. A belief gap and a skill gap look identical in a status report and need opposite interventions. Show up guessing, and you'll spend real money teaching people to use a tool they simply don't trust yet. Congratulations - you've just catered the wrong conversation.

Mistake 2

Letting leaders off the hook

One of the biggest predictors of whether change sticks is also one of the most overlooked: leadership.

If your executives show up as observers, nodding along and quietly answering email under the table, your people clock it in about four minutes.

That doesn't mean your CEO has to emcee the thing. It means they use the tools in front of everyone, participate in the conversation, and make it clear this isn't someone else's initiative.

Recently we’ve been working with a Fortune 200 global professional services firm who’s top 120 leaders were at very different points with AI. Some were redesigning entire processes. Others were using it to summarize emails, or not at all. Rather than focus on the technology, the four-hour session focused on what leaders could do with AI, applying it to a live strategic challenge and ending with a personal commitment to lead differently. The response was strong enough that the organization is now cascading the experience globally.

The lesson is simple: when leaders experience AI as a strategic capability, they're better equipped to model the behavior that makes adoption stick. Nothing you build during those two days survives without that entire chain of leadership doing its part.

Mistake 3

Chasing the wrong outcome

Without a behavioral baseline, you have no way to prove anything actually moved. No baseline, no ROI. You're just hoping the energy in the room was good, which is a wonderful feeling and a terrible metric to bring to your CFO.

But the baseline isn't just about proving the off-site worked. It's about understanding where you're starting in the first place. And you'll want that clarity, because the quiet resistance is real. In that same 2026 research, nearly a third of employees admitted to actively working around their company's AI strategy. If you don't win their belief in the room, some of them will keep politely ignoring the whole thing from their desks. You can't measure your way out of that. You have to earn your way out of it.

Which brings us to the biggest reframe of all.

Mistake 4

Leaving follow-through to chance

We've been working with a Fortune 100 medical device company on their AI strategy for three years. It started with their leadership team, a three-hour session built around what those leaders would do differently, and it landed. What became clear afterward was that the same experience needed to happen everywhere else. So, it expanded: 90-minute activations for 15,000 people, and this year intact teams redesigning their own workflows.

Three years in, that first session is the smallest part of the story.

Your event is where momentum gets created. What happens at 30, 60, and 90 days is where results get made.

If you're planning one of these and want to change what happens on Monday, not just how everyone feels on Friday, that the work we do.
We'd be glad to help you design it.
Blog
August 14, 2026
5
min read
Every candidate looks like a great hire now. AI made sure of it.
Polish is no longer a hiring signal. See how organizations use role-relevant simulations and predictive validity data to hire for high-stakes roles.

Candidates now arrive at interviews pre-coached by AI, with their resumes optimized to pass every checkpoint. Polish has stopped being a signal. The traditional hiring process was built to read exactly the cues that AI is now best at producing, and the signals hiring managers once relied on have weakened as a result. And for roles where the wrong hire carries real business consequences, losing the ability to tell who will actually perform is not a minor inconvenience. It is a material risk, and it exposes the business to unnecessary turnover, reduced performance, and heavier investment for talent growth and development.

So how do you observe the behaviors that matter most, before someone is in the role?

Not by asking better questions, but rather by putting candidates in situations designed to elicit that behavior.

The limits of predicting from paper

Credentials tell you what someone has done. Structured interviews tell you what someone says they would do. Neither lets you observe what they actually do in the moments that count.

This distinction matters most in client-facing, relationship-driven roles, where the performance gap between a strong hire and a weak one plays out in real business outcomes (revenue, retention, client growth). Organizations that hire at scale in these roles carry that gap across hundreds of decisions at a time.

The better approach is to watch candidates do the work before you hire them. Put them in simulated, role-relevant scenarios, and pair the simulation with a second, different kind of measure so no single method carries the whole decision. That combination is what lets you evaluate real performance before anyone is in the role. Organization-specific simulations provide a clear read on who is ready and capable of performing on day one. In a world of AI-supported candidate signals, the use of simulations makes the process harder to prep for. It is harder to fake. And, when designed well, it is substantially more predictive than other hiring methods.  

What counts as evidence

Claims about predictive power are easy to make. Evidence for them is rarer than you would expect.

A predictive validity study, the kind that links pre-hire assessment scores to how someone actually performs once hired, is some of the hardest evidence to produce and the rarest to see. Many assessments are validated against proxies: another test, or a theoretical model of the role, rather than real results on the job. Connecting scores to concrete business outcomes and doing the statistical work to show the link holds, takes years of shared data and a level of commitment from both the assessment provider and the client that most partnerships never reach. That is precisely why it is worth asking for. A provider who can show how assessment scores track to training completion, retention, and first-year output is offering something categorically different from one who can only show a correlation with another test.

Why simulation holds up where other methods do not

When a candidate sits across from a trained assessor (someone playing the client or prospect on the other side of the conversation) and has to work through a real situation, they cannot rely on a rehearsed answer. The scenario is specific. The stakes feel real. What you see is close to what you would get on the job.

That is the value of simulation-based assessment: it does not test what candidates know about the role.

It shows how they use what they know when a real person is on the other side of the conversation, before the stakes are real.

For roles that carry significant business responsibility, this distinction is the whole game. The cost of the wrong hire in a high-stakes client-facing role is not just a missed quota for a quarter - It plays out in relationships that do not develop, clients who leave, and productivity losses that compound over time. Getting those hiring decisions right, at scale, with consistency, requires methods that are built for predictive accuracy, not just candidate experience or hiring speed.

What this means for how organizations think about hiring

Most organizations are still optimizing the wrong things in their hiring process. They invest heavily in employer branding, application flow, and interview structure, all of which matter, but less in the core question: does our hiring process actually predict who will succeed in this role?

AI has sharpened the stakes here. If every candidate can present as polished and prepared, screening based on presentation becomes less useful. What holds up is direct observation of the behaviors that the job requires.

A few principles worth building from:

  • Measure what the job requires, not what is easy to measure. Cognitive tests and personality questionnaires have their place, but they do not look much like the job. The closer the assessment is to the actual work, the better it predicts performance in it.
  • Ask what your assessment predicts. Training completion? Retention? First-year output? Most organizations cannot answer that question today, largely because providers have rarely been asked to prove it. It is a fair thing to ask for.
  • Take the human element seriously. In a simulation, a candidate is having a real conversation, responding in real time, navigating a situation that requires judgment. Even with the help of AI, that is hard to game. And it remains one of the strongest predictors of on-the-job performance available.

The data exists to make hiring decisions more accurate, fairer, and more directly tied to business outcomes. For organizations operating in high-stakes roles at scale, there is too much on the line to rely on methods that cannot hold up to that standard.

You may be interested in BTS’ thought leadership in the five talent shifts AI is forcing now.