Insights

Leadership frameworks are introduced with good reason. Done well, they define what great leadership looks like, guide decisions under pressure, and give employees clarity on what’s expected. A strong framework can align leaders, speed up decision-making, and reinforce the culture an organization needs to grow. But too often, frameworks launch with energy and then fade. Behaviors are defined. Announcements are made. Posters go up. Resources are shared. For a while, it feels like momentum, but everyday habits don’t change. When frameworks fail to stick, it’s not just a missed opportunity. It puts strategy execution, talent alignment, and transformation outcomes at risk. The real challenge isn’t writing the right words. It’s embedding those words into how people work, lead, and decide especially under pressure. That’s where the true power of a framework lies: not in its creation, but in its activation. Our work with leadership teams has shown this again and again: to activate a framework, you must shift how people lead, how work gets done, and how the system reinforces it all.

Why one model can’t, and shouldn’t, do it all

Many organizations try to do too much with a single framework. They blur cultural aspiration with behavioral expectation, leaving people with something that sounds inspiring but isn’t practical. The result? A framework that lacks both inspiration and clarity. The most effective approach is to keep them distinct but connected:

• Cultural principles provide direction and inspiration, creating a shared ethos and common language.

• Behavioral expectations provide clarity and action, defining how leaders and teams are expected to behave especially under pressure.

Frameworks aren’t tested in calm moments. They’re tested when the stakes are high, during uncertainty, tension, or rapid change. That’s when leaders need clarity. Strong frameworks show up in three critical places:

• In people decisions: influencing how leaders hire, promote, and reward talent.

• In business decisions: serving as a lens for setting priorities, making trade-offs, and course-correcting.

• In cultural moments: reinforcing how teams respond to change, uncertainty, or challenge.

Whether you’re shaping culture, driving transformation, or building systems for speed, your framework is either fueling progress or quietly holding it back. One framework should inspire with purpose and direction. The other should guide action, so people know how to lead, how to decide, and how to show up when it counts. When both are in place, and aligned with strategy and systems, culture becomes a lever for transformation, not a barrier.

Making it real

Too often, the launch of a framework feels like the finish line. Leaders put energy into designing the model, running workshops, and sharing materials but the follow-through is where momentum slips. Competing business priorities quickly take over. Senior leaders may see the framework as an HR initiative rather than their own responsibility. Employees can feel overwhelmed by change or confused if the framework is too complex. And if systems like performance reviews, hiring, or recognition don’t reflect the framework, it starts to feel optional. The result? Even strong frameworks can fade into the background, seen as “just another initiative” rather than something that truly guides how the organization leads and makes decisions. The difference comes when activation is intentional, and includes:

• Practical tools that make it easy to use in the moment behavior guides, coaching templates, interview prompts, checklists.

• Manager development that goes beyond awareness, giving leaders confidence to apply the framework in setting goals, giving feedback, and developing their teams.

• Targeted communication that ties the framework to business priorities and brings it to life with senior leader stories and real examples.

• Personalization so employees can see how the framework connects to their own roles, decisions, and impact.

Most importantly, frameworks stick when leaders own them. When senior leaders use the framework to guide their own choices and conversations, it stops being a program and starts becoming how the business runs.

Modernize without losing what matters

For organizations with deep histories, shifting long-standing leadership behaviors and ways of working is a balancing act. Move too fast, and you risk alienating the very leaders you need. Move too slow, and you risk falling behind evolving customer needs, strategic priorities, and market realities. Employees need to know that the values and behaviors that made them successful still matter even as new expectations take hold. That means working with senior leaders to clarify which attributes and behaviors are enduring, and which must shift. In its strongest form, this shows up as clearly defined leadership behaviors, translated across levels and roles. Employees need to know what’s expected of them whether they’re leading a team, managing a function, or working on the front line. Successful rollouts also:

• Build awareness early and help people understand the “why” before embedding new systems.

• Engage credible champions: leaders who model and reinforce new behaviors.

• Create space for storytelling, peer coaching, and shared learning.

• Ensure senior leaders are visible champions, not just passive supporters.

These moves build trust, belief, and momentum, the ingredients that make change real.

Activate leadership behaviors for agility and speed

In today’s environment, speed, efficiency, and cross-functional collaboration are urgent imperatives. In these contexts, alignment alone isn’t enough. What matters is driving real behavior change breaking down silos, reducing hierarchy, and accelerating decisions. That’s where leadership frameworks rooted in core behaviors become levers for agility. Behaviors like courage and care combined with consistent ways of working that promote collaboration, quick feedback, and rapid decisions enable teams to move faster and more effectively. These behaviors matter most in defining moments: when leaders speak up despite risk, prioritize team goals over silos, or give honest feedback instead of waiting for perfection. But they only stick when embedded into how teams actually operate. We’ve seen success when teams:

• Adopt the two-part framework as part of their chartering process.

• Use tools like teaming canvases and retros to define roles and spot friction.

• Leverage technology to highlight wins, circulate feedback, and increase transparency.

• Apply frameworks as a lens for setting goals, measuring success, and course-correcting in real time.

In agile environments, goals shift constantly. The best teams don’t see that as chaos—they see it as momentum. Clear, consistent behaviors keep them focused, adaptable, and confident.

3 activation tips every talent leader should remember

1. Clarity beats complexity. You don’t need more capabilities or skills. You need fewer, clearer ones defined at every level of responsibility.
2. Co-creation is essential. If employees don’t see themselves in the framework, they won’t use it. Involve them early and often.
3. Systems must follow story. If hiring, performance, and recognition systems don’t reinforce the framework, it won’t stick. Story without system is a short-term boost. System without story is compliance. Neither lasts.

Our best advice: A quick checklist

• Provide something useful on day one – Make sure people can apply the framework immediately in a meeting, feedback session, or hiring decision.

• Set the right pace – Move fast if urgency and trust are high. If skepticism or fatigue is present, slow down and create space for dialogue.

• Secure leader ownership – Frameworks don’t create change, leaders do. Ensure leaders model and reinforce the framework in how they lead every day.

Nearly every leader I talk to knows the old planning model doesn’t make sense anymore. Multi-month cycles. Layers upon layers of initiatives. Budgets that quietly replace strategy as the plan. By the time it’s all done, the competitive landscape has already shifted under their feet. And yet, many companies still do it this way. They can feel the mismatch as they strive to move fast. They just don’t know what to do instead. The old game was setting direction. Decide where to go. Communicate it. Cascade it down. It made sense when the future looked enough like the past that you could be certain of your choices. But certainty is gone. In its place: disruption, surprise, and acceleration. Which means the work of leaders has shifted. The new game is adapting direction.

What needs to be new and different

If strategy execution today is about improv, then strategy setting is no longer about choreography. It requires a more flexible approach. Here are four flaws of traditional strategy planning, and what leaders can do differently:

1. Stop pretending there’s only one future.

We know the future won’t unfold exactly as envisioned. Customer needs shift. Competitors surprise you. Economies wobble. So why do we plan for just one version of what’s next? When one “winning” idea emerges too fast, it often gets momentum without being stress-tested. A better approach:evaluate multiple distinct directions at the same time.  One executive team we worked with had five competing visions for doubling the business in three years. Instead of forcing consensus, we worked with them to think through the core choices for each, including customer focus, product bets, and geographic expansion. Once leaders saw the real implications, they quickly ruled one option out. The eventual plan blended elements of the others, with contingencies built in. Thinking through alternatives gave them confidence and resilience when the inevitable twists came.

2. Make choices real before you announce them

Too many strategic plans race to the declaration moment at the Town Hall: here’s the big idea, now go execute. The problem? Leaders rarely know what they’ve actually signed up for, or what needs to change in how the work gets done. If you believe that strategy execution requires improv, then even in setting strategy you need to imagine what comes next and rehearse moves, implications, and ripple effects across future time horizons, albeit in a simpler but realistic form.  One client we worked with knew that acquisitions were essential to their growth. They had several targets in sight and negotiations underway, but no imminent deal. Instead of waiting, we ran the extended leadership team through a series of acquisition scenarios with different strategic intent that examined variables such as deal size, level of integration, and adjacency of the added business. As they worked through each scenario, they not only got a view into the nature of potential targets but also what changes they, as the leaders of the organization, needed to make now. They were choosing what kind of organization they would become. Based on what they were learning, they were able to make key decisions to position themselves for future success. They agreed on new hiring profiles, streamlined decision processes, leadership shifts, so they’d be ready when the right deal came. Strategy shifted from a conceptual statement to a real, lived preparation for a different future.  

3. Work across time horizons.

People can change fast. Infrastructure and capital cannot. Budgets, board approvals, and physical assets move slowly. Leaders need to intentionally plan for what can change now, what will take time, and what’s locked in, while still identifying the opportunities at each stage.  Take a pharma company with a pipeline bursting with new drug development. If even half their drugs made it through approval, their manufacturing capacity would be insufficient. Together we built an adaptable manufacturing plan, anchored on essentials, with clear trigger points for future decisions. When 70% of the drugs cleared approval, they were ready. Without that horizon-based thinking, they would have been caught flat-footed.

4. Align at the right level of detail.

Here’s a trap: mistaking varied interpretation of the strategy for purposeful improvisation. They are not the same. Without clarity and alignment at the top, every leader fills in gaps differently. That isn’t agility, it’s chaos. Leaders must turn the conceptual strategy into something tangible and real, in order to be able to align and lead the organization in the same direction. Strategic modeling allows leaders to test choices at the right level of fidelity, so they know what they’re actually agreeing to. Growing “a lot” versus growing 37% are not the same thing. The detail that is uncovered in the modeling exercises provides enough clarity to shape coherent execution, while still leaving room for adaptive moves over time.

From map to compass

Old strategy setting was about certainty. New strategy setting is about clarity of intent and readiness to adapt. It’s less a map and more of a compass. If your strategy and planning process still looks like a marathon toward a finished plan, ask yourself: are you preparing for the world you wish you had, or the one you actually face? The trick is helping leadership teams shift from setting direction to adapting direction—so strategy setting and execution can adapt. The future won’t wait for your plans.

Most leaders focus on strategy—not because they undervalue culture, but because strategy feels concrete. It has structure, timelines, metrics, and deliverables. It’s visible and defensible. When pressure is high, strategy gives leaders something they can point to and steer. Culture doesn’t always feel that way. It’s harder to define, harder to measure, and often lands in the “important, but not urgent” pile. That’s not a leadership flaw. It’s a gap in how we’ve equipped leaders to lead.But if you want to change how your organization operates, you have to start with what people experience every day.

Below are six no-fluff actions from our recent event, , designed to help you leave your team stronger than you found it.

‍Culture Without the Fluff→ Don’t miss events like these! Sign up for our newsletter or visit our events page to see what’s coming.

1. Build shared habits

If strategy defines where you’re going, culture determines whether you’ll get there. Strategy can shift quickly, with a new market, goal, or CEO. Culture can’t. It’s shaped by the beliefs, habits, and norms that don’t pivot on command—and that’s where friction starts. The disconnect doesn’t usually show up in big moments. It shows up in how decisions get made, what’s prioritized under pressure, and whether feedback is honest or avoided. These daily behaviors signal what really matters, regardless of what the strategy says. That’s why high-performing organizations go beyond communicating direction. They turn strategy into clear expectations for how people should work, lead, and collaborate—and then reinforce those expectations through routines, incentives, and leadership behavior.

Try this:

Pick one strategic priority and ask: What should people be doing differently if this is truly our focus? If you’re not seeing those behaviors, there’s a gap. Ask yourself: Do our daily habits match the future we’re trying to build?

2. Use the levers you already own

Culture change doesn’t have to start with a massive initiative. It can start with the levers you already own. Culture lives in the mechanics of your team’s work: how meetings are run, how frontline decisions are made, how failure is treated, and what behaviors leaders model. These small signals shape big beliefs. That’s why abstract values and vision statements alone often fall flat. They’re not wrong, but without action behind them, they’re just words on a page. Real change starts by zooming in on specific moments that shape how work gets done, and making small, intentional shifts. Want a culture of accountability? Focus on what happens after meetings. Want more innovation? Look at how failure is handled during team reviews.

Start here:

Pick one lever (like how meetings are run) and ask:

• What messages are we sending through how we meet?

• Who speaks up? Who stays silent? What actually gets decided?

Then make small adjustments that reinforce the culture you want—not the one you’ve inherited.

3. Avoid the tempting pitfalls

If you’ve ever rolled out a new set of values, launched a culture initiative, or shared a bold new vision, only to see behavior stay exactly the same, you’re not alone. Most culture efforts stall not because leaders don’t care, but because they start with what’s visible and familiar: messaging, posters, kickoff events. These feel like the right moves. But they rarely shift what people actually do, and rarely resonates in a meaningful and lasting way In our recent webinar, we shared six common traps that organizations fall into often with the best intentions. Here are three that come up again and again:

1. Relying on values to do the heavy lifting. Most teams have clear values, but that’s not the problem. The challenge is turning those values into real habits. If the way you run meetings, make decisions, and give feedback doesn’t reflect what’s on the wall, people notice—and disconnect.
2. Expecting HR or culture champions to lead the culture shift alone. HR and champions play a big role in culture, but they can’t do it without leaders. People take their cues from credible influencers in the business: what gets rewarded, what gets ignored, and how leaders show up under pressure. That’s where real culture change starts.
3. Announcing culture change before actually changing anything. This is a classic case of show don’t tell. When leaders talk about change without shifting the day-to-day experience, people become skeptical. They’ve heard it before. What earns their belief and commitment is seeing leaders act differently in ways that directly affect their work.  

P.S. We’ve rounded up 3 more pitfalls worth avoiding. See them here.

Start here:

Surface the unspoken. Ask: What do people believe they’ll be rewarded for today? What would they have to believe to behave differently?Culture change requires shifting the mental models that shape behavior.

4. Shift the beliefs beneath the behaviors

You can’t shift behavior without understanding the beliefs behind it. If teams aren’t collaborating across silos, it’s probably not because they don’t want to—it’s because they’re rewarded for competing, not collaborating. If leaders aren’t taking smart risks, it might be because failure has been punished, not treated as a learning moment. These everyday behaviors are just the surface—what’s driving them are deeper, often invisible beliefs that probably outlast the tenure of some of your employees.

Start here:

Ask: What are the unspoken rules here? What would someone need to believe for this behavior to feel natural, safe, and worth it? Until you name and shift those beliefs, culture efforts will stay stuck at the surface.

5. Don’t let your culture fall behind your tech

Honestly, the real surprise would be if AI wasn’t reshaping your culture. Some organizations are going all-in on experimentation. Others are still figuring out what their approach will be. But wherever you are on the curve, one thing’s clear: this moment feels a lot like the wild west. And your talent is picking up on that. Leaders are signaling the need to adapt and innovate—but rewards and incentives often tell a different story. Without clear signals from the culture that it’s safe to try, valuable to learn, and worth the risk, even the smartest tools won’t be used to their full potential.

Ask yourself:

• How are we capturing what’s working with AI—and making those insights visible and usable across the organization?

• What are we taking off people’s plates to give them the time and space to learn, experiment, and adapt?  

• Have we updated the priorities, deliverables and expectations to reflect the new reality—or are we layering AI on top of an already full workload?

• Are leaders helping people see the personal value in this shift—so AI feels like a path to growth, not a threat to their role?

6. Start small, scale fast

Most leaders assume culture change has to be slow and sweeping. But it doesn’t.We’ve seen major progress start with one small shift—the kind that’s visible, repeatable, and high-impact. The key? Start where the energy already is: a team that's eager, a leader who's ready, a process that’s stuck. Then focus on one behavior that’s holding things back—and change it. From there, scale what works.

Start here:

Use this simple 3-step exercise to find a small, high-impact place to start:

1. Pinpoint a stuck spot: Where is strategy getting delayed, deprioritized, or lost in translation? Common areas include:
   • Team meetings that always run long but lead to no decisions
   • A new tool or process people aren’t adopting
   • A frontline team disconnected from the broader strategy
   • An area with low engagement or slow execution
2. Identify the blocker behavior:
   • What specific habit, mindset, or expectation is in the way? (e.g., defaulting to top-down decisions, rewarding speed over learning, fear of trying something new)
3. Make one shift—and scale what works
   • Change that behavior in one team, one moment, or one process.
   • Capture the impact. Then share the story and replicate what worked.

Change spreads through stories. Show people what’s possible, and they’ll move with you.

Culture change is hard. Doing it alone? Even harder.

We work with teams around the world to:

• Spot what’s working—and what’s getting in the way

• Test small shifts that create big ripple effects

• Keep momentum going as change starts to spread

Reach out to us to start a conversation!

Leadership today doesn’t come with the luxury of guesswork. Intuition, charisma, and old habits aren’t enough to carry us forward. In a hybrid world, where hallway conversations and informal cues have all but disappeared, small signals carry outsized weight. Your words, your silences, your facial expressions, how quickly or thoughtfully you respond to an email—these become the cues people rely on to interpret how you feel, what you expect, and how much they matter to you as a stakeholder. Add in constant Slack messages, Zoom calls, and email threads, and every interaction becomes a moment of truth. Communication gets dissected quickly, often without full context. Each moment can either build—or erode—credibility and trust. As a result, it’s no surprise that executive presence (the way your leadership is perceived) is under a brighter spotlight than ever. And yet, it remains one of the most misunderstood dimensions of leadership. Leaders hear it matters. They’re told when they have it, or don’t, but they rarely receive clear, practical insight to help them understand what it is or how to build it.

Why leaders struggle to see themselves clearly

‍Over the years, I’ve had hundreds of coaching conversations with senior leaders. And nearly every one has reinforced the same truth: even the most capable leaders rarely get honest, useful feedback on how they come across. Most of what they hear is filtered: shaped by hierarchy, team dynamics, or the desire to keep the peace. They may get regular input on business results or performance goals, but often they get very little feedback on presence itself. That makes executive presence hard to improve. You can’t shift what you can’t see. And when feedback is vague or inconsistent, it’s easy for leaders to default to habits that may no longer serve them. That’s where tools like the Bates Executive Presence Index (ExPI™) come in. The ExPI™ is a 360° assessment designed to help leaders understand how others experience them across 15 distinct facets of executive presence from Authenticity to Vision to Concern.

“You’ve got to name it to tame it”

‍One conversation about executive presence with a leader we’ll call “Maya” stands out. After we reviewed her ExPI™ results, celebrating what was working and exploring a few areas rated lower, I asked how the session felt. She paused for a moment and said:

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“I know this wasn’t therapy, but it felt like it at times. And you know what my therapist always says? ‘You’ve got to name it to tame it.’”

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That stuck with me, because it’s true: awareness is the first step to change. Before this, Maya had never had a clear picture of how she showed up with her manager, her team, or her peers. For the first time, she had language for the things she’d sensed but couldn’t pinpoint. And with that, she could make small, intentional shifts that would strengthen her leadership impact.

Executive presence isn’t vague, it’s visible

‍While executive presence often feels hard to define, that’s usually because it’s talked about in broad, subjective terms like “gravitas” or “charisma.” In reality, executive presence is grounded in visible, measurable behaviors. The challenge is that most people don’t have a shared language for what to look for. It’s not about being the loudest voice or “commanding the room.” It’s about how you build trust, communicate with clarity, and bring others with you, especially in high-stakes moments. Once you know what to look for, executive presence becomes less of a mystery and more of a skill you can practice and refine.

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Executive presence refers to the qualities of a leader that engage, inspire, align, and move people to act. Based on research, we have organized those qualities in a set of leadership behaviors that appear across three dimensions: Character, Substance, and Style.

These are observable signals that shape how others experience your leadership.

A framework for turning awareness into action

‍Awareness of how others experience your leadership is a crucial first step, but it’s not enough: Leaders need to know what they can do to take action on this awareness. Here’s what we recommend:

1. Where do I stand? Start with a reliable mirror. A structured tool like the ExPI™ helps you understand how others perceive your presence across key traits like Practical Wisdom, Composure, and Assertiveness.
2. What strengths do I want to protect? Your superpowers are likely already serving you, but they can also become liabilities if overused. Appreciating both the upside and the risk of overusing it helps you use them more skillfully.
3. What’s getting in my way? Common blockers include being too guarded, reactive, or intense under pressure. The goal isn’t to eliminate them but to recognize patterns and adjust intentionally.
4. What small shifts could make a big difference? Executive presence isn’t about reinvention. It’s often about dialing one behavior up and another down in critical moments. Flexing just enough to shift how you’re experienced—without losing yourself.

What leaders often learn from the ExPI™

When leaders first see their ExPI results, it’s rarely a total surprise. More often, they find that something they suspected to be an issue is having a much bigger—or different—impact than they realized. Here are some ways that might show up:

• The ripple effect you missed. You may know you’re blunt or reactive, but not realize it’s keeping people from bringing you problems or ideas.
• The missing detail. You might know you need to improve Vision, but the ExPI shows whether the gap is in strategic thinking, inspiring others, or both—and with whom it shows up.
• The “happy blind spot.” Others may rate you higher than you rate yourself—a sign that you may need to focus less on that quality and more on another that is truly an area of opportunity.
• What got you here won’t get you there. Traits like decisiveness or bias to action may have served you well as an individual contributor, but they can backfire in a leadership role if they limit collaboration or inclusiveness.
• Character vs. Substance and Style. Many leaders score highest in Character (formed early in life) and lower in Substance and Style (skills built over time). It helps to remember that what they are seeing are perceptions—and they can be changed.
• Everything’s connected. Improving one facet often boosts others—for example, raising Resonance can lift Concern, Humility, Practical Wisdom, Interactivity, and Inclusiveness.

Insights like these turn vague impressions into concrete starting points for growth—without asking leaders to become someone they’re not.

Presence is perception in action

‍Many leaders spend a lot of energy trying to read the room, manage perceptions, or recover from moments that didn’t land well. When you understand how your presence is being read and have a language to interpret and adjust it, your work gets simpler. You stop worrying about how you're coming across and start operating from a place of calm clarity. Perception equals impact, and your presence is a shortcut to help you understand how others interpret your leadership. Those around you are picking up on how grounded your thinking is (Substance), how you engage in dialogue in the moment (Style), and what your behavior reveals about your values and intent (Character). Whether you need to show up as a strategic partner, drive growth, or shepherd people through change, how you show up shapes how your ideas land. Even small improvements in presence can unlock major shifts in influence, trust, and results.

Try this to shape your executive presence

‍Ask two trusted colleagues: “When have you seen me at my best as a leader?” Listen closely. Then ask yourself: “What was I doing that made the difference, and how can I do more of it on purpose?” When you name it, you can tame it, and that’s when your executive presence becomes a catalyst for impact.

Want deeper insight into how you’re showing up as a leader?

• Explore the Bates ExPI™ to get clear, actionable 360° feedback from a certified expert.
• Contact us to get certified to use the ExPI™ with leaders across your team or enterprise.

→ Read Part 2 of this series to explore the ways you can fine-tune your executive presence, authentically.

Adjusting your executive presence in moments of friction

Nadia, a high-potential executive at a payment processing company, was grappling with this question: what does it actually look like to lead with both authenticity and awareness? She had recently completed the Bates Executive Presence Index (ExPI™), a 360° assessment that helps leaders understand how they’re perceived across 15 facets of executive presence. → Learn more about executive presence and the Bates ExPI™ in Part 1 of this series. During our debrief, one facet stood out: Authenticity. It was one of Nadia’s highest-rated dimensions—but also the most polarizing.

“People like that I’m direct,” she said. “But they also say I’m too direct. It feels like I can’t win. I’m either being real and upsetting people or holding back and not feeling true to myself.”

It’s a tension many leaders feel, and it becomes even harder to navigate when something goes wrong. For Nadia, that tension surfaced clearly during a recent product launch failure. Her lowest-rated ExPI™ facet, Restraint, showed up in that moment. Her response to her team was swift and emotional:

“I can’t believe we let this happen, there will be hell to pay. What were you all thinking?”

Some team members rallied, while others shut down.

That’s when I shared a different way to think about presence—not as something fixed or all-or-nothing, but as something you can tune. The key isn’t choosing between being yourself or holding back. It’s learning to adjust your approach based on what the moment calls for, without losing your center.  Nadia didn’t need to choose whether to be authentic; she needed to be thoughtful about how and when to be authentic.

What does it mean to lead with authenticity?

The term “authenticity” emerged in the business world in the 1990s - 2000s. It surged in popularity after the 2008 financial crisis, when trust in institutions and leadership sharply declined.  Few leadership traits are as valued, or as misinterpreted, as Authenticity. People want to know the person behind the title to build trust and belief in the person setting the example. And yet, every move a leader makes today is more visible and risks destroying trust and belief.  We’re often encouraged to ‘be ourselves’ no matter what. But that oversimplified version of authenticity assumes every situation calls for the same version of you, and that you, yourself, aren’t adaptive, evolving, and multi-dimensional. Effective leaders flex with intention. They don’t compromise who they are, but they do consider what the moment requires. Leadership presence isn’t an on/off switch, it’s a set of dials, and learning to use them well starts with understanding the difference between being real and being reactive.

Reframing executive leadership

I asked Nadia: “What if, in that difficult moment with your team, you turned the dial down on your strengths in Authenticity and Integrity and turned it up on another of your strengths, like Concern?” Within seconds, she reframed her message:  

| “You’re the best team in the company. That’s why we’re so disappointed today. This hurts. But I know we’ll figure it out and come back stronger.”

Same core values, entirely different tone. And, likely, a better outcome.

How to tune your executive presence

Here’s a quick self-check to help leaders navigate tough moments:

• Pause a moment and ask yourself, “What does this situation call for?” Empathy?  Curiosity? Candor?

• Am I leading with a behavior because it’s what’s needed, or just because I am comfortable with it?

• Is this a moment to leverage a strength, or to show a different side of myself?

• How can I meet the needs of the situation without compromising who I am?

Presence is about intentionality. The best leaders flex their style based on audience, stakes, and context without losing their center.

Using the dials

Think of executive presence like a soundboard:

• Dial up Concern when helping others deal with uncertainty and change

• Dial down Authenticity when it’s more important to listen and understand than push your point of view

• Dial up Vision when teams need clarity about why something is happening and inspiration to get there

• Dial down Confidence when acting quickly is less important than building consensus and commitment

The point isn’t to become someone else. It’s to show up as the best version of yourself—on purpose.

Try this: Pick one important interaction this week. Before you walk in, ask: “Which dial do I need to turn up and which one should I turn down?” Watch what happens when you lead with that level of clarity.

When we talk about executive presence, leaders often fear that we’re going to try to fit them into some sort of box where they have to look, speak, and act a certain way. The good news is this: you can be true to who you are AND be viewed as a leader with executive presence. If you can become more aware of how others perceive you and how that connects to driving business results, you can always find a way to dial up or dial down different aspects of yourself to be the best leader you can be.

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.

When OpenAI launched GPT-5, the reaction was muted. No flashy new tricks or “wow” demo moment. If you stopped there, you might think nothing’s really changed. But the real story is bigger and far more important for leaders. OpenAI didn’t just release an updated model, they triggered a collapse in the cost of top-tier intelligence across the market. That cost shift will accelerate innovation in ways we’re only beginning to imagine, and it’s happening already. It’s important to note that there are two main ways people and companies use GPT-5.

1. Through the ChatGPT app, individuals and teams interact with the AI directly, writing prompts, asking questions, or creating content. It’s plug-and-play, no coding required, and now GPT-5 is the default model even for free users (with some usage caps).
2. Through the API, companies connect GPT-5 to their own systems or products so it can power customer support tools, automate large-scale analysis, or run AI features inside other apps.

The headline here is that OpenAI cut GPT-5’s API price to $1.25 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens numbers that would have seemed impossible not long ago. In simple terms, tokens are chunks of words. A million tokens of input is roughly 750,000 words, which is the equivalent of several full-length books. “Input tokens” are the text you feed into the model, and “output tokens” are the text it generates in response.

The new API pricing makes a big difference for large-scale, embedded use cases. Companies can now process massive amounts of data, run more experiments, and serve more customers for a fraction of the cost. Workloads that once felt budget-breaking are now affordable, opening the door to AI innovation at an entirely new scale. Combine this new cost structure with the decision to make GPT-5 the default in ChatGPT, and you have a dual shift: high-powered AI is dramatically cheaper for heavy users and instantly accessible to hundreds of millions of people, including your competitors. Intelligence that once required careful budgeting and scarce expertise is now abundant and that abundance changes the game entirely.

When intelligence gets cheap, the game changes

Just a couple of years ago, AI was expensive and resource-intensive, so leaders had to be selective about where and how they applied it:

• Licensing and compute costs were high: Running large models at scale through an API could cost thousands of dollars a month, even for modest use cases.
• Access was limited: The best models were behind higher subscription tiers or enterprise contracts.
• Specialized expertise was needed: Integrating AI often required dedicated data scientists or engineers, which added cost and slowed speed to value.
• Budget trade-offs were constant: Leaders had to choose a few high-priority projects for AI investment and delay or reject others.

In other words, leaders had to ration AI usage just like any other scarce, expensive resource. In a low-cost world, the constraint shifts from budget to imagination. The central question stops being “Can AI do this?” and becomes “How can we reimagine the way we work if this is possible everywhere?”

‍That’s when innovation accelerates. Experiments that once required hard trade-offs can now be run in parallel, testing ten ideas for the cost of one. AI copilots can quietly monitor, reconcile, and draft decisions in real time, expanding your team’s capacity without adding headcount. Entire archives or research libraries can be parsed in minutes. Intelligence can be embedded into the devices your people already carry, putting expertise within reach at any moment.

Two ways leaders commonly get this wrong

For some, the old assumption still holds: AI feels too expensive or too specialized to deploy widely. Their only exposure has been high-cost pilots, niche specialist teams, or consulting projects where each experiment felt like a big-ticket gamble. That may have been true last year it’s not true today.

For others, the issue isn’t what they say, it’s what their strategy reveals. They’ll tell you they know AI is now cheaper and more accessible but they still budget and resource it like a premium feature. It’s reserved for high-priority initiatives or “innovation” workstreams, rather than being built into core workflows and systems.In both cases, the result is the same: they’re underestimating how radically the playing field has changed. Intelligence is now abundant. The gate is no longer money it’s imagination and execution speed.

The organizations that win will be those that treat AI not as an experimental add-on, but as infrastructure integrated deeply enough that the question isn’t whether to use AI, but how to keep evolving it as the cost curve continues to drop.Strategies built without this shift in mind risk missing opportunities in a competitive landscape that’s already moving forward. The advantage now belongs to those who experiment, learn, and adapt faster than the cost curve drops.

‍We’d love to help you with your AI strategy: Contact us to get started.

Traditionally, Sales Kick-Offs (SKOs) were large, centralized gatherings, designed to align teams, spark momentum, and roll out the company’s go-to-market strategy. But as global businesses expanded, that one-size-fits-all approach began to show its limits.

Even before 2025, forward-thinking companies were experimenting with more localized formats to meet rising complexity and regional nuance. As international operations expanded, centralized SKOs began to strain under the weight of market variability, logistical challenges, and cultural differences. Regional activations emerged as a way to make strategy more relevant, and more actionable, at the local level.

Then came COVID-19. Travel restrictions, distributed teams, and new ways of working forced companies to reconsider the value, and feasibility, of large-scale gatherings. Virtual and regional alternatives emerged not just as stopgaps, but as smarter, faster, more focused activations.

That shift planted the seeds for what’s now taking hold: a hybrid model, where flagship events are amplified, not replaced, by a network of hyper-local strategy activations.

Why hyper-local SKOs have gained traction in 2025

Tighter budgets, tariff volatility, region-specific complexity, and faster-moving markets have made the traditional SKO model harder to justify, at least for now. But what’s emerging isn’t a downgrade. It’s a high-impact alternative built for today’s realities.

Hyper-local SKOs offer:

• Budget-conscious impact: Less spent on travel, more invested in enablement.
• Regional relevance: Local markets demand tailored approaches.
• Faster execution: Smaller events mean shorter planning cycles and more agility.
• Stronger engagement: Intimate settings foster real dialogue, trust, and retention.

Done right, hyper-local SKOs deliver sharper alignment, deeper enablement, and faster activation, without the logistical drag.

But this approach only works when it’s connected to something bigger:

• A clear, unifying story
• A strategy that flexes by region
• Tools and experiences that build competence, not just motivation

They’re not replacing the flagship event, they’re extending its reach, bringing strategy to life where performance happens in the field.

What to consider if you’re going local in 2026

1. Start with a unified strategy
   Without a cohesive message, fragmentation becomes a real risk. That’s why leading companies align early on messaging, strategic pillars, and storylines, then empower regional leaders to bring them to life in context.
   Centralized intent, decentralized delivery. That’s the sweet spot.
2. Use simulation and AI-enabled practice to scale what matters
   Smaller doesn’t mean shallower. Digital tools, like AI-powered practice platforms and immersive simulations, let teams stress-test decisions, sharpen skills, and internalize strategy.
   Instead of hearing strategy, reps experience it and leave ready to act.
3. Cut costs, without cutting connection
   The savings from reduced travel and venue spend are real, but the return comes from reinvesting in high-value enablement: stronger coaching, sharper content, localized insights, and sustained follow-through.
   Be thoughtful about how you redirect your budget. Spend to increase the outcome you desire.

1. Match the way your teams actually sell
   Modern GTM teams flex by region, segment, and product line. Hyper-local SKOs let teams focus on what’s actually happening in their markets.
   It’s not just about relevance, it’s about reps feeling seen and set up to win.
2. Create space for meaningful dialogue
   Large SKOs can default to performance over participation. Local formats flip the script. Smaller rooms enable deeper conversations and real-time alignment.
   Candor goes up. Trust goes up. Impact goes up.
3. Move faster, stay closer to the market
   Planning a traditional SKO can take six months or more. In a world where pricing shifts monthly and competition evolves weekly, that delay is a liability.
   Local events can launch quickly and adjust mid-stream, by design.
4. It’s not a replacement. It’s a complement.
   The flagship SKO still has value, especially to launch a new strategy or bring global teams together. But leading organizations are building a drumbeat of activation through local SKOs that reinforce, tailor, and sustain that initial momentum.
   Think about the tradeoffs and choose a flagship SKO versus localized experience based on the desired goal of the event.

Understand the risks and how to avoid them

Hyper-local SKOs bring opportunity, but also potential pitfalls if not well-integrated. Key risks include:

1. Fragmentation of message and priorities
   Without a strong central narrative, messaging drifts, and alignment erodes.
2. Uneven quality and experience
   When local teams aren’t equally equipped, outcomes vary. Some teams leave inspired. Others don’t.
3. Loss of cross-regional connection
   Flagship SKOs build culture through shared experience. Without intentional connection, silos can deepen.
4. Underinvestment in enablement
   If companies view local SKOs purely as cost-saving, they risk missing the moment to truly invest in seller capability.
5. Leadership misalignment
   If local and global leaders aren’t working from the same playbook, sellers get mixed messages, and lose confidence.

How to mitigate these risks:

• Anchor every SKO to a common strategic narrative
• Equip regional leaders with tools, training, and facilitation support
• Invest in shared enablement assets like simulations and AI tools
• Create cross-regional touchpoints to build culture and community
• Track impact and reinforce key messages over time

Finding new ways to perform and adapt

In a time of uncertainty, the best sales organizations aren’t pulling back on alignment, they’re finding new ways to deliver it.

Hyper-local SKOs offer a strategic evolution: reducing spend, increasing relevance, and accelerating execution.

It’s not just a budget decision.

It’s a better way to make what matters go further.

The question isn’t “What can we do with less?”

It’s “How do we get more out of every moment?”

Safety in the workplace today is different from the past. Today, process improvements, safer designs, systems, and protective equipment are not enough. To create workspaces that are truly safe, companies must cultivate organizational cultures that prioritize safety by focusing on the behaviors and mindsets that enable lasting change.

Part of developing a culture of safety is determining the obstacles that prevent people from moving towards advancement. Beyond the proper physical tools or processes, ‘mind traps,’ or inherent subconscious ideas and beliefs that prevent people from achieving an ideal state, are one of the major barriers preventing organizations from improving their safety levels. Mind traps are difficult to identify and overcome because most people have a logical and rational basis for believing them.

Why is it important to identify mind traps in safety?

It is important to identify mind traps in safety because they have an impact on the way people communicate and behave in their day-to-day lives. If you believe accidents will still happen, no matter how much you try to communicate otherwise, your team will notice this belief and you will be passing on your mind traps to them. For example, if you believe that by sub-contracting an activity, it is normal for the number of incidents to increase, you will lower your guard and your team will do the same and thus increase the likelihood of an accident. In the end, mindsets impact and shape your behaviors and those of the people around you. The sum of these behaviors creates the company's safety culture.

To help you identify mind traps in safety in your organization, this list provides some of the most common mind traps people in safety experience.

Common mind traps in safety

Skepticism: This is usually one of the most difficult mind traps to overcome because people can use data to justify their beliefs. For example, if history shows that on average, one accident happens every year, it is reasonable to expect that it will continue, right? However, it is actually possible to eliminate accidents, but before this is possible, people must overcome their skepticism. Skepticism can sound like: "it is impossible not to expect any accidents over time – the data backs me up."

Complacency: This mind trap typically occurs when companies have experienced periods of significant progress, with indicators showing an absence of serious accidents and therefore improvements in safety. When indicators begin to reach a plateau, it often serves as a justification to make leaders believe statements like: “we have improved a lot in recent years, further progress is going to be very difficult.”

Criticism: This mind trap happens when people focus more on their surroundings rather than on how to actually improve themselves. This is normal when there are many things to improve and people don’t know where to start, when the job relies largely on third parties (collaborating companies, contractors), or when superiors do not always show coherence between what they do and say. Statements exhibiting criticism look like: “how do you expect me to set an example if my bosses don’t?”

Short-Termism: One of the main dilemmas in productive and industrial environments is the perceived tension between results and safety. The tension is only perceived because in more mature and advanced safety cultures, the two terms (results and safety) are not separated, nor do they contradict each other. This mind trap becomes accentuated in market environments that negatively affect income and margins, where naturally, the pressure for results makes the rest of the elements take a back seat. This thinking impacts what kinds of decisions are made, how they are communicated, and how they are executed. An example of the verbalization of this trap is: “safety is important, but sometimes it goes against efficiency.”

It is important to recognize that mind traps vary over time and are highly dependent on the environment in which you find yourself. There may be times when you think you have no mind traps, and then suddenly when facing a change of job or pressure for results, some are automatically activated. The nature of your day-to-day life greatly impacts your mind traps.

So, how do you face and overcome mind traps?

How to face and overcome mind traps

Identify them: Identifying the main safety mind traps and knowing which ones you are more likely to fall into is the first step to overcoming them. Leverage evaluations to easily identify individual mind traps.

Understand their impact: It is important to know the impact safety mind traps have on your behaviors and on the people around you – your team, your peers, your superiors, etc. Explore the impact your safety mindsets could have on the team.

Challenge them: Finally, define mechanisms to challenge yourself, your colleagues, bosses, and teams to break free from the safety mind traps. Become the devil’s advocate who questions the logical reasons behind the mind traps. For example, to combat skepticism, you might reference specific examples of long periods of time without accidents: “if we managed to spend a week, month, or year without any accidents in such an asset, we should be able to do the same with the rest of our assets, and for a much longer time, right?”

The ultimate goal of any business is to make money and therefore efficiency is key. However, to achieve such results in a sustainable way, safety must be integrated into your organization’s culture and way of working. This means identifying the mind traps in your organization and working as a collective to overcome them.

In an ideal state, at the more advanced levels of safety culture, there is a sense of community where everyone cares about each other. While the goal is still safely achieving business results (efficiency, income, margins), safety is not sacrificed.

In summary, to achieve significant improvements in organizational safety and wellbeing, it is fundamental that companies focus on developing a culture of safety. Key to any organization sustainably achieving their goals, a safety culture not only enables success but also ensures that everyone gets home to their loved ones safe and sound. To achieve this goal, it is critical to understand the mind traps within your organization and learn the mechanisms to challenge and overcome them.

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In 2025, sales organizations are navigating more than just competitive landscapes. They’re contending with intensifying trade tensions, evolving geopolitical alliances, and the cascading effects of global tariffs. These forces aren’t abstract, they’re showing up daily in pricing pressure, delayed shipments, shifting forecasts, and customer churn. And they’re transforming how companies approach go-to-market strategy, starting with how they design and deliver their Sales Kick-Offs (SKOs).

Tariffs are no longer edge-case scenarios. They’re sending ripple effects across every link in the value chain. Sales teams are contending with pricing instability as supplier costs swing unexpectedly. Delivery timelines are harder to pin down. Customers are pushing back on cost hikes or walking away altogether. And forecasting? It’s become a moving target. What was once considered a background risk is now a central variable in sales planning.

In this climate of constant flux, SKOs are evolving from motivational moments into serious strategic platforms. Several themes are rising to the surface:

1. Redefining “adaptability” in sales strategy

Tariffs have amplified economic turbulence. With global cost structures in near-constant motion, organizations are being forced to sharpen how, and how fast, they respond. While “agility” has been a staple of business language since COVID-19, today’s landscape demands something deeper: adaptability built on scenario planning, data fluency, and customer-centered pivots.

Sales teams are being asked to do more than react. They’re adjusting pricing mid-cycle, sourcing new suppliers, and rethinking product priorities based on margin impact or availability. SKOs need to reflect this reality. It’s not just about preparing for change—it’s about practicing for it. Teams need exposure to the messiness of mid-quarter shifts, trade-offs across functions, and pressure-filled decisions that can’t wait.

2. Flexible pricing models are pushing teams to focus on customer value

As tariff-related costs climb, many companies are left with little choice but to raise prices. But doing so without a strong value narrative is risky, especially in a market shaped by caution, cost sensitivity, and competitive noise.

Sellers can’t afford to lead with price. They need to lead with relevance. That means helping customers connect the dots between solutions and the outcomes that matter to them—faster ROI, mitigated risk, and sustained performance. The more the landscape shifts, the more essential it becomes to differentiate through clarity and confidence, not discounts.

3. Relationship-building, referrals, and longer sales cycles

In unpredictable environments, trust becomes a competitive advantage. Tariffs introduce new friction—delivery delays, price changes, procurement constraints—that sellers must help customers navigate. As buyers face more internal scrutiny, decisions slow down. Sales cycles stretch. Consensus is harder to build.

All of this puts relationship quality front and center. Sellers who understand their customer’s world, anticipate challenges, and offer real partnership—not just pitches—are the ones who earn the right to stay in the conversation. Advisory behaviors and referral networks matter more than ever. Investing in long-term trust has become a short-term differentiator.

4. Shaking things up with cross-functional insights

The effects of tariffs aren’t siloed. They ripple through procurement, finance, operations, and strategy. Sales teams without visibility into those pressures risk overpromising or missing opportunities for smarter collaboration.

That’s why more organizations are bringing cross-functional voices into the SKO. Procurement leaders are spotlighting sourcing constraints. Finance is unpacking cost structures and trade-offs. Operations is clarifying where flexibility exists and where it doesn’t. These perspectives help sellers see the system they operate within and bridge the gaps that often slow down execution—from misaligned incentives to regional friction.

5. Leveraging AI and data to support shifting targets for frontline sellers

In a tariff-impacted world, data is no longer a nice-to-have. It’s a real-time edge. As market signals shift faster than humans alone can track, AI-powered tools and predictive analytics help surface patterns, sharpen messaging, and guide better decisions.

Forward-looking companies are embedding AI into the SKO itself. Tools like BTS’s Verity give reps the ability to practice, iterate, and refine in real time, coaching them through tough conversations, pricing trade-offs, and shifting buyer behavior. It’s not about replacing reps. It’s about expanding their ability to adapt, stay sharp, and lead confidently through constant change.

6. Preparing for longer sales cycles and negotiations

As cost pressures rise, customers are taking longer to commit. Deals are dragging. More stakeholders are weighing in. Pricing discussions are stretching further than before.

SKOs are a chance to help teams get ready for that reality. Sellers need to build fluency in managing drawn-out conversations, navigating objections, and reinforcing value over time. Practicing those skills now ensures they can show up with confidence and consistency, especially when the path to close is slower and more complex than expected.

Rethinking your SKOs for shifting ground

Tariffs aren’t a temporary disruption—they’re part of a broader pattern of global instability that sales organizations must plan around. The question isn’t how to avoid the turbulence. It’s how to lead through it.

That’s what the best SKOs are doing in 2025 and into 2026: grounding teams in the real conditions they’re facing, building strategic muscle, and creating alignment across the business. It’s not about hype. It’s about capability.

Done right, your SKO becomes more than a kickoff. It becomes a catalyst—one that equips your team to win on uncertain ground.

Day 42: A newly hired Group Strategy Director is still at her desk at 9:00 p.m. She was brought in to lead a major transformation - one that’s been discussed for months but never clearly defined. She was hired because she’s capable, and there’s often an unspoken belief that capable leaders should just “get it” and move.

Her inbox is overflowing. Priorities keep shifting. Her peers are polite but distant - unclear on her mandate, protective of their turf, and too busy to engage deeply. Conversations stay surface-level.

She’s been invited in - but not set up to succeed.

It’s a common story: a strong leader, dropped into a high-stakes role without the clarity, structure, or support to land well.

Whether new to the company or stepping into a bigger role, many executives spend their critical first months navigating complexity alone - while being expected to deliver from day one.

Research has held steady for years: around 40% of leadership transitions fail within 18 months when the right support isn’t in place.

Too often, companies focus on choosing the right person - then overlook what it takes to truly integrate them. Without structured, human-centered support, even the most capable leaders struggle to succeed.

Why this matters more now

Transitions have always been high-stakes moments. But in today’s climate, the pressure is rising and the timelines are shrinking.

Leaders are stepping in during disruption - not stability.

Most aren’t inheriting status quo - they’re hired to fix or accelerate something.

Hybrid work delays trust-building and blurs cultural cues.

Visibility is high. Expectations form early and often.

In short: less room for error. More risk when it goes wrong.

Different paths. Same risks.

It’s tempting to think internal promotions are easier. But each path comes with invisible traps:

External hires lack historical context and relationships yet are expected to drive change.

Internal promotions bring familiarity but struggle to reset relationships and lead differently.

In both cases, leaders are often left navigating ambiguity alone once onboarding ends.

What’s missing

Most organizations do onboarding. Few do transitions. And that’s where things break down.

What’s often overlooked:

 
• A clear and aligned mandate
 
• Shared definitions of success across key stakeholders
 
• Insight into unspoken cultural and political dynamics
 
• Active sponsorship from the manager
 
• A longer runway to build trust and momentum
 
• Board-level clarity and engagement for senior roles

The result? Leaders are under pressure to perform - while still finding their footing.

The quiet rejection

Leaders are often hired to shift the system. But once inside, they encounter subtle resistance:

• Their pace feels too fast.
 
• Their questions challenge norms.
 
• Their style doesn’t match unspoken rules.

Suddenly, trust is withheld. Expectations shift. Peers disengage - but don’t say why. The very qualities that got them hired now work against them. Confidence erodes. Performance stalls. And promising transitions quietly derail.

This isn’t just an onboarding issue. It’s a readiness issue - on both sides.

The cost of getting it wrong

A failed executive transition doesn’t just impact the individual - it ripples across the organization. It stalls momentum, fractures teams, delays results, and undermines trust in leadership.

It’s also expensive. Between lost productivity, re-recruitment, and missed goals, the cost can easily reach several times the leader’s salary.

When transitions go off course, it’s not just a talent issue - it’s a business one.

What needs to change

Organizations that get transitions right do five things well:

1. Treat transitions as enterprise critical. Ask: What’s at stake beyond this one role?
 
2. Define success together. Ask: Are expectations aligned across leader, manager, and stakeholders?
 
3. Equip the manager to lead the transition. Ask: Are they prepared to sponsor - not just evaluate?
 
4. Provide real support - not just warm welcomes. Ask: Have we created space for the leader to reflect, adapt, and build capability?
 
5. Extend support beyond day 90. Ask: What happens after the honeymoon ends?

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The gray zone

Most leadership transitions don’t fail during onboarding - they stall in the murky middle. That stretch between onboarding and full performance. Too late for checklists, too early for formal reviews, and too often overlooked.

This is when the leader is highly visible but still gaining footing. The system assumes they’re up and running. But what they actually need is time to reflect, context to navigate, and support to show up differently.

Without that space, small misalignments become big ones. First impressions stick. And promising transitions quietly derail - not because the leader isn’t capable, but because they’re left to navigate complexity alone.

This “gray zone” isn’t anyone’s job to manage - and that’s the problem.

The role of transition coaching

Transition coaching provides a confidential, strategic space to:

• Navigate unspoken dynamics
 
• Build confidence and clarity
 
• Reflect and recalibrate in real time

As Greg Smith, CEO of Teradyne, put it:

“We’re investing in executive coaching because we want our senior leaders to lead with confidence from day one—not figure it out by month six.”

And the research backs it up. Coaching accelerates traction, strengthens alignment, and improves long-term performance.

But it only works when paired with system-level readiness: aligned stakeholders, engaged managers, and a clear plan for integration.

Final thought

Transitions aren’t just about setting a leader up to succeed. They’re a mirror for whether your organization is ready to evolve.

Because every new leader brings change - and every transition is a test of how well your system absorbs it.

If you’re hiring or promoting this year, the question isn’t just “is this the right person?”

It’s “are we ready to change with them?”

BTS helps leaders - and the systems around them - thrive through transition. Let’s talk.

Sources

 
1. McKinsey & Company (2023), Leadership Transitions: Making the Move from Operational to Strategic
 
2. Harvard Business Review (Ciampa & Watkins, 1999), Right From the Start
 
3. CEB/Gartner Executive Research (2016), Why Successful Executives Fail
 
4. DDI Global Leadership Forecast (2021), Assessing the Risks in Leadership Transitions
 
5. McGill, P., Clarke, P., & Sheffield, D. (2019). From “blind elation” to “oh my goodness, what have I gotten into”: Exploring the experience of executive coaching during leadership transitions into C-suite roles. International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring. Oxford Brookes University.
 
6. Greg Smith, CEO of Teradyne, as quoted in BTS webinar (2025)
 
7. International Coaching Federation (ICF, 2021), The Value of Coaching in Leadership Transitions

In the 1990s, Business Process Reengineering (BPR) was the Big Bet. Companies launched tightly controlled pilot programs with hand-picked teams, custom software, and executive backing. The results dazzled on paper.

But when it came time to scale? Reality hit. People weren’t ready. Systems didn’t connect. Budgets dried up. The pilot became a cautionary tale, not a blueprint.

We’ve seen this before with Lean, Agile, even digital transformations. Now it’s happening again with AI, only this time, the stakes are different. Because we’re not just implementing a new solution, we’re building into a future that’s unfolding. Technology is evolving faster than most organizations can learn, govern, or adapt right now. That uncertainty doesn’t make transformation impossible, but it does make it easier to get wrong.

And the dysfunction is already showing up, just in two very different forms.

Two roads to the same cliff

Today, we see organizations falling into two extremes. Most companies are either overdoing the control or letting AI run wild.

Road 1: The free-for-all

Everyone’s experimenting. Product teams are building bots, prompting, using copilots. Finance is trying automated reporting. HR has a feedback chatbot in the works. Some experiments are exciting. Most are disconnected. There's no shared vision, no scaling pathway, and no learning across the enterprise. It’s innovation by coincidence.

Road 2: The forced march

Leadership declares an AI strategy. Use cases are approved centrally. Governance is tight. Risk is managed. But the result? An impressive PowerPoint, a sanctioned use case, and very little broad adoption. Innovation is constrained before it ever reaches the front lines.

Two very different environments. Same outcome: localized wins, system-wide inertia.

The real problem: Building for optics, not for scale

Whether you’re over-governing or under-coordinating, the root issue is the same: designing efforts that look good but aren’t built to scale.

Here’s the common pattern:

• A team builds something clever.
• It works in their context.
• Others try to adopt it.
• It doesn’t stick.
• Momentum dies. Energy scatters. Or worse, compliance says no.

Sound familiar?

It’s not that the ideas are flawed. It’s that they’re built in isolation with no plan for others to adopt, adapt, or scale them. There’s no mechanism for transfer, no feedback loops for iteration, and no connection to how people actually work across the organization.

So, what starts as a promising AI breakthrough (a smart bot, a helpful copilot, a detailed series of prompts, a slick automation) quietly runs out of road. It works for one team or solves one problem, but without a handoff or playbook, there’s no way for others to plug in. The system stays the same, and the promise of momentum fades, lost in the gap between what’s possible and what’s repeatable.

We’ve seen this before

These aren’t new problems. From BPR to Agile, we’ve learned (and re-learned) that:

• Experiments are not strategies. Experiments show potential, not readiness for adoption. Without a plan to scale, they become isolated wins; interesting, but not transformative.
• Culture is the operating system. If the beliefs, behaviors, and incentives underneath aren’t aligned, the system breaks, no matter how advanced the tools.
• Managers matter. Without their ownership and support, change stalls.
• Behavior beats code. Tools don’t transform companies. People do.

Design thinking promised to bridge this gap with user-driven iteration and empathy. But in practice? Most efforts skip the hard parts. We tinker, test, and move on, without ever building the conditions for adoption.

AI and the new architecture of work

Many organizations treat AI like an add-on—as if it’s something to bolt onto existing systems to boost efficiency. But AI isn’t just a project or a tool; it changes the rules of how decisions are made, how value is created, and what roles even exist. It’s an inflection point that forces companies to rethink how work gets done.

Companies making real progress aren’t just chasing use cases. They’re rethinking how their organizations operate, end to end. They’re asking:

• Have we prepared people to reimagine how they work with AI, not just how to use it?
• Are we redesigning workflows, decision rights, and interactions—not just layering new tech onto old routines?
• Do we know what success looks like when it’s scaled and sustained, not just when it dazzles?

If the answer is no, whether you’re too loose or too locked down, you’re not ready.

The mindset shift AI demands

AI isn’t just a tech rollout. It’s a mindset shift that asks leaders to reimagine how value gets created, how teams operate, and how people grow. But that reimagination isn’t about the tools. The tools will change—rapidly. It starts with new assumptions, new stances, and a new internal leader compass.

Here are three essential mindset shifts every leader must make, not just to keep up with AI but to stay relevant in a world being reshaped by it:

1. From automation to amplification

Old mindset: AI automates tasks and cuts costs.

New mindset: AI expands and amplifies human potential, enhancing our ability to think strategically, learn rapidly, and act boldly. The question isn’t what AI can do instead of us, but what it can do through us—helping people make better decisions, move faster, and focus on higher-value work.

2. From efficiency to reimagination

Old mindset: How can we use AI to make current processes more efficient?

New mindset: What would this process look like if we started from zero with AI as our co-creator, not a bolt-on?

3. From implementation to opportunity building

Old mindset: Roll out the tool. Train everybody. Check the box.

New mindset: AI fluency is a core human capability that creates new realms of curiosity, sophistication in judgment, and opportunity thinking. Soon, AI won’t be a one-time training. It will be part of how we define leadership, collaboration, and value creation.

From sparkles to scale

In most organizations, the spark isn’t the problem. Good ideas are everywhere. What’s missing is the ability to translate those isolated wins into something durable, repeatable, and enterprise-wide.

Too many pilots are built to impress, not to endure. They dazzle in one corner of the business but aren’t designed for others to adopt, adapt, or sustain. The result? Innovation that stays stuck in the lab—or dies.

Designing for scale means thinking beyond the “what” to the “how”:

• How will this spread?
• What behaviors and systems need to change?
• Can this live in our whole world, not just my sandbox?

It’s not about chasing the next use case. It’s about setting up the conditions that allow innovation to take root, grow, and multiply, without starting from scratch every time.

Here’s how to make that shift:

1. Test in the wild, not just in the lab

Skip the polished demo. Put your solution in the hands of real users, in real conditions, with all the friction that comes with it. Use messy data. Invite resistance. That’s where the insights live, and where scale begins. If it only works in ideal settings, it doesn’t work.

2. Mobilize managers

Executives sponsor. Front lines experiment. But it’s team leaders who connect and spread. Equip them as translators and expediters, not blockers. Every leader is a change leader.

3. Hardwire behaviors, not just tools

The biggest unlock in AI is not the model—it’s the muscle. Invest in shared language, habits, and peer learning that support new ways of working. Focus on developing behaviors that scale, such as:

• Change readiness: the ability to spot opportunity, turn obstacles into possibilities, and help teams pivot.
• Coaching: getting the best out of your AI “co-workers” just like human ones.
• Critical thinking: applying human judgment where it matters most—context, nuance, and ethics.

4. Align to a future-state vision

To scale beyond one-off wins, people need a shared sense of where they’re headed. A clear future-state vision acts as an enduring focus, allowing everyone to innovate in concert. That alignment doesn’t stifle innovation. It multiplies it, turning a thousand disconnected pilots into a coherent transformation.

5. Track adoption, not just “wins”

Don’t mistake a shiny, clever prompt for progress. A great experiment means nothing if it can’t be repeated by many people. From day one, design with scale in mind: Can this be adopted elsewhere? What would need to change for it to work across teams, roles, or regions? Build for transfer, not just applause.

The real opportunity

AI will not fail because the tech wasn’t good enough. It will fail because we mistook experiments for solutions, or because we governed innovation into paralysis.

You don’t need more control. You don’t need more chaos. You need design for scale, not just scale in hindsight.

Let’s stop chasing sparkles. Let’s build systems that spread.

Executive transitions are among the most critical moments in an organization’s lifecycle. When a leader steps into a new executive role, it impacts not only the strategic direction but also the organizational culture, stakeholder relationships, and overall business performance. If managed poorly, transitions can lead to disruptions such as loss of institutional knowledge, diminished team morale, and financial challenges.

The reality is that many executive transitions don’t go as planned. According to Harvard Business Review, 50% of new executives fail or leave within 18 months, potentially costing the organization up to ten times their salary. Additionally, Korn/Ferry reports that only 30% of global executives are satisfied with their onboarding process. These statistics underscore the need for a strategic approach to ensure successful leadership transitions.

Several years ago, I worked with the new CFO of a $6B division of a $40B manufacturing organization. She transitioned from corporate headquarters to a division, which had a markedly different culture. Her challenge was not only adjusting to a new environment. It meant embedding herself in an unfamiliar culture, building trust with her C-suite peers, and establishing herself as a strategic advisor to the CEO—all while leading a team uncertain about its future.

To further complicate the transition, the division was being acquired, and her team faced nine months of incredibly heavy work with no guarantee of securing future roles in the new organization. Despite these challenges, by receiving the right executive advisory transition support, she navigated the complexities, built trust quickly, and inspired her team to stay committed, even when the nine months turned into 18.

Executive transitions are pivotal moments for organizations. They require careful planning, clear communication, and focused support to ensure a smooth and successful transition. Below are four key considerations for senior leaders to manage transitions effectively and with confidence.

1. Understand the ecosystem: stakeholder mapping and engagement

As you step into this new role, understanding the organization’s ecosystem is one of the first and most crucial steps. Every organization has its own dynamics—how departments, teams, and individuals interact, how decisions are made, and where power and influence lie. It’s important to map out not only formal authority but also informal networks and relationships. This will help you navigate internal politics, align your strategies, and avoid potential pitfalls that could derail your efforts.

Stakeholders are key to your success—both in the short term and for the long-term execution of your vision. Their support can unlock resources, enable smoother decision-making, and lead to faster buy-in. However, if you don’t identify and understand key stakeholders early on, you risk spending valuable time and energy in the wrong areas or missing out on insights that could shape your strategy.

I recently advised a new SVP of R&D for a $50B pharmaceutical company who was transitioning into this role from academia. We’ll call him Nate. One of his first areas of focus was understanding and connecting with key stakeholders in this highly matrixed organization around the world. Nate formed relationships, sought to understand their roles and areas of expertise, and learned what was important to them. This enabled him to speed up what is often a daunting transition and quickly become embedded in the business.

Navigating the ecosystem can be tricky, especially when not all stakeholders are immediately visible. Some people may wield significant influence without holding formal authority, while others may be new to the organization or going through their own transitions, which could affect their willingness to support yours.

Executive ecosystem checklist:

• Identify key stakeholders: Identify both formal and informal influencers. Understand their roles, influence, and how their priorities align with yours.
• Conduct listening tours: Engage stakeholders through one-on-one conversations. Listening to their concerns, needs, and aspirations will give you a broader view of the challenges and opportunities ahead.
• Understand motivation and metrics: Recognize what each stakeholder needs to achieve and how they measure success. This understanding will help you align goals and collaborate effectively.
• Build relationships early: Establish trust by engaging with key stakeholders from the start. Understanding their perspectives and setting the foundation for collaboration is essential for a smooth transition.

2. Communicate a compelling vision: aligning and inspiring your team

In your new role, one of the first things you’ll need to do is communicate a clear and compelling vision. This vision should not only align with the organization’s broader goals but also provide your team with a clear direction. As a senior leader, your ability to communicate this vision effectively will be pivotal to driving alignment and motivating those around you.

It’s about more than just outlining a plan—it’s about inspiring action. Crafting a vision that resonates with your team and stakeholders gives them a sense of purpose and direction, especially during a time of uncertainty. Your communication needs to go beyond clarity; it must be compelling and motivating. The clearer and more inspiring you can be, the more quickly you’ll build the trust and commitment necessary to lead your team forward.

Nate communicated his vision with passion and energy that inspired others. He also showed genuine curiosity and care for the organization and people within it, so they wanted to buy into his inspiring vision and deliver on it.

Executive vision checklist:

• Align with organizational goals: Ensure your vision is aligned with the strategic objectives of the organization. This alignment ensures that you and your team are working toward shared long-term goals.
• Communicate clearly: Convey your vision in a way that resonates with your team and stakeholders. Use your communication skills to inspire confidence, trust, and action.
• Inspire and motivate: Use your vision not just as a roadmap but as a source of motivation. Help your team see their role in achieving broader goals, making the work meaningful and engaging.

3. Develop a strong strategic plan: laying the foundation for long-term success

A strong strategic plan to guide your transition and ramp up your impact is essential as you step into your new leadership role. This plan should outline your immediate goals, long-term objectives, and key milestones to mark progress and success. It’s important to approach planning with an understanding of the organization’s broader strategy and how your goals align with it. While your experience gives you strategic insight, remember that flexibility is key. Transitions come with uncertainty, so your plan should adapt to evolving challenges.

As you lead through change, creating a clear roadmap helps you set expectations and provide clarity for your team. At the same time, no plan is without risk. Identifying potential challenges and understanding how to manage them proactively will set your organization up for success in both the short and long term.

Nate sparked bold, future-focused thinking on his team while communicating long-term strategic priorities related to wise investment and growth. He advocated for impactful portfolio investments while engaging in open dialogue to ensure his team contributed meaningfully to, and owned, the strategy.

Executive strategy checklist:

• Set clear success objectives: Define what success looks like in the first 6–12 months. Engage your leadership team in setting achievable goals that align with the broader strategy.
• Identify potential barriers: Recognize challenges such as misalignment or lack of support and create contingency plans to navigate them.
• Develop a flexible roadmap: Create a strategy that balances structure with flexibility. Build in checkpoints to reassess and adjust as needed.

4. Evaluate, build, and engage the team: ensuring alignment and high performance

As you settle into your new role, evaluating and aligning your team is critical. Assess whether the team structure is equipped to execute your strategic plan. Do you have the right people in the right positions? Are there gaps or development opportunities? Building a high-performing team isn’t just about filling positions—it’s about fostering collaboration, psychological safety, and shared ownership of your vision.

Nate quickly built trust through openness, thoughtfulness, and respect while encouraging collaborative thinking and cross-functional idea sharing. As a result, his team was positioned to lead significant initiatives that will positively affect the future of the business.

Executive team checklist:

• Evaluate and align the team: Assess your team’s structure and capabilities against strategic goals to ensure the right people are in the right roles. Identify development areas and align efforts.
• Foster a culture of collaboration: Create an environment where open communication and constructive conflict are encouraged. This enables better decisions and teamwork.
• Invest in building a high-performing team: Continuously develop your team’s skills and collaboration to ensure alignment with your broader strategic goals.

Set the stage for true transformation

Stepping into a new executive role is more than a leadership shift—it’s a pivotal moment for both you and the organization. The challenges are significant, and the stakes are high, but this transition also offers a powerful opportunity to shape the future. The actions you take early on establish your credibility and influence, setting the tone for your leadership from day one.

How you navigate these early challenges will define both your immediate success and your long-term legacy. This transition isn’t just about managing change—it’s about actively shaping it. By embracing a structured, strategic approach, you can turn uncertainty into a clear roadmap for growth and transformation.

The more you invest in understanding the organizational ecosystem, building your team, and aligning your vision, the better equipped you’ll be to lead with confidence, inspire loyalty, and drive the organization forward.

Ultimately, this transition is not just a phase to endure—it’s a defining moment that can elevate the organization and set the stage for sustained success. Make it count.

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.

In a world where transformation often feels complex and distant, real progress is often sparked at the community level, through leaders who create change from within.

In Senegal, a partnership between BTS Spark and Tostan, a nonprofit dedicated to community-led development across Africa, is bringing this idea to life. It’s a reminder that sustainable leadership isn’t built by imposing new systems. It grows when people are equipped to lead themselves.

A ground-up approach to lasting change

Since 1991, Tostan—whose name means "breakthrough" in Wolof—has partnered with rural African communities to advance human rights, health, literacy, and economic development. Its Community Empowerment Program (CEP) weaves together practical knowledge and human rights education, enabling communities to define and pursue their own visions of progress.

Across eight countries and more than five million lives, Tostan’s approach has led to deep-rooted changes, including the voluntary abandonment of harmful traditional practices. Not by directive, but by choice.

It’s an approach that shows leadership capacity isn’t something to be delivered from outside. It’s something to be nurtured from within.

Meeting communities where they are

In 2024, BTS Spark deepened its collaboration with Tostan through an in-person leadership workshop, led by a BTS Spark consultant, following a year of virtual engagement.

The visit coincided with a leadership transition at the executive level—a pivotal moment requiring clarity, continuity, and resilience. Through targeted coaching and workshops, BTS Spark worked alongside Tostan’s leaders to support the transition and strengthen leadership capacity at every level of the organization.

The focus wasn’t on delivering a model. It was on listening, amplifying existing strengths, and equipping leaders to navigate complexity with confidence.

Practical tools for complex challenges

As part of the ongoing collaboration, BTS Spark also provided custom-designed micro-simulations focused on sectors vital to community sustainability: climate resilience, microfinance, and agriculture.

These micro-sims offer leaders a chance to engage with real-world decision-making challenges in a safe, practical environment—an approach that mirrors how leadership development increasingly happens: not through theory alone, but through repeated, real-world application.

It’s a reminder that growth is rarely linear. It’s built through practice, reflection, and adaptation over time.

Building leadership that endures

The work between BTS Spark and Tostan reflects a broader truth:

Leadership isn’t confined to titles, industries, or regions. It emerges where people are given the tools, trust, and space to act.

Sustainable change, whether in communities or organizations, happens when leadership capacity is strengthened closest to where challenges are lived every day.

The partnership also highlights the power of investing in local capability: focusing on what’s already working, building resilience from within, and preparing leaders not just to meet today’s challenges, but to shape tomorrow’s opportunities.

Moving forward: Scaling with purpose

The work in Senegal is continuing to evolve. BTS Spark and Tostan are exploring ways to extend leadership development to more communities, deepen their impact, and continue supporting transformation through shared expertise and partnership.

It’s a model rooted in respect, collaboration, and the belief that leadership is most powerful when it reflects the realities and aspirations of the people closest to the work.

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.

At a large nonprofit, the team’s schedules were packed—weekly staff meetings were one of the few times they could connect and align on big priorities. Having just gotten Board approval of an ambitious strategic plan, the leadership team saw this as a high-leverage moment and made bold changes to improve the structure: clear purposes, defined outcomes, and assigned ownership.

But after a high-stakes budget conversation fell flat, it became clear that structure wasn’t enough. The behavior in the room—who spoke, who listened, how decisions were made—mattered just as much.

Every habit embedded in the nonprofit’s culture—good and bad—was showing up somewhere in their meetings. Rather than ignore it, the team used it. They turned meetings into a mirror (and a tool) for culture change.

This is the third post in our Meetings as Culture series. Part 1 explores how meetings reflect your organization’s culture. Part 2 offers practical solutions to five common meeting pitfalls. Now, in Part 3, we focus on the five individual and team behaviors that drive lasting culture change—one meeting at a time.

Meetings as the crucible of culture 

Meetings are where your company culture plays out in real time—where it’s tested, transformed, and forged under pressure. The more senior you are, the more meetings you attend. Your behavior in these meetings—whether you’re leading or participating—affects the culture of your organization. Each company has a unique approach to meetings that reflects their culture.  

At BTS, we believe meetings are more than just structures—they’re part of your organization’s social fabric. The way people interact, pay attention, and respect each other’s time in meetings reflects your company’s values and mindsets. In short, a single meeting is the culture in concentrated form.

As simple as it sounds, there are five fundamental meeting behaviors:

1. Listening

2. Participating

3. Efficiency

4. Accountability

5. Focus

These five meeting behaviors – defined in observable terms to ‘see’ what works - can be developed by individuals, teams, and organizations to transform your meeting culture. Individual behavior informs team dynamics, which aggregate to become organizational behaviors. To shift your culture, you need to progressively develop meeting behaviors with individuals, teams, and the organization.

Develop the five meeting behaviors—as individuals, teams, and organizations

Start by looking in the mirror. Individuals have a major impact on meeting productivity and inclusiveness. It starts with you—your actions shape the meeting environment, whether you are leading it or not.  

Considering your last meeting, ask yourself: How many times did I reschedule this meeting? Was I on time? How well did I listen? Did I ask questions for clarity, or did I talk over others? Did I come to the meeting having done what I said I would do? Did I leave knowing and committing aloud what I will do next? The fixes are all simple, but not always easy.

• Quick tip: A BTS client aiming to improve their meetings found that reminding individuals of the power of asking more probing questions helped foster better listening, which helped with their strategic goal of building a culture of stronger collaboration. A probing question is one that opens up the conversation, clarifies the discussion for everyone, and increases ideas generation.  

Once individuals are aware of and start improving their behaviors, look at how the team works. Here, you will start to notice that individual behaviors seep into team patterns: Are the same voices always leading the conversation? Does everyone feel free to speak up? Do we reward diverse perspectives and debate? How many conversations do we have at the same time? Do the triggers that often derail us have discernable tells?

• Quick tip: Consider how you allocate time during meetings. One team made a rule to save the last five minutes of any important topic for quieter members to speak, sending a strong message: everyone’s voice matters. It’s often easier to change meeting structures (like the agenda) than it is to change behaviors. So, use structures to support the team behaviors you want.

Cumulatively, meetings have a huge organizational impact. If you look closely, you can see how meetings reflect and shape company-wide cultural values. Are your meetings aligned with the strategic priorities of the business and the values you want to see across the organization?

• Quick tip: When the meeting invite and materials you send in advance overtly connect the meeting’s purpose and outcomes to broader business goals, people are more aligned and productive. As a side benefit, people should question any meeting that cannot be tied to a broader business goal—it is the litmus test of a meeting agenda.  

Assess your meeting effectiveness  

If you’re not paying attention to how you and your team behave during meetings, you won’t have a sense of how effective your meetings are, and they won’t improve.  

At the nonprofit in our earlier example, leaders tracked their progress with a simple anonymous post-meeting poll. After each meeting, participants gave a thumbs up if the meeting hit the five fundamental observable behaviors or a thumbs down if it didn’t. This quick feedback helped them stay on track.  

Reflect on your most recent meeting using the framework below.

How to do it:

Start with assessing your most recent meeting at Level 1 in the list below. If you can’t answer “yes” to the fundamental meeting behaviors at Level 1, then this is an area to practice intentionally next meeting. To level up to Level 2 and 3, answer “yes” for all five meeting behaviors for three meetings in a row (to ensure it’s not a fluke).

Level 1

Listening: Did we have ‘one conversation’?

Participating: Did everyone stay present – no multi-tasking or checking out?

Efficiency: Did we begin and end on time?

Accountability: Were all the action items clear and claimed?

Focus: Did we stay on topic for each agenda item?

Put it into practice

At the nonprofit, assessing meeting behaviors over time led to better individual behaviors, stronger team results, and a shift in the way staff meetings contributed to the mission. As old behaviors that previously dominated or derailed staff meetings declined, the meetings became an even more valuable time for organization-wide connections and storytelling. This approach and discipline to meetings was adopted by the individual leaders’ meetings. Meetings all around the organization improved. While getting there took longer than predicted, the shifts lasted, and the organization’s outcomes improved. People began to expect good meetings that were productive and contributed to action and success.  

Meetings are more than just a tool for getting things done—they’re a powerful reflection of a microcosm of your organization’s culture. When approached with intention, they can drive behavior change, foster collaboration, and align teams with strategic goals. Simply by developing five fundamental behaviors, the way you and your teams show up in meetings can transform how your company works together and accelerates progress. Ultimately, meetings are where culture is built, one conversation at a time.  

Once a reorganization goes live, leaders are no longer waiting. They are in it. The organization is looking for rapid signs of momentum. Executives are being asked to make calls quickly, show decisive leadership, and validate that the new model is working.

But in reality, most leaders are still figuring out their new context. Teams are re-forming. Work is being uncovered. And no one yet has full visibility into how everything fits together.

This is the tension of the early days. The pressure to move fast and deliver results collides with the reality that long-term, scalable success depends on something slower—defining roles, building trust, establishing connection, and understanding what is really going on.

The reality: You’re expected to perform in a system you’re still learning

Your new role may be official, but the environment around you is still unstable. You might be leading a team you have never met, working in a part of the business that is new to you, and trying to navigate decisions with incomplete information.

Meanwhile, others are looking to you for answers and there is no time to reflect and analyze the right path forward. Here are steps that will help you achieve this balance and create impact for yourself and your teams quickly, while staying on course.

Five things great leaders do during the transition

1. Balance decisiveness with discovery The instinct is to prove yourself by acting quickly. But decisive leadership is not about speed alone. Take these steps to check your actions:
   • Make informed decisions with short-term relevance while signaling you’re still learning the broader system. Ask questions and show curiosity.
   • Be transparent about what you do and don’t yet know, and ask your team to help close the gaps.
2. Establish connection before authority There’s often a quiet fear: “If I don’t assert control early, I’ll lose credibility.” Trust is built by showing interest, not just issuing direction. Now’s the time to:
   • Start by listening. Ask thoughtful, open-ended questions. Seek clarification and insights.
   • Assume the team knows things you don’t and is closer to the work than you are.
   • Learn how the team functions before trying to improve it.
3. Expect the unexpected—and normalize it Every reorganization brings surprises. Legacy work emerges. Assumptions break. Systems misfire. Communications blur. Dial up your composure:
   • Stay calm and curious. Your reaction shapes how others respond.
   • Resist the urge to assign blame or fix everything. Learn from what surfaces.
4. Lead with questions, not just answers In the thick of transition, the questions you ask can influence outcomes more than commands:
   • Use a few consistent questions that signal what matters to you and encourage deeper thinking.
   • Genuinely ask for input—you’ll build credibility and sharpen your own decisions.
5. Be steady in the chaos Many organizations equate competence with rapid action and displays of command. During disruption, consistency of presence is your greatest asset:
   • Show up predictably, especially when conditions are unpredictable.
   • Make it clear your priority is helping the team succeed, not showcasing your own capability.

Four common transition pitfalls to avoid

Pitfall #1: Moving fast without understanding the system you’re operating in. Context is key. Don’t trade speed for comprehension.

Pitfall #2: Defaulting to past experience that doesn’t match the new context. What served you before won’t necessarily serve you now. Lead differently.

Pitfall #3: Trying to “look strong” instead of building the strength of the team. Heroics sap energy and undermine collective performance.

Pitfall #4: Assuming trust will come later—it starts now. If you wait to build trust, it will be too late. Now’s the time to lean into that foundation.

Key takeaways

• In the first 30 days, balance the urgency to act with the discipline to listen.
• Trust is not a soft skill—it’s the foundation for sustainable performance.
• The way you show up now will be remembered long after the reorganization dust settles.

Call to action: In the transition

If you are in the early days of a new leadership role post-reorg, ask yourself: “Am I earning the trust that will let me lead through what’s next, not just what’s now?”

If you want a downloadable version of this series, click here to get the whitepaper.

This is part of a 3-part series. Be sure to read the other two: Part 1: What great leaders do before the change and Part 3: What great leaders do after the change.

The reorganization is complete. The structure is in place, job titles are assigned, and reporting lines are formalized. From the outside, it may look like the change is over.

But this is where the real work begins.

At this stage, teams are no longer navigating ambiguity about where they sit. Now, they are trying to figure out how to operate in a new system. This is the phase where leaders must move from concept to execution, turning design decisions into daily reality.

The reality: The structure is set, but the work is just beginning

You now have clarity on roles and reporting, but that does not mean people know how to work together. Expectations are still being defined, cross-functional collaboration is still forming, and pressure to deliver results is growing. Your teams are worried about ensuring their own success as well as that of the organization.

The mistake many leaders make is to assume the structure will carry itself. But an operating model is only as effective as the behaviors it enables and the decisions it guides. This is where leadership matters most.

Four things great leaders do after the reorganization

1. Commit to making the model real This means going beyond knowing what the new structure looks like. You must understand why it was designed and how it is meant to function. Your ability to help your teams thrive in the new organization rests on being able to live the new model yourself. Consider these steps:
   • Revisit the intent behind the operating model. What problems was it built to solve?
   • Use that intent to guide how you set priorities, coordinate with peers, and shape decisions.
   • Treat the structure as a framework, not a finished product. It gives shape to the work, but it does not dictate how the work gets done. This is where you and your teams come
2. Adapt the “how” while staying anchored to the “why” Things will not unfold exactly as planned. That doesn’t mean the plan is wrong—it means reality is offering new input. Your adaptability as a leader to keep the focus while incorporating information as you go is key to your success—and your team’s. Now’s the time to:
   • Refine how work happens without losing sight of what you are trying to achieve.
   • Be disciplined in your purpose, flexible in your methods.
   • Keep it balanced. Resist both rigid adherence and constant reinvent
3. Practice detachment and purposeful ownership You are not here to protect a system. You are here to make it work. It’s easy to get swept up in the emotions of a new environment. Now is the time to keep those emotions in check and focus on the end game: leading toward the vision for the new organization.
   • Stay focused on outcomes. Take ownership for how your team contributes to the bigger picture.
   • When something fails, do not personalize it. Use it as input. The best leaders treat operating models as living systems, not fixed mandates.
4. Make inclusion intentional and strategic Including others in shaping the work is not about being agreeable. It is about unlocking the full capability of the organization. People get behind new ways of working when they have helped to shape them. Your role is to make sure this happens effectively and with purpose:
   • Be specific about who you bring into decision-making and why. Inclusion must serve the work, not dilute it.
   • Avoid informal circles of influence that leave others confused or sidelined. This quickly erodes trust and engagement.
   • Done well, inclusion increases clarity, alignment, and speed. Ignored, it creates drag and disconnection.

Four common post-change pitfalls to avoid

Pitfall #1: Assuming that the operating model will work automatically. It’s never “build it and they will come.” Acknowledge up front that making it work is the real work.

Pitfall #2: Abandoning the design too early instead of learning through it. It’s tempting to revert to the old way when resistance appears. Treat resistance as information and stay the course.

Pitfall #3: Overcorrecting at the first sign of friction. Especially in harmony-seeking cultures, quick overreactions create more uncertainty and make it harder to move to the new vision.

Pitfall #4: Making inclusion broad and vague rather than targeted and purposeful. Trying to give everyone a voice in everything leaves no one feeling heard. Get the right voices on the right decisions at the right time.

Key takeaways

• The operating model is not the solution. It is the starting point.
• Leadership after the reorganization means interpreting and adapting the model in service of outcomes.
• Inclusion is a strategic behavior that drives performance when applied with intent and discipline.

Call to action: Post-reorganization

If you are leading after a transformation, ask yourself: “Am I helping this model function as intended, or am I assuming that structure equals success?”

If you want a downloadable version of this series, click here to get the whitepaper.

This is part of a 3-part series. Be sure to read the other two: Part 1: What great leaders do before the change and Part 2: What great leaders do during the change.

In today’s climate of continuous transformation, especially across manufacturing and engineering, many organizations are launching new operating models while managing significant workforce reductions. The weeks before “go live” are often the most ambiguous, yet they carry disproportionate weight in shaping how people interpret and engage with the change.

In this early stage, leadership presence sends strong signals. What executives say, how they show up, and the questions they ask all begin to shape the culture of the new organization. The challenge is that because so much is uncertain at this stage, the signals you send can get mixed up, exacerbating the problem of your team’s engagement and focus.

The reality: You’re leading before the structure is ready

This period before the reorganization goes live means leading in an abyss, before the new structure and roles are clearly defined and announced.

At this stage, your future as a leader is still in flux:

• Some leaders know their new roles but not their teams or decision rights.
• Others are being pulled into decisions for parts of the business they do not yet fully own.
• Some still do not know if or where they fit in the new organization.
• And yet all have to act.

This creates a leadership paradox. You are expected to influence outcomes in a space where your authority is informal, your team is undefined, and your context is incomplete. Fortunately, there are steps you can take to move forward successfully.

Four things great leaders do to navigate pre-organization

1. Prioritize the play-by-play, not the organizational chart

When formal clarity is missing, do not wait. Focus on how to work together in the moment, and take these steps:

• Treat major tasks or decisions like individual plays. Huddle up, assign roles based on strengths, and move forward.
• Recognize that progress comes from coordinated actions, not from waiting for the full design to finalize. Keep the focus on making smaller moves, together.

2. Resist solving for the whole system

As you press forward, you will notice inefficiencies and gaps. You will feel pressure to fix everything. Pause and remember:

• Now is not the time for sweeping changes. You do not yet have the full information.
• Stay focused on solving the immediate problem while keeping broader implications in view. Make notes you can come back to later when you know more.

3. Be aware of the shadow you cast

In times of uncertainty, your influence is amplified. Even casual comments you make can set unintended actions in motion. As you communicate to your team, use this as a guide:

• Assume everything you say will be interpreted as direction; be intentional about what you ask people to do.
• Speak with intention, even when you are still forming your own understanding.

4. Make decisions that can be revisited

Remember that most early decisions will not—and should not—be irreversible. Focus on keeping things moving, not setting the future in stone. As your guide:

• Make smart calls that can be adjusted as new information emerges.
• Aim for progress and learning, not permanence.

Three common early-stage pitfalls to avoid

Pitfall #1: Trying to fix everything at once. This fragments your focus and is impossible to achieve, while creating the risk that you will miss important smaller wins and solutions that will propel the team more successfully forward.

Pitfall #2: Applying past playbooks too quickly. What has worked before does not always work in a new and different environment. Jumping too quickly to past approaches can blind you to quick pivots you need to make now, and bring your team off course along with you.

Pitfall #3: Waiting for certainty. By nature of the “pre-reorg” fog, certainty is not going to come anytime soon. And important work still needs to get done. Getting stymied by awaiting big decisions and key direction will leave you and your teams far behind.

Key takeaways

• The “before” period is not a holding pattern. It is a critical window to shape tone, relationships, and ways of working.
• Curiosity, not control, earns early trust.
• The habits you form now will influence how others operate once the structure is in place.

Call to action: Before the reorganization

If your organization is approaching a major reorganization, ask yourself:
“What signals am I sending today, and are they building the foundation I want for tomorrow?”

If you want a downloadable version of this series, click here to get the whitepaper.

This is part of a 3 part series. Be sure to read the other two here: Part 2: What great leaders do during the change and Part 3: What great leaders do after the change

You already know strategy matters. You’ve likely spent months—maybe years—crafting one that’s bold, clear, and built to win. But when progress stalls, the issue often isn’t the strategy itself—it’s whether the organization can move with it.

That’s where culture comes in.

The culture that once fueled your success may no longer be fit for what’s next. And even if things look fine on the surface, early signals might be telling a different story—signs your culture isn’t accelerating your strategy the way it used to.

Culture is what turns intent into impact. It’s not the values on the wall or the message at a town hall—it’s the unwritten rules that shape how people decide, collaborate, and lead. It’s how things really get done.

When those patterns align with your direction, momentum builds. When they don’t, even the best strategy struggles to stick.

→ Let’s chat about leveraging culture to manage change fatigue at your organization.

You see it in:

• The stories people tell about what gets rewarded
• The choices teams make under pressure
• The habits that show up when no one’s watching

And in the everyday:

• How decisions get made
• How people collaborate
• How accountability is managed
• How change is received

If your strategy has shifted but progress still feels stuck—or strained—it’s worth asking:

Is your culture still serving your business, or is it starting to slow you down?

A case in point

Two years ago, BTS partnered with a global organization that had just launched an ambitious growth strategy. Excitement was high—but results didn’t follow.

Leaders were frustrated by a lack of speed and ownership. Employees said they didn’t feel empowered. The word that kept surfacing? Bureaucracy.

That term became a catch-all for inefficiency, but no one could quite define it. So we helped them unpack what was really going on:

• Unclear decision rights
• Too many committees for too many decisions
• Outdated knowledge-sharing systems
• Manual processes slowing everything down

We visualized the findings in a “bureaucracy tree” to connect the dots. That clarity helped leaders prioritize where to focus first. And that’s when momentum returned.

The power of pivotal moments

The breakthrough didn’t start with a bold new initiative. It started with a shift in focus—from broad ideas to specific moments.

We worked with leaders to identify the everyday situations where culture is shaped and signaled: subtle, unscripted moments that reflect what’s truly expected and rewarded.

• A decision point with no obvious answer: do we act, or wait for perfection?
• A team member hesitates: do we jump in to solve, or create space for them to step up?

When leaders could name these moments, they could begin to shape them—making small, deliberate choices that sent a different signal. These weren’t one-time actions. They were repeatable patterns, practiced consistently.

And they’re just as available to you. Start by asking: where are the moments I tend to default to safety, silence, or control? And how could I begin to respond differently to shift the story?

Breaking old habits and building new ones

With these pivotal moments in mind, the leadership team reflected on their own patterns. How were they showing up? What were they reinforcing?

They focused on three shifts:

1. Stop reinforcing slow, complex decision-making
2. Start modeling clarity, ownership, and speed
3. Shift systems that quietly rewarded caution over empowerment

These weren’t abstract goals. They were grounded in real behaviors:

• How many people are involved in a decision?
• Are roles and responsibilities clear?
• Are our tools helping—or slowing us down?

By focusing on what people could see, track, and practice, change became tangible. It gave people something to act on—and believe in.

Scaling change through experimentation

The organization didn’t treat culture change as a campaign. They treated it as a learning process.

Top leaders ran small, coordinated experiments—turning abstract values into visible behaviors.

In one experiment, leaders committed to returning authority to managers who had “delegated decisions up” to them. In another, they redefined decision rights to cut through ambiguity and accelerate action.

These weren’t pilots. They were deliberate repetitions of new behaviors, designed to build muscle memory across the organization.

The results:

• Decisions moved faster
• Long-stalled initiatives were shut down
• A new product feature launched in half the usual time
• Employees reported feeling more empowered and accountable

If you’re wondering what this could look like for your organization, start here: What’s one behavior you could test out—or let go of—for a week? What’s one decision you could delegate? One moment you could coach instead of solve?

That’s how momentum builds—quietly, visibly, and fast.

Four common patterns to surface

Now that you’ve seen how small cultural habits shape (or stall) strategy, the next step is to spot where those habits are hiding in your organization. Here are four patterns we often see when momentum is missing—along with what they may be signaling.

   Element of Culture What It Shapes What It Might Look Like Today Why It Might Be Time to Rethink     Decision making Speed, ownership, and accountability Teams slow down not because the path is unclear, but because they’re unsure who’s empowered to choose it. Decisions stall in ambiguity—or escalate unnecessarily. Legacy approval structures often reflect yesterday’s risks. Today’s pace requires alignment over consensus, and trust in judgment at every level.   Meeting norms Focus, decision velocity, and participation Meetings are packed with updates, but few decisions get made. Real conversations happen in sidebars—after the meeting ends. When meetings become status dumps, they signal that the real work happens elsewhere. Reclaim meetings for collaboration and visible decisions to shift how teams show up—and move with more speed.   Leadership modeling Credibility and cultural integrity Leaders talk about agility or empowerment—but in high-stakes moments, default to control, caution, or top-down decisions. Culture isn’t shaped by slides—it’s shaped by what leaders do when it counts. If words and actions diverge, people follow the behavior. Find misalignments and try a new tack.   Feedback Learning, adaptability, and momentum Leaders see something misaligned—but let it go to avoid discomfort or protect relationships. Feedback is delayed, diluted, or disappears. Without feedback, small misalignments calcify. Cultures that learn fast don’t wait—they normalize feedback as a lever for shared growth.    

Which one shows up most in your team? That’s your next pivotal moment.

Shining a flashlight on your invisible “monsters”

When it comes to culture, the hardest part is often what you can’t see—or don’t know how to name.

Think back to childhood. Most of us, at some point, were convinced there was a monster in the closet or under the bed. In the dark, a pile of clothes becomes something menacing. A shadow turns into something to fear.

But then the light comes on. You see clearly. The fear fades. What once felt huge and scary becomes harmless—even a little silly.

That’s what culture can feel like inside an organization. Bureaucracy. Resistance. Complexity. These forces seem big and hard to define. They slow us down and sap momentum. But more often than not, they’re just old habits and assumptions lurking in the dark.

When leaders learn to spot the subtle, pivotal moments that shape behavior, they turn the light on. What felt intangible becomes specific. What felt impossible becomes actionable.

You don’t need a total reinvention. You need clarity—a way to see what’s really happening and where to shift, simply and deliberately.

When to bring in reinforcement

Not every culture challenge needs an outside partner. But some moments call for reinforcement—especially when change needs to stick at scale.

At BTS, we help organizations turn invisible cultural friction into visible forward motion. Whether you’re shaping a new strategy, integrating after a merger, or building a leadership culture that unlocks ownership—we help leaders shift from insight to impact.

Here are a few signs it might be time to partner

• You’ve named the strategy—but execution keeps stalling.
• You see the issues—but can’t align on how to shift behaviors.
• Leaders are bought in intellectually, but behavior hasn’t changed.
• Teams say the right things—but culture feels stuck in old habits.

If you’re facing one of these moments, it’s not a failure—it’s a signal. The good news? You don’t have to tackle it alone.

Let’s talk about what it would take to move from insight to sustained culture change.

AI is reshaping how organizations think about go-to-market

Tools are smarter. Content is easier to produce. Execution feels faster than ever.

But for many teams, something’s still off.

Growth is sluggish. Sales cycles feel stuck. Content isn’t landing. Leaders keep asking for more—but what they really need is better.

Because that’s the trap: when performance plateaus, many companies start adding. More tools. More messaging. More campaigns. More enablement.

It feels like progress. But often, it’s just motion—without momentum.

The most effective GTM leaders are starting to realize that the answer isn’t more. It’s better execution of the right strategy—with the right people, at the right moments.

That simple shift in thinking changes everything.

The illusion of progress: When “more” feels like a solution

The allure of AI is that it removes friction. It gives teams the ability to move fast and produce at scale. That’s a gift—but also a risk.

When growth slows, it’s tempting to flood the system with content and activity. New talk tracks. New sequences. New assets. More volume, more reach, more automation.

But if the fundamentals aren’t sound, you’re just amplifying misalignment.

Without a clear GTM strategy at the center, that content doesn’t connect. Sellers don’t know how to use it. Customers don’t know what to do with it. And suddenly your teams are working harder—but not driving real results.

Better is about focus—not flash

The most mature GTM teams aren’t chasing complexity. They’re pursuing clarity.

They start by asking sharper questions:

• What do our top sellers already do well—and how do we scale that behavior?
• Where are we falling short in executing on our strategy?
• What’s the one thing we need to get right before we try to scale?

These questions drive focus. And that focus turns strategy from theory into traction.

When enablement and marketing efforts ladder up to a shared GTM playbook, capability building becomes a multiplier—not an afterthought. It’s not about equipping people with more—it’s about helping them execute what matters most.

AI doesn’t replace alignment—it accelerates it.

AI should enhance execution, not distract from it

Used well, it can help teams personalize outreach, generate insights, and build assets faster. But AI doesn’t tell you what to say, who to target, or why your message matters. That still requires a well-defined GTM strategy, strong customer understanding, and aligned messaging.

And most importantly, it requires talent that’s equipped to bring it all to life.

AI won’t fix a disconnected team or a fragmented customer experience. It will just help you scale the wrong things faster—unless your foundation is strong.

Don’t scale what you haven’t nailed

Before you double down on more, ask yourself: have we nailed the fundamentals?

• Do our sellers understand the buyer’s real problems?
• Is our messaging consistent, clear, and rooted in our value proposition?
• Are our commercial teams aligned around shared motions and moments?

If the answer is “not yet,” then adding more tools or content won’t move the needle. In fact, it might make things worse—by creating clutter, confusion, and competing signals in the field.

The real leverage comes when you pause and invest in better execution. That’s what makes strategy stick.

The risk of “more”

• Misalignment between strategy and execution
• Content that’s produced, but not used
• A GTM engine that’s busy, but not effective

The upside of “better”

• Teams focused on the right moments that matter
• Capability building that drives real business outcomes
• A GTM motion that feels clear, confident, and connected

Where to go from here

AI is not going away—and it shouldn’t. But it’s time to get intentional about how you use it. Not to create more noise, but to sharpen your signal.

That starts with strategy. With execution. With talent.

And most of all—with clarity.

Because in a world of infinite GTM choices, better is your competitive edge. It’s what separates teams that deliver impact from teams that deliver volume.

So don’t start with more. Start with better.

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

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