For senior executives, this shift signals both new opportunities and a set of urgent and unfamiliar challenges. Leading companies are meeting these demands by embracing three strategic imperatives in the way they work.  

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Report Highlights

Addressing these escalating demands requires more than individual capability; it necessitates an organizational context that enables leaders to succeed.

Four foundational elements—autonomy, empowerment, psychological safety, and recognition—can help strengthen a leader’s capacity to carry heavier loads without buckling.

Survey Highlights

Effective AI integration requires leaders who can act as bridges between organizational goals and AI capabilities and then inspire their teams to trust and adopt AI tools to help achieve those goals.

To better understand how the workforce is learning about gen AI, Harvard Business Publishing Corporate Learning partnered with Degreed to conduct a global survey of 2,739 employees across a range of industries. The study aimed to uncover how employees are learning about gen AI, its workplace applications, and the skills needed to develop user proficiency with various tools.

A 2019 McKinsey survey found that just 20% of respondents say their organizations excel at decision making. A poll one year later by Gallup echoed those results, with just 24% of U.S. managers strongly agreeing their peers make well-thought-out decisions.

While some organizations have taken comprehensive steps to improve decision quality, most do not yet treat decision making the way they do other competencies.

To better understand the business skills employees need, Harvard Business Publishing Corporate Learning spoke with Harvard Business School professors, business leaders, and some of Harvard Business Publishing’s own executives, and identified a body of knowledge, called business acumen, that leaders across every level and function need to differentiate their company from their rivals and deliver greater value to their customers.

A 2023 survey found that among the 72% of companies globally that said they had mandated a return, 42% reported a higher quit rate than anticipated, and almost a third reported recruiting difficulties. Organizations must ensure their RTO policies are achieving the intended outcomes.

To move successfully through this transition, download our perspective paper to learn the four key themes that stand out as areas where leaders should focus, reflect, and potentially take action.

Employees want control of their own learning, yet they also want guidance and support from managers and L&D teams. These five strategies can help you cultivate a culture of personalized, learner-driven, and social learning that will ensure your organization is prepared for the future.

By complementing the skills they already have with those most crucial for leading people, these five capabilities can help frontline managers—especially those new to the role—make the transformation from individual contributors to successful leaders who understand how to get the best from their teams.

In contrast with employee engagement, working with an employee toward fulfillment is done, at least in large part, to benefit the individual. Fulfillment involves understanding each employee’s needs for wellness in its broadest sense.

Revitalization of the employee experience with a focus on fulfillment starts with a commitment to helping employees for their own sake and rejecting the idea of engaging them solely for the organization. It continues with the strategic decision to develop human-centered leaders who are capable of understanding and meeting each employee’s unique needs for feeling valued, belonging, and growth.

But human-centered leadership is not just a general “people first” mindset plus a particular set of soft skills. 

Being a truly human-centered leader requires having a genuine intention to help each person succeed and find fulfillment at work, along with a disciplined approach to effectively choosing and exhibiting the leadership behaviors appropriate for the individual and the context.

In this paper, we examine each capacity, describing how it shows up in a leader’s approach to framing situations and in how the leader responds to common situations that call upon the dimension. We also discuss how these capacities can be developed and the role Learning and Talent can play in supporting that development.