Amplifying with AI: L&D’s Role in Scaling Collective Intelligence

Mark Marone, PhD

September 9, 2025

Artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to automate anything that can be measured, revolutionizing how work gets done. Even if AI innovation stalled today, the disruption would continue. That gives learning and development (L&D) leaders two urgent tasks: to help people use AI effectively and to use AI to enhance how people learn.

Business today demands learning that is faster, more personalized, and deeply contextualized. That’s where AI comes in. In a recent Harvard Business Review article by Marc Zao-Sanders that methodically ranks 100 current use cases for generative AI, both “enhanced learning” and “personalized learning” feature among the top 20.

This work of L&D today is critical. By combining AI’s capacity to scale insight with L&D’s ability to shape behavior, organizations can build their collective intelligence: the dynamic interplay between people and machines that enables smarter decisions, innovation, and better performance at scale.

The Amplification Imperative

According to Harvard Business Impact’s 2025 Global Leadership Development Study, 49% of L&D leaders expect AI to improve talent development outcomes this year. Even more expect it to enhance the scalability (50%) and adaptability (53%) of learning programs.

That promise is already being realized. Consider how Hilton Hotels rolled out an AI-powered virtual reality training program for front desk staff. Employees interact with a Guest Service Coach that delivers real-time feedback on tone, word choice, and service behaviors. What used to take four hours of instructor-led training now takes just 20 minutes, and the program has scaled to over 400,000 employees globally.

This kind of amplification is exactly what many organizations need, but speed and efficiency aren’t enough. The deeper value lies in AI’s ability to help organizations codify and share internal expertise, personalize development pathways, and create learning systems that adapt alongside the business and help it grow.

Three Ways AI is Already Amplifying Learning

1. Contextualized Knowledge at Scale

AI tools powered by internal data are helping organizations unlock and distribute tacit knowledge. For example, large language models can be trained on internal policies, playbooks, and best practices, enabling employees to ask context-specific questions and receive curated answers grounded in the organization’s way of working.

A multinational firm interviewed in our study represents a typical example. It deployed an AI coach that understands company values, ethical guidelines, and leadership principles, then delivers tailored coaching to first-time managers. This kind of amplification by AI is allowing organizations to streamline the work of middle managers and flatten organizational hierarchies.

2. Personalized and Proactive Learning

In contrast to traditional training calendars, AI-powered systems can push microlearning or feedback precisely when and where it’s needed. Leaders can receive just-in-time nudges before key meetings. Teams can be prompted to reflect on recent challenges. Learners can navigate personalized development journeys based on evolving role requirements, skill gaps, and performance trends.

3. Learning Embedded in Workflows

The best learning doesn’t feel like training at all. AI makes it possible to integrate development directly into the flow of work, offering real-time guidance, simulations, and decision aids. Instead of stepping away to learn, employees learn as they work. This not only increases relevance and retention but also addresses one of the biggest barriers to learning: lack of time. Instead of logging in to a portal and searching for content, employees increasingly engage with intelligent assistants that deliver curated answers, personalized learning, and targeted support just when it’s needed.

Why Learning Needs to Lead

Right now, organizations need L&D as a strategic partner in developing collective intelligence to unlock the full potential of human-AI collaboration. Yet our study revealed an uncomfortable gap: only 36% of organizations believe their leaders fully embrace the mindset that AI must be central to strategy and operations. Just 42% describe their support for employee AI experimentation as strong.

Learning leaders have a critical role to play in helping to close these gaps. This includes not only helping leaders and employees become AI literate themselves, but also leading by example, incorporating AI into how learning is developed, delivered, and measured.

The most effective strategies blend AI’s precision with human insight, creating a loop where machine-generated guidance is continuously refined by people and returned to the system as collective intelligence. In this way, AI doesn’t just accelerate learning; it becomes part of a feedback loop that strengthens it.

The Learning Function as the Leverage Point

When business models, company workflows, and entire industries are being reshaped by intelligent machines, the ability to learn at scale becomes a competitive differentiator.

Amplifying learning with AI promises to increase the velocity and impact of learning across organizations. The challenge for learning leaders today isn’t whether to use AI, it’s how to use it well: ethically, strategically, and in the service of human growth as well as business growth.

With the guidance of talented L&D teams, AI can enable not just more learning, but better learning: learning that equips people to lead, adapt, and thrive in a fast, fluid, and future-focused world.

The post Amplifying with AI: L&D’s Role in Scaling Collective Intelligence appeared first on Harvard Business Impact.

Why the Tortoise Doesn’t Win Anymore: Speed to Skill as a Competitive Advantage

Mark Marone, PhD

August 18, 2025

For 2,000 years, the fable “The Tortoise and the Hare” has offered a lesson in patience and persistence. “Slow and steady wins the race,” the story goes. Deliberate, methodical progress beats speed.

But in today’s business landscape, that moral increasingly feels outdated.

Welcome to an era where speed to skill—how quickly individuals and organizations can learn, adapt, and apply new capabilities—has become a defining competitive advantage. In fact, it may be the only sustainable competitive advantage left. The new race is to see who learns fastest, applies that learning in real time, and gets maximum ROI before the landscape and the skills needed to navigate it shift again.

The Hare Learns a Lesson

In the classic tale, the hare loses. The advantage of his natural speed is undermined by his arrogance and complacency. But imagine a different version: one where the hare has learned his lesson and recognizes there is no time for napping under a tree. Instead, he scans the terrain for the best way forward, learns from every misstep, and uses those lessons immediately to move ahead, smarter and faster.

That’s today’s winning strategy in business. Companies are now consciously improving their speed to skill, making them more agile and adaptive. And they’re pulling away from competitors, even those making slow but steady progress.

Institutionalizing Learning at Speed

On the cutting edge are companies like Google and OpenAI, which approach learning like an extreme sport. OpenAI, for example, has built systems that treat every launch as a learning opportunity. Nearly 100% of releases are A/B tested, and those insights feed back into rapid cycles of iteration, dramatically increasing what some call their “learning velocity.”

At Google, speed to skill is also measured with surgical precision, especially on engineering teams. Through its DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) framework, Google tracks how long it takes teams to deploy new code, recover from failures, and iterate changes. These metrics reflect how fast teams learn from the real world and integrate that learning into the product.

Speed to Skill at Scale

Learning velocity isn’t limited to tech companies. Unilever has become a global model for what it means to build speed to skill at scale. Through its internal talent marketplace, employees can map their own career paths and identify the skills they’ll need. They can access relevant learning and apply their new capabilities immediately by volunteering for short-term internal gigs. For instance, a marketing professional can learn basic data analysis and then test that skill in a data-driven project in a time frame of just weeks.

This integration of learning, doing, and performing creates a virtuous cycle: faster skill acquisition, faster application, and a faster impact on the business. It’s no coincidence that Unilever consistently ranks among the most future-ready global companies.

Why This Matters Now

The half-life of skills is shrinking, quickly. The World Economic Forum predicts that by 2027 44% of workers’ core skills will be disrupted. AI is transforming job roles at a pace that is making some training programs obsolete before they can be completed.

And the pressure for speed is mounting. According to our 2025 Fast, Fluid, and Future-Focused study, 55% of organizations say that incorporating gen AI, AI, or machine learning into business practices is a top priority this year. It follows that nearly half also said there are significantly increased expectations of leaders to upskill their teams in AI.

Faster training delivery alone isn’t the full solution to the problem of accelerating speed to skill. Organizations must first understand the skills they will need, something that must go hand in hand with setting strategy. Second, the training must be effective and applicable. Third, it all needs to happen within an organizational culture that embraces the application of new skills—a change-seeking organization. It is a task for which many business leaders and organizations aren’t fully prepared.

A New Moral for a New Race

So what’s the takeaway for business leaders?

The lesson isn’t that speed always wins. It’s that learning speed wins in a world that rewards insight, agility, and action.

If you’re a leader, ask yourself:

• Is learning embedded in our C-suite strategy discussions?
• How quickly can our teams integrate new technologies, tools, or processes? How do we know?
• Knowing our strategy, do our people have the opportunity to help identify the skills they are going to need?
• Does our leadership create a psychologically safe environment that is conducive to applying new skills?
• Are our performance measurements and incentives aligned with accelerating our organization’s learning velocity?

To compete in this new race, organizations must design for speed to skill. It’s not just about training programs but also systems and environments that make learning continuous, contextual, and integral to performance.

When it comes to learning, it’s time to retire the old fable. The new one is being written every day by companies that are learning their way to the finish line—faster than ever before.

The post Why the Tortoise Doesn’t Win Anymore: Speed to Skill as a Competitive Advantage appeared first on Harvard Business Impact.

The Fluid Future of Work: Rethinking Roles in the Age of Intelligent Machines

Mark Marone, PhD

July 25, 2025

As AI advances, human employees’ roles are evolving in unpredictable ways. Organizations must now anticipate and prepare for nonlinear role shifts, where job responsibilities fragment, fuse, or disappear altogether. The ability to proactively adapt leadership, learning, and development strategies to this new reality is emerging as an important competitive differentiator.

To meet this challenge, learning and development (L&D) must not only close current skills gaps but also forecast future ones. This means redefining how we think about jobs, how we develop talent, and how we support leaders who are navigating uncharted organizational terrain.

The Need to Prepare for the Nonlinear Evolution of Roles

In an AI-transformed world, job roles are being rapidly reshaped. Traditional workforce planning models aren’t enough to get the job done. Organizations are faced with the need to rethink their approach to workforce planning and development.

This imperative, which we call predicting the nonlinear evolution of roles, was identified by global leaders as one of the three most urgent objectives in our 2025 Global Leadership Development Study. Alongside the rise of digital labor and the acceleration of AI, it is changing not just how work gets done but also who does it and what capabilities they need to succeed.

For decades, workforce planning has typically followed a relatively linear and role-based approach: define the roles needed to support strategic goals, identify the skills and experiences required for each, and create structured career paths to build proficiency. That model no longer works. Today, leaders must anticipate role changes before they happen and equip teams to adapt in real time.

In our study, 44% of respondents said their organization is placing greater emphasis on upskilling and reskilling within leadership development. And almost half (45%) said expectations are rising for leaders to actively support their own teams’ AI upskilling.

These trends highlight the fact that leaders themselves are seeing their roles change, sometimes dramatically. Moves that create entirely new leadership roles, such as merging IT and HR departments, are making headlines.¹ Leaders are increasingly valued as sense makers who can deal with complexity and guide AI-enabled systems rather than as decision makers and subject matter experts. They are navigating new responsibilities that may not have existed a year ago, and that may change again in six months.

AI Is Driving and Redefining Role Evolution

As AI tools grow more sophisticated, they are no longer simply assisting with tasks. Increasingly, they are performing end-to-end processes autonomously. In many companies, AI has already evolved from the role of helpful assistant to agent.

One multinational company we interviewed shared their use of a “4B” framework to determine how work gets done in the future: Will a task be handled by human talent that is bought, built, or borrowed? Or will it be transferred to a bot or button (AI)? This type of thinking, which was once rare, is becoming common across industries and functions.

In some cases, AI orchestrates entire workflows. Take UBS, for example. Since 2024, the financial firm’s AI-driven service approves loans without human intervention. Credit officers didn’t disappear, but their responsibilities changed. Today, they define parameters, conduct scenario testing, and coach AI systems rather than make each decision themselves.

That kind of shift has implications for how we design leadership development. L&D teams must prepare leaders to take on new responsibilities, some of which may not be clearly defined yet. This requires not only technical upskilling but also a rethinking of leadership identity, agency, and capability.

What’s at Stake: Leadership Pipelines and Capability Gaps

The nonlinear evolution of roles affects more than just current job holders; it upends the traditional leadership pipeline. In industries where AI displaces entry-level roles, organizations may lose the proving grounds where future leaders once developed. Without action, this will create serious capability gaps down the road.

That’s why the most forward-looking companies are redesigning development paths to reflect the new reality. They are investing in tools to model likely role changes, analyze skill adjacency, and forecast future workforce needs. Crucially, they are embedding learning earlier and more broadly to build readiness, not just at the top but across the enterprise.

What L&D Can Do Now

So how should L&D leaders respond? Start by shifting the question from “What does this role require now?” to “What will this role likely become?” Then, work backward. What experiences, knowledge, and capabilities must be built today to support success tomorrow?

Effective teams are:

• Building dynamic role profiles that adapt as new technologies and business models emerge
• Integrating AI into workforce planning tools to simulate different futures and surface new opportunities
• Redesigning development programs to account for lateral moves, hybrid roles, and new leadership expectations
• Supporting leaders through transitions, helping them redefine their contributions as machines take over more routine tasks

This is not about predicting the future perfectly. It is about being prepared for many possible futures and helping people adapt and thrive in any of them.

The Bottom Line

Static job descriptions are a thing of the past. The future requires leaders who recognize that human and digital roles will be frequently reimagined. To lead in this world, people must be trained not just to perform but to pivot.

The role of L&D is no longer to close skills gaps. It is to help organizations anticipate them. And to do that, L&D leaders must be fast, fluid, and relentlessly future-focused.

Now is the time to rethink not just what we teach but why we teach it and whether it’s what’s needed to prepare people for what lies ahead in the world of work.

Explore further insights by downloading our 2025 Global Leadership Development Study: Fast, Fluid, and Future-Focused.

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2025 Global Leadership Development Study: Fast, Fluid, and Future-Focused

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1. Bousquette, Isabelle, “Why Moderna Merged Its Tech and HR Departments,” CIO Journal, May 12, 2025. https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-moderna-merged-its-tech-and-hr-departments-95318c2a?utm. ︎

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Transforming Leadership Development: Building Leadership Capacity to Change Paradigms and Patterns

Mark Marone, PhD

December 5, 2024

Over the past several months, we have been speaking with leaders at all levels of organizations about change and transformation. One challenge is common to all of them, regardless of their level, their organization, or even their industry: leading through an ongoing evolution. As one leader put it, “We used to implement plans to get from point A to point B. Now, there isn’t a point B—the destination just keeps moving.”

The normal reaction we see from leaders to this adaptive, complex environment is to double down on what’s worked in the past. It’s a survival skill, but one that can hold a leader back from adapting to situations that are ambiguous and constantly emerging.

Our report on leadership fitness described four key underlying capacities that are necessary for leaders to thrive in today’s leadership environment. One of those leadership capacities is flexibility—the capacity of leaders to adapt their thinking and behaviors to the situation.

But can a leader really change at such a fundamental level? The answer is yes, but it requires a different, more immersive learning process.

In our 2024 Global Leadership Development Study, we outlined a process for building leadership capacities—an approach that goes deeper than the traditional management development sessions commonly used to impart new skills and capabilities to leaders.

Change at a Deeper Level

As we’ve seen, great ideas and fresh thinking alone do not necessarily translate to deep change in a leader’s mindset or behavior. They need development that enables them to:

• See and challenge their current ways of working, allowing them to examine how their assumptions and biases might be holding them back.
• Develop new strategies, with new insights about themselves and their situations, and provide approaches they can experiment with to build that capacity.
• Test new approaches in real-world scenarios, facilitating their growth through experimentation, coaching, and feedback.

Example: Helping Leaders Learn to Adapt

Here’s an example of what that process might look like in practice:

Issue: Improving the Leadership Pipeline in Health Care

A 50-hospital health care system realized that its growth was being hindered by an inadequate leadership pipeline. Internal fill rates for leadership positions, from middle managers up to executives, was unsustainably low. Bringing in talent from the outside was expensive, unpredictable, and highly disruptive to the culture. The system needed to unblock the internal pipeline if it were to execute its growth plans.

A key barrier to internal promotions identified by the talent organization was that its best, most experienced leaders at each level often lacked the curiosity and adaptability needed to grow into larger roles. They tended to charge into new situations with their tried-and-true approaches, even when it was obvious to others that a different approach was needed. And with the amount of constant, dynamic change in health care, this inflexibility was even hindering their performance in their current roles.

Step 1: Seeing and Challenging Current Ways of Working

Seeing this as a multifaceted issue, the organization started by adapting its performance management process for leaders to create more frequent developmental feedback, moving to feedback-based quarterly leader reviews coupled with short, 360-degree pulse surveys on how leaders were performing. This process raised leaders’ awareness of how their current paradigms were helping or hindering them.

At the same time, the talent team reviewed its current talent pools and succession plans at each level, identifying two cohorts of leaders—one middle manager group and one senior manager group —that they felt had potential to move up if they could improve their adaptability as leaders. For these two groups, the team implemented a more robust, interview-based 360-degree assessment to provide additional qualitative feedback on their strengths and on areas where they needed to grow and adapt. In the debrief of the assessment, each leader was asked to identify key underlying assumptions and paradigms that drove their leadership approach, helping them see more clearly the roots of their automatic responses to new situations.

Step 2: Developing New Strategies

Armed with a greater awareness of the need to change, the two sets of leaders began a yearlong developmental journey focused on personal adaptability and agility. After an initial in-person kickoff, the journey included a combination of two-hour learning modules spread throughout the year along with on-the-job agility assignments and group coaching sessions.

Step 3: Testing New Approaches

Because the nature of this type of change requires a considerable amount of personal vulnerability, the leaders focused on creating a rhythm of practical, frequent developmental milestones called “progress points”—small but recognizable behavioral achievements that could build each leader’s confidence, curiosity, and a growth mindset throughout the year. The study groups and coaching circles provided a safe space for leaders to share what was working and where they were struggling, and to receive guidance and encouragement to continue growing.

By the end of the year, about 20% of the leaders in the initial two cohorts were reclassified as “ready now” for internal promotion, and by the following year the number more than doubled as real personal transformation took place. The organization chose to increase its investment by expanding to three cohorts to continue growing its leadership pipeline.

Building Leadership Capacity at Your Organization

At Harvard Business Publishing, we believe that leadership is more than a set of skills—it’s a mindset. Traditional development models, which focus solely on management and interpersonal capabilities, are helpful but only part of the story. Our approach goes deeper, incorporating assessments, continuous learning, real-world practice, and sustained support.

Investing in leader capacity is essential for true transformation. The journey is demanding, but the rewards are great. Leaders who embrace this holistic approach can see and lead differently, fostering a culture of innovation and excellence. Whether you’re looking to build a deeper leadership talent pool, enhance organizational culture, or drive specific business outcomes, our partnership offers the strategies and tools needed for success. Reach out to us today to discover how we can help your leaders achieve their full potential.

Explore Further

This is the sixth post in our series on transforming leadership development. If you haven’t yet read the previous posts, you can find them below:

• Why Widening Skill Sets is Crucial for Today’s Leaders
• Why Leaders Must Challenge Their Patterns and Paradigms
• How to Manage Polarities and Paradoxes
• Why Potentializing People Is the New Employee Engagement
• Building Leadership Capacity to Manage Polarities and Paradoxes

The post Transforming Leadership Development: Building Leadership Capacity to Change Paradigms and Patterns appeared first on Harvard Business Impact.

Transforming Leadership Development: Building Leadership Capacity to Manage Polarities and Paradoxes

Mark Marone, PhD

November 20, 2024

Change at a Deeper Level

As we’ve seen, great ideas and fresh thinking alone do not necessarily translate to deep change in a leader’s mindset or behavior. They need development that enables them to:

• Challenge their current operating paradigms, allowing them to examine their ways of thinking and working and the assumptions and biases that might be holding them back.
• Develop new strategies with new insights about themselves and their situations; provide approaches they can experiment with to build that capacity.
• Test new approaches in real-world scenarios, facilitating their growth through experimentation, coaching, and feedback.

Example: Building Leadership Capacity

Here’s an example of what that process might look like in practice.

Issue: Developing capacities to facilitate transformation

A large, U.S.-based telecommunications company needed to make significant shifts in how it ran its business. One example was its core network, which had been assembled over the years through a series of acquisitions, leaving them with a patchwork of different technologies that was becoming increasingly unreliable and difficult to keep current. Centralizing ownership across the company of all technologies led to a different set of problems with operating the network and meeting the needs of its customers across geographies. Similar issues were popping up all over the firm, which was growing destabilized after multiple unsuccessful reorganizations and internal power struggles.

The challenge, they suspected, was that their leaders lacked the capacity to see and manage the polarities and paradoxes in their worlds—they were “problem-solving” for the issue in front of them, but many of the issues required a balanced, “hybrid” approach with leaders managing the ongoing tension between the two extremes.

Step 1: Challenging Current Operating Paradigms

To confirm the issue, the company’s talent organization built a targeted, developmental leadership assessment instrument to roll out to leaders in key groups that had been most affected by the earlier transformation efforts, and then it conducted follow-up interviews to gather additional qualitative information about the issue, both of which confirmed the capacity gap. Through a series of workshops with the leaders they surveyed, they were able to help leaders get a better understanding of the link between the prevalence of an “either/or” mindset and the stalled transformation efforts. They also helped leaders better understand their personal results on the assessment and identify some of the key patterns in their thinking that were helping or hindering them in trying to move from an “either/or” mindset to a “both/and” mindset.

Step 2: Developing New Strategies

From there, the company piloted a learning journey focused on building the capacity for both/and thinking and managing polarities, starting with key field and headquarters leaders responsible for the end-to-end network. The journey unfolded over four months, allowing leaders to learn key concepts in interactive, 90-minute sessions, exposing them to new concepts and connecting back to the specific scenarios they faced in their jobs.

To make the learning as practical as possible, for example, they used one of the sessions to have the teams work through the centralization/decentralization issue with a polarity management workshop, where they had to work in teams to see all sides of the issue, helping them realize the need for balance—not just for the network issue but in many other areas of their leadership as well.

In between sessions, leaders completed specific assignments to apply each concept in their work. Each leader was part of a six-person learning group that supported each other throughout the process. The organization took it one step further by assigning a coach to each learning group to provide coaching support to the teams and individuals as they wrestled with a new way of thinking and leading.

Step 3: Testing New Approaches

Following the learning journey, the learning groups continued to meet monthly for the next six months with their coaches, where they supported each other through the different polarities they were managing. Each leader had selected a handful of “experiments” to test their new approaches, and as they worked through them, they began to realize that many of the issues they had previously identified as problems were really polarities, which required a completely different approach. The leaders were also provided with additional content and tools they could leverage to sustain and build on what they learned in the learning journey.

At the end of six months, the leaders came back together, shared their success stories and learnings, and completed a follow-up assessment of their capacity for both/and thinking and leading. The survey results reflected two important learnings. First, their initial assessment of their abilities was overly optimistic, and through the process, they came to see how big a shift in mindset they needed and were able to achieve. Second, the group had developed a better-shared understanding of their issues and a common language and approach to bridge their differences. As this three-step learning process was launched with other leaders across the organization, real transformation was now within reach.

Building Leadership Capacity at Your Organization

At Harvard Business Impact, we believe that traditional leader development models—those that define leadership as a set of management and interpersonal capabilities or skills—bring leaders only part of the way to leading well in the current business environment. The strategy in the example above illustrates the importance of a holistic development approach—incorporating assessment, “chunked” learning over time, real-world application, and ongoing feedback and support.

Building leadership capacity is an investment, because real transformation is hard work. But the rewards can be powerful, creating leaders who truly see and lead differently. Whether you are trying to build a deeper leadership talent pool, improve the culture in your organization, or drive a specific business result, by partnering with us, you’ll gain access to cutting-edge strategies and tools designed to enhance leadership effectiveness and organizational performance. Contact us today to learn how we can help your leaders reach their full potential.

Explore Further

This is the fifth post in our series on transforming leadership development. If you haven’t yet read the previous posts, you can find them below:

• Why Widening Skill Sets is Crucial for Today’s Leaders
• Why Leaders Must Challenge Their Patterns and Paradigms
• How to Manage Polarities and Paradoxes
• Why Potentializing People Is the New Employee Engagement
• Building Leadership Capacity to Change Paradigms and Patterns

The post Transforming Leadership Development: Building Leadership Capacity to Manage Polarities and Paradoxes appeared first on Harvard Business Impact.

Transforming Leadership Development: How to Manage Polarities and Paradoxes

Mark Marone, PhD

August 30, 2024

What’s more important to your organization: maintaining stability or driving transformation? How about cost containment vs. investment for growth? Or centralization for scale and efficiency vs. decentralization to stay close to the customer? Improving short-term results vs. achieving long-term goals? And what about fostering employee well-being vs. driving a culture of high performance?

Both, you answer? Yes, but how can that be? Many of these paired choices are polar opposites. They are classic examples of what are referred to as polarities or paradoxes—pairs of interdependent opposites or contradictory choices that need to be managed rather than “solved” because both have value and contribute to positive outcomes for the organization.

The intensified turbulence and complexity of modern business conditions mean leaders are increasingly asked to make what can seem on the surface to be impossible choices.

To thrive, leaders need new approaches and a different tool set to make effective decisions and manage the natural tension that is always present in a both/and world.

Recognizing Polarities and Paradoxes: Problems That Aren’t Really Problems

In the learning profession, we’ve done a pretty good job of equipping our leaders with problem-solving skills—fishbone diagrams, force-field analyses, decision-making models—this is familiar territory for us. Unfortunately, polarities simply don’t work that way. They are not problems per se. They are elements of a complex system where forces naturally pull at each other.

When a leader sees this tension in the system, they may see it as a symptom of something that is “broken” and needs to be fixed—with a decision to choose, say, cost containment over investment for growth. As Wendy Smith and Marianne Lewis state in their book, Both/And Thinking, “For many of us, these competing and interwoven demands are a source of conflict. Since our brains love to make either-or choices, we choose one option over the other. We deal with uncertainty by asserting certainty.”¹

To avoid the certainty trap, leaders need to recognize whether the scenario they are facing is a problem to solve or a polarity or paradox to be managed.

Addressing Polarity Mapping

One of the best-known tools for understanding and addressing polarities is called Polarity Mapping, which was first published by Barry Johnson in his 1992 book, Polarity Management: Identifying and Managing Unsolvable Problems.

Through the mapping process, leaders and teams begin to see more holistic pictures of the situations they face and learn to recognize polarities among the vexing problems confronting them. Correctly identifying a polarity is foundational for maximizing benefits from both options while minimizing downsides. But dealing with paradoxical situations isn’t just a tool set—it’s a completely different mindset.

The Paradox Mindset

Unlike with traditional problem solving, you don’t just decide, execute, and move on from a polarity. Polarities involve natural tension that requires ongoing management to keep the opposing forces in balance.

In their 2022 Harvard Business Review article, “Solving Tough Problems Requires a Mindset Shift,” Lewis and Smith talk about three things that leaders who operate with a paradox mindset do to manage that natural tension when navigating paradoxes:

Surfacing Tension

People with a high paradox mindset recognize that paradoxes are common, and they proactively uncover them by seeking out tensions and opposing positions. Surrounding themselves with “people of varying, even opposing views” is one important method they use for creating an environment where paradoxes cannot be hidden.

Embracing Tension

Tension and ambiguity—hallmarks of a paradox—create emotional discomfort. It is tempting to make a quick decision to relieve this discomfort, but leaders with a paradox mindset recognize it as normal. In addition, “both/and thinkers often are very clear about the big picture and an overarching higher purpose, but they know that achieving this aim requires some consistently inconsistent decision making.”

Processing Tension

Lewis and Smith recommend that leaders “separate and connect” opposing ideas—seeing how they are distinct and different but also “questioning how these differences can reinforce and enable one another.” Seeing opposing ideas as interdependent parts of the same system can make it easier to manage the resulting tension and lead to better outcomes over time.²

In our recent study on leadership fitness, one of the four key capacities we identified for leaders is referred to as balance, which focuses on managing polarities and paradoxes.³ In it, we outline ways that leaders need to first see differently to lead differently. Moving from traditional problem-solving to both/and thinking, identifying assumptions in decision-making, and more fully exploring the merits of opposing ideas are all part of achieving a balanced, accurate view of the situations they face as leaders.

The Bottom Line

The first step to a good decision is having a clear understanding of its true nature—whether problem, polarity, or paradox. Increasingly, leaders find themselves confronting one of the latter two. As learning professionals, we can equip our leaders with the toolset and mindset they need to navigate these complex situations successfully.

To learn more about how, download a copy of our report, “Time to Transform Leadership Development.”

Explore Further

This is the third post in our series on transforming leadership development. If you haven’t yet read the previous posts, you can find them below:

• Building Leadership Capacity to Change Paradigms and Patterns
• Why Widening Skill Sets is Crucial for Today’s Leaders
• Why Leaders Must Challenge Their Patterns and Paradigms
• Why Potentializing People Is the New Employee Engagement
• Building Leadership Capacity to Manage Polarities and Paradoxes

1. Wendy Smith and Marianne Lewis, Both/And Thinking: Embracing Creative Tensions to Solve Your Toughest Problems (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, August 2022). ︎
2. Wendy Smith and Marianne Lewis, “Solving Tough Problems Requires a Mindset Shift,” Harvard Business Review, August 2022. ︎
3. Harvard Business Publishing Corporate Learning, “Leadership Fitness: Developing the Capacity to See and Lead Differently Amid Complexity,” 2024. ︎

The post Transforming Leadership Development: How to Manage Polarities and Paradoxes appeared first on Harvard Business Impact.

Transforming Leadership Development: Why Widening Skill Sets is Crucial for Today’s Leaders

Mark Marone, PhD

July 29, 2024

In the world of music, jazz artists are revered as a special type of musician. To effectively improvise, a jazz soloist leverages a broad and complex skill set—deep knowledge of music theory and modes, excellent technique and execution on the instrument, a repertoire of phrases and runs they can stitch together on demand, and the ability to listen and respond in the moment to the other players—all at the same time.

Today’s leadership environment can be a lot like playing jazz. The complex and adaptive nature of leading today forces leaders to call upon a growing range of capabilities and skills in the moment to make sense of situations and lead people and teams through them.

Top Priorities for Leadership Development

In our recent study across leadership development practitioners globally, the top four priorities they said they need to address in their development efforts all centered on transformation. But the range of skill sets needed to support those priorities is daunting.

On the technical side of transformation, leaders are being asked to implement automation and robotics initiatives to improve productivity as well as to incorporate generative AI into business practices. On the human side, leaders are being tasked with strengthening corporate culture, driving ever-greater performance, and building teams’ capacity to innovate.

Widen Skill Sets: More of Almost Everything

The breadth of the demands leaders face has expanded. As one learning leader in our study reported, “The number one thing our business leaders need to do differently is to recognize that the things that have gotten them to the place they are—that they are very good at—will not get us to the next level.”¹

What types of skills, then, are most important today? In some cases, leaders are being asked to enhance their expertise in their industry or deepen their operational knowledge. Transformation—especially through technology or business model innovation—requires a strong grasp of how things work and the opportunities for change. But more broadly, expectations of leaders now include higher levels of social and emotional intelligence, digital and data intelligence, finance, communication, strategy, and decision-making expertise. In short, more of just about everything.

Learning to Learn

“No one knows what our disruptive world will throw at leaders next. They don’t know, either. We do know, however, that those who possess a wide and balanced repertoire of complementary competencies, skills, and behaviors—and the wisdom to know which one to use in a given situation—are likely to be most effective at leading their people, teams, and organizations through the turbulence.”

—Robert Kaiser, Ryne Sherman, and Robert Hogan, “It Takes Versatility to Lead in a Volatile World,” Harvard Business Review, 2023.

The good news, though, is that new research shows the capacity to broaden skill sets can be developed. The authors of a 2023 article in Harvard Business Review, “It Takes Versatility to Lead in a Volatile World,” report that the ability to learn new skills and apply them appropriately in different scenarios is not tied to any specific personality profile or attribute. However, there was a pattern among leaders who were able to improve their versatility. “What they did have in common…are career histories defined by a variety of jobs and work experiences that required learning skills and behaviors that don’t come naturally to them.”²

This capacity to broaden skill sets was also identified in another Harvard Business Publishing study as one of four key leadership capacities, what we referred to as the four dimensions of leadership fitness.[³ Continually learning new skills and becoming more flexible and intentional in the application of those skills is now a key component of effective leadership.

What It Means for Learning Leaders

There are three big implications for learning professionals working to widen the skill sets of leaders. First, we need to expand how we look at leader development in general. For example, this may mean expanding access to more personalized learning—where leaders can access and tailor learning experiences and learning pathways so that relevant learning can happen in the flow of work and life.

Second, we need to grow the underlying capacities of our leaders to help them become more flexible, resilient, and able to see and adapt to complexity. This is a long game but critical to enabling leaders to effectively employ their skill sets. You can read more about capacity-building in our report on leadership fitness.

And third, we need to rethink how we measure leadership—adopting more human-centered metrics that capture a leader’s impact on corporate culture, team success, and employee commitment to the organization’s vision. These types of metrics not only resonate with employees but also highlight key elements of an environment where transformation can occur more readily.

The Bottom Line

Asking more of our leaders may seem counterintuitive at a time when many may already feel overwhelmed. But by widening their skill sets, we enable them to better improvise and adapt—like a seasoned jazz soloist—and thrive in a complex, changing environment.

Download our 2024 Global Leadership Development Report now for deeper insights into evolving leadership demands.

Explore Further

This is the first post in our series on transforming leadership development. Continue the journey by checking out more posts:

• Why Leaders Must Challenge Their Patterns and Paradigms
• How to Manage Polarities and Paradoxes
• Why Potentializing People Is the New Employee Engagement
• Building Leadership Capacity to Manage Polarities and Paradoxes
• Building Leadership Capacity to Change Paradigms and Patterns

1. Harvard Business Publishing Corporate Learning, “Time to Transform: 2024 Global Leadership Development Study,” 2024. ︎
2. Robert Kaiser, Ryne Sherman, and Robert Hogan, “It Takes Versatility to Lead in a Volatile World,” Harvard Business Review, 2023. ︎
3. Harvard Business Publishing Corporate Learning, “Leadership Fitness: Developing the Capacity to See and Lead Differently Amid Complexity,” 2024. ︎

The post Transforming Leadership Development: Why Widening Skill Sets is Crucial for Today’s Leaders appeared first on Harvard Business Impact.

The Vicious Cycle Preventing Your People from Adapting to Change—and How Human-Centered Leadership Can Help

Mark Marone, PhD

January 19, 2024

Threat rigidity and the change-resistance cycle are the enemies of rapid transformation

As a leader, it can sometimes feel that the faster you want things to change, the more some people resist. It may not just be your impatience that’s making you feel that way. The truth is that there is a vicious cycle at work putting a drag on transformation plans everywhere.

When people feel uncomfortable or threatened by change, they often experience threat rigidity, which is a tendency to resort to familiar behaviors even in situations that demand others.¹

Stress resulting from change and disruption reduces people’s willingness to adapt their behaviors. Pressure to change faster, especially without sufficient support, creates more stress, uncertainty, and negative emotions, further increasing people’s resistance and the risk of failure. This is the change-resistance cycle.

The stress and negative emotions people experience resulting from change initiatives and transformations—even when they are successful—can take an immense toll. According to one study, negative emotions increased by 25% for respondents during successful transformations, compared with an increase of more than 130% during underperforming ones.²

People are feeling stressed

Employees and leaders alike report high levels of stress and burnout, as evidenced by a recent survey of more than 3,400 full-time employees across 11 countries conducted by Harvard Business Publishing Corporate Learning. Forty five percent reported feeling stressed or burned out once a week or more. If that stress is making people less likely to embrace the next change on the horizon, that’s a big problem for everyone involved.

Smart leaders know that a business can’t be transformed without successfully transforming the behaviors of the people involved. Slowing the pace of change and the need to respond is not an option. Instead, a new approach may be the best way to help people better adapt. Human-centered leadership—not as a buzzword but as it could be—is just that approach.

Confronting threat rigidity and the change-resistance cycle with human-centered leadership

Despite many people’s perceptions, 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.

By increasing employees’ confidence, sense of well-being, and resilience to stress, human-centered leadership has the potential to help people adapt more easily and even change people’s relationship with work for the better.

Human-centered leadership must be well defined and understood before leaders can practice it

Before they can practice human-centered leadership, leaders have to understand what it means in their organization. Which humans should human-centered leadership be centered on? Employees? Customers? Other stakeholders? All of the above? What should it look like in practice? Where are the boundaries? Without clarity, agreement, and concrete action, it’s just another fashionable phrase in today’s business world.

Our recent survey explored some important examples for human-centered leaders. Here are two that can be useful to prime discussions of a shared vision for human-centered leadership in the organization.

Empathy and compassion

Expectations of empathy have risen. Others say it’s compassion that’s really needed. But being human-centered doesn’t mean being one or the other; it means understanding the needs of the individual and the situation to know whether listening is enough or action needs to be taken—and that can be difficult to judge. Just 31% of leaders in our survey rated their own confidence in knowing when to show empathy versus compassion as very good.

Effectively demonstrating a balance of empathy and compassion also means being able to draw a line that keeps a leader from becoming a therapist. That’s a real concern, because 6 in 10 leaders in our survey said exhibiting those behaviors adds stress to their role as a leader.

Psychological safety and intellectual honesty

Psychological safety has been shown to be a crucial factor in team effectiveness, and it rightly has received a lot of attention. But there’s another concept that can be lost in the quest to make psychologically safe environments: intellectual honesty.

Researchers at MIT have found that too much emphasis on psychological safety can hamper people’s willingness to proactively, constructively voice their ideas and disagreements, as they fear hurting others’ feelings or diminishing their sense of belonging. Yet open debate is exactly what intellectual honesty requires. It is especially important today because it significantly improves a team’s ability to innovate by enabling every team member to bring their knowledge to bear on the problem to be solved.

Fewer in our survey say their leader is a highly skilled facilitator of intellectual honesty in the team (22%) than say so for psychological safety (28%). When we asked leaders about their own abilities, 30% reported being confident they are very good at creating psychological safety, whereas just 24% said the same about facilitating the kind of constructive debate that is necessary for intellectual honesty.

Being human-centered does not mean maintaining psychological safety at the expense of intellectual honesty. To get the benefits of both, leaders must first correctly identify situations that require that one or the other be encouraged and then balance their behaviors appropriately.³

Effective human-centered leadership requires leaders to show balance and flexibility in the selection and demonstration of leadership behaviors

As the prior examples demonstrate, real human-centered leadership means finding the right balance between leadership behaviors that may even seem contradictory and then effectively using those behaviors to achieve the desired results of making people feel valued, connected, and confident in their professional growth.

In the beginning of this blog, “real human-centered leadership” was proposed as part of the solution to mitigate the effects of threat rigidity and the change-resistance cycle. But leaders themselves aren’t immune to the impacts of stress on their willingness and ability to change either. These same enemies can discourage leaders from embracing the discomfort that is a necessary part of learning and from developing the balance and flexibility that are crucial for the kind of leadership versatility that is required for real human-centered leadership.

When it comes to meeting the individual needs of employees on a team, no one particular style or narrow set of leadership behaviors is sufficient. Learning to recognize the optimal leadership behaviors for a given situation and demonstrate them effectively—while remaining authentic—is the new objective.

But that’s a topic for another blog.

Learn more

To learn how to develop human-centered leaders who drive employee fulfillment, download our report “Leadership Fitness: The Path to Developing Human-Centered Leaders Who Drive Employee Fulfillment” now.

Perspectives

Leadership Fitness: The Path to Developing Human-Centered Leaders Who Drive Employee Fulfillment

Download

1. Barry M. Staw, Lance E. Sandelands, and Jane E. Dutton, “Threat Rigidity Effects in Organizational Behavior: A Multilevel Analysis.” Administrative Science Quarterly, December 1981. https://doi.org/10.2307/2392337. ︎
2. Errol Gardner, Norman Lonergan, and Liz Fealy, “How Do You Harness the Power of People to Double Transformation Success?” EY and the University of Oxford, October 20, 2022. https://www.ey.com/en_it/consulting/how-transformations-with-humans-at-the-center-can-double-your-success. ︎
3. Jeff Dyer, Nathan Furr, Curtis Lefrandt, and Taeya Howell, “Why Innovation Depends on Intellectual Honesty.” MIT Sloan Management Review, January 17, 2023. https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/why-innovation-depends-on-intellectual-honesty/. ︎

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The Leadership Imperative: Why BFSI’s Digital Transformation Is Not All About Technology

Mark Marone, PhD

October 25, 2023

Among BFSI leaders today, much of the discussion is about vision, strategy, and innovative ideas for integrating new technology. Along with the complexity of considering ethics and regulations, establishing, and communicating guidelines and guardrails, and managing risks, these discussions and decisions are not trivial. But technology has brought us to a new moment. We have arguably reached the point where its potential uses are so numerous that we are unlikely to adopt them all before newer technology arrives to replace it. Determining which initiatives to pursue is challenging, but the hardest part of all still may be leading the people involved.

The winners will be the BFSI entities whose leaders are able to align the people and resources to their vision, execute the strategy and implement the ideas faster than others. That means the real challenge involves developing the capability to adopt technology rapidly and responsibly across an organisation.

What Gets in the Way of Rapid and Responsible Adoption

The fact is that even successful transformations involve negative emotions, which helps explain the resistance people often show. Researchers found that, on average, negative emotions among a workforce increased by 25% in a successful transformation and by more than 130% in an underperforming transformation.¹ The pace of digital transformations looks set to accelerate. If each one, whether successful or not, means a period of negative emotions for the people involved, the outlook for stress and burnout is grim.

GenAI, for instance, is ushering in transformation within BFSI on a revolutionary scale – because nearly anyone can be a user. It will eventually result in changes to all sorts of processes, workflows, and staffing structures. Uncertainty and unpredictability about the exact ways in which GenAI will transform the business of BFSI are already having an impact. Fears of job loss, negative changes at work, and lack of confidence in their ability to learn the new skills GenAI will require trouble a significant fraction of the APAC workforce. On top of that is apprehension about whether organisations will show sufficient care in using digital technologies, including concerns about transparency, privacy, and the potential for discrimination.²

Reducing Resistance

BFSI organisations and leaders can partially mitigate those concerns and reduce people’s natural resistance. Two key strategies can help:

1. Organisations can take steps to reassure people of their intention to evolve and transform with an awareness of the impacts of the technology they employ. Collaborative frameworks such as the one outlined by Corporate Digital Responsibility suggest a set of practices and behaviours that organisations can adopt to help them use data and digital technologies in ways that are recognised as being socially, economically, and environmentally responsible.³
2. Leaders can put concern for people at the centre of transformations to improve the chance of success. By building trust through an authentic and empathetic communication approach that considers people’s needs, interests, and concerns, leaders can help them accept and adapt to change and uncertainty.

In our latest global survey, the behaviour of leaders is shown to have a significant impact on employees’ positivity towards AI and what it may mean for their role in the future. More specifically, when leaders show empathy and support employees’ professional growth, respondents are more likely to have a positive attitude towards AI. Organisational support of employees’ well-being is also correlated with the level of positivity respondents have towards what AI may bring to the workplace. It only makes sense employees’ confidence gets a boost when organisations are investing in the growth and well-being of their people at the same time they are investing in technology. Finally, a positive outlook towards the future impact of AI is correlated with lower stress and burnout, which, of course, is associated with higher engagement.⁴

None of this can be achieved without great leadership, which must be both broader and deeper than ever before.

Going Broader

Becoming a leader used to be something people often did because it came naturally. Those who were inclined to it chose a leadership career path. They had a style and honed it. But leadership is now a discipline that demands an extraordinarily broad skill set that few are born with. Those who are tapped to become leaders simply because they are great individual contributors in their field typically have even larger skill gaps to close.

Exceptional social and emotional intelligence are now a requirement because employees’ expectations for empathy and inclusion are higher than ever. Many leaders are not yet comfortable with the new boundaries—or lack thereof—of personal and professional life. To be effective, leaders need to be human-centred. That means demonstrating caring as well as challenging people to grow and achieve. They also must be able to thoughtfully adapt their leadership behaviours to create a balance between such things as consistency and agility, self-reliance and collaboration, and prudence and risk-taking – and do it all without seeming inauthentic.⁵

Leaders now also need to function as digital collaborators, and many need help getting there. To collaborate effectively, they need to be comfortable communicating with technology teams, able to assess opportunities and risks related to technology initiatives, and capable of leading and evaluating people whose jobs require skills they themselves do not have. Many leaders even now need to develop or enhance their understanding of the basics of emerging technologies. That understanding is the foundation for identifying and evaluating new ways in which technology innovations could impact their team’s work, the broader organisation, and the stakeholders involved.⁶

Going Deeper

With the pressure to innovate, organisations are moving to tap into the ideas and experience of all their employees.

To support employees’ ability to make and implement decisions aligned with corporate strategy and culture, companies are going deeper into the organisational chart with leadership development initiatives to strengthen the relevant technical and interpersonal skills of more of their people.

Rather than limiting programs to high potential talent who show the traits, characteristics, and abilities associated with current successful leaders, some organisations are inviting the participation of wider groups of employees. By helping people enhance their skills primarily for the employees’ benefit, companies can expect to gain as well. Increasing the diversity of leadership pipelines is part of a strategy to prepare organisations to better adapt to the changing world.

“With the proliferation of collaborative problem-solving platforms and digital “adhocracies” that emphasize individual initiative, employees across the board are increasingly expected to make consequential decisions that align with corporate strategy and culture.”

— Mihnea Moldoveanu, University of Toronto, and Das Narayandas, Harvard Business School

Transforming Business by Transforming People

Experts predict that today’s technology has the potential to transform nearly everything. Tomorrow’s technology will transform it all again. Yet among the many stories of organisations that have truly remade themselves in history, it is rare to find one where the attitudes and skills of the people themselves were not also transformed.

BFSI does not necessarily need more technology right now. Maybe what it needs is broader leadership skillsets that penetrate deeper into the hierarchies to unleash the organisation’s capacity for adopting technology that already exists, and to take another look at how it supports the highly complex profession that leadership has become.

Learn more

In a 2023 global leadership development survey by Harvard Business Publishing of a subset of leaders from BFSI industries, 95% cited tech-savviness and digital adaptability as an important leadership skill for meeting business needs.

Download the perspective “How BFSI Leaders in APAC Can Capture the Full Potential of GenAI” to explore how stronger digital, social, and emotional intelligence can prepare leaders and organizations to face some of the challenges involved in capitalising on the power of GenAI.

1. Errol Gardner, Norman Lonergan, and Liz Fealy, ‘How Do You Harness the Power of People to Double Transformation Success?’, EY and the University of Oxford, October 20, 2022. https://www.ey.com/en_gl/insights/consulting/how-transformations-with-humans-at-the-center-can-double-your-success ︎
2. PwC, ‘Asia Pacific Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey’, June 2023. https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/about/pwc-asia-pacific/hopes-and-fears/2023.html ︎
3. Corporate Digital Responsibility, ‘The International CDR Manifesto’, February 2023. ︎
4. Harvard Business Publishing, ‘Humanizing Leadership Global Survey’, 2023. Unpublished. ︎
5. Tony Schwartz and Emily Pines, “Why Leaders Don’t Embrace the Skills They’ll Need for the Future.” HBR.org, October 25, 2018. https://hbr.org/2018/10/why-leaders-dont-embrace-the-skills-theyll-need-for-the-future ︎
6. Matveeva, Sophia, “Coding Isn’t a Necessary Leadership Skill — But Digital Literacy Is.” HBR.org, July 26, 2022. https://hbr.org/2022/07/coding-isnt-a-necessary-leadership-skill-but-digital-literacy-is ︎

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The Real Way to Quiet Hire

Mark Marone, PhD

April 28, 2023

Job openings continue to exceed the number of unemployed workers throughout the United States,¹ causing companies in many industries to face daunting hiring scenarios. Can the practice of “quiet hiring” offer a remedy? As talent development professionals grapple with current labor shortages, we offer up a shift in thinking around this talent allocation strategy. And it all starts with the vital role of frontline leadership.

What is quiet hiring? 

Quiet hiring is an emerging workforce trend in which organizations invert the much-discussed phenomenon of “quiet quitting” by making use of the existing skillsets that they already have in-house.² This practice plays itself out in three possible ways:

• Employing contract workers with specific, high-demand skills to temporarily meet organizational staffing demands
• Assigning employees to departments or projects experiencing staffing shortages
• Upskilling employees by providing training that allows them to expand their contribution to the organization

Current labor shortages make this trend a necessity for employers, who find themselves without enough workers to fill in-demand roles, especially on the frontline. The practice of staffing “creatively” isn’t new; hiring “quietly” is simply the latest take on the age-old problem of responding to workforce fluctuations.

What could be new? If employers are willing to embrace a different mindset around their staffing approach, they could improve their talent practices. At a time when skilled employees are hard to find, the potential of this new strategy could be significant.

Rethink quiet hiring to improve its impact

Quiet hiring clearly benefits organizations financially by tackling staffing shortages without adding employee headcount. To date, much of the discourse around quiet hiring has been related to talent reallocation—in essence, shuffling the players around to “plug up the holes” in a leaky staffing situation—and we’ve seen this play out most palpably at the frontlines.

For example, consider this recently observed scenario at an airport: as passengers board their flight, the person scanning their tickets is wearing a bright yellow safety vest, not the typical gate agent uniform one expects to see. He’s the baggage handler. But today, he’s also the gate agent. A passenger remarks, “They’ve got you doing double duty, huh?” to which the weary employee rolls his eyes and says, “Yep.”

To be sure, organizations are struggling to fill job vacancies, with nearly 11 million job openings in the United States,³ many of which are “deskless” customer-facing work. This airline, like many other companies, is doing what it can to satisfy customers and deliver on its promises. So, employees are pulling double-duty.

Yet, if not handled properly, these organizational tactics tend to signal to employees that they’re merely cogs in the organizational flywheel to be moved around as needed, with no real thought given to their mental health or career aspirations. Each day, across the world, how many baggage handlers (and countless other deskless workers) are there on the frontlines, doing jobs they may or may not have been trained to do, struggling to keep up and dispirited by a seeming lack of caring from their management?

The benefits of developing talent from within

For quiet hiring to truly work, we need to look beyond shuffling the players on the chessboard. To reach the full potential of this trend, we need to capitalize on the third element of quiet hiring—developing the talent organizations already have. It may be tempting to view quiet hiring as a gimmicky buzzword, but if we parse out the intent behind it, then it becomes a powerful North Star to guide leadership development efforts that support not only organizational goals, but an individual employee’s as well.

1. Opportunity for growth and professional development

Consider for a moment what would happen if companies looked at quiet hiring not as a reductive “flavor of the month” business tactic designed to wring more work out of an already-exhausted frontline workforce, but instead as an opportunity to tap into an employee’s desire to learn and grow? This mindset places both organizational and employee needs into the mix. If managers present the chance to take on new tasks, learn new technical skills, or upskill one’s communication abilities as a means to growth and professional development, employees are much less likely to feel taken advantage of. Workers need to see the benefits of taking on something new (and not just “more,” which feels like the very tired trope of “work smarter, not harder.”)

2. Better cultural fit

For example, during the Great Resignation and its aftermath, most organizations had challenges finding the talent they needed to grow. Yet, a few forward-thinking companies bucked this trend. How? Organizations with talent strategies that leaned heavily on developing talent internally to meet future requirements had an edge: they didn’t have to compete exclusively on the open market when talent was scarce, and their “new hires” already knew the company’s customers and culture.

3. Lower attrition rate

There are measurable benefits for companies that fully embrace this approach. Research shows that external hires take longer to adapt to organizational culture and have higher rates of attrition often because they aren’t as tuned in to company norms and culture.⁴ One often-overlooked benefit of developing talent from within: other employees notice their peers growing and feel motivated by their company’s commitment to development.

Developing others is a critical leadership capability

This is where the role of frontline leader comes in. Quiet hiring intersects with an important leadership capability: creating opportunities for employees to grow and develop through coaching and feedback. Harvard Business Publishing’s research points to “developing others” as one of the five most critical capabilities for frontline leaders.⁵ However, there are gaps in beliefs that suggest frontline leaders may not have the chance to fully embrace this essential aspect of their job.

It appears that organizations are more focused on delivering training on key human-centric skills, like developing others, to senior leaders than frontline leaders—despite general consensus that these leadership capabilities are most relevant to frontline leaders. It’s possible this gap exists due to a holdover from a time when these higher-functioning skills were thought to be the primary domain of purely senior-level leaders. But societal expectations regarding interpersonal skills have changed; therefore, so have employee expectations of leadership.
—Diane Belcher, Vice President, Chief of Staff and Head of Product, Harvard Business Publishing Corporate Learning

Harvard Business Publishing’s research further found that People Managers shoulder the majority of the “Developing Others” responsibility, with 64% of respondents saying this capability is most important in that role. But just 59% of People Managers say their organization’s culture emphasizes it, and even fewer Senior Managers (53%) and Individual Contributors (50%) say this is the case. Even though employees expect their organization to help them grow, they are not receiving such support—and that is one of the foremost contributors to a lack of employee engagement.⁶

[Related: These are the five capabilities critical for new frontline leaders]

Frontline leaders are the linchpin of quiet hiring

Based on our research, we believe there’s a hidden gem buried within all organizations that’s connected to quiet hiring: frontline leaders. The real way to quiet hire starts with your frontline leaders and their ability to develop the talent already resident within an organization’s walls. These managers, who directly supervise up to 80% of the workforce, are the linchpin to creating a talent pipeline that will withstand the volatility of the labor market.

However, it is a paradoxical reality that the key to executing on internal talent development often rests with those whose daily work is already stacked with competing demands and time pressures. What’s worse, this group is desperate to learn more about how to develop their team, yet they receive few opportunities to do so. According to our research, just 56% of people managers received training last year on how to develop others.

The learning experience frontline leaders need 

If frontline leaders are time-starved but eager to learn, what could a successful leadership development program for them look like? Based on our experience working with thousands of clients across the globe, a program that offers practice, feedback, small-group learning, and flexibility grants unique advantages for any organization seeking to improve their frontline leadership quickly:

Practice and feedback

To rapidly build leadership skills and encourage their application in the workplace, frontline leaders need immersive, contextual learning experiences. By giving them space for individual learning and practice, as well as real-time feedback with peers that’s contextually relevant to their business, they can more easily apply new capabilities on the job. 

Small-group learning

To make sure learning sticks, frontline leaders need to learn among peers. By connecting with their fellow leaders and discussing how to apply skills to specific situations, frontline leaders can reinforce their understanding, gain a stronger grasp on the material, and even learn from each other’s struggles or mistakes.  

Flexible design

To make time for learning, frontline leaders need flexibility. As priorities emerge and workloads change, a semi-synchronous experience makes it easy to fit into their busy schedules. Moreover, organizations could consider a modular design that allows them to deliver frontline leadership learning experiences in different ways to meet the population’s diverse needs. 

Learn more

Today’s employees don’t see career development and skill enhancement as privileges to be reserved just for “top potential employees”—but as a right that every worker should have. It’s no wonder then, that among the leadership capabilities, respondents in our research named the failure to “develop others” as the top risk for faltering employee engagement.

The good news? If organizations want to truly capitalize on quiet hiring and develop the talent they already have, they don’t have to look too far: Start with frontline leaders and help them tap into their team’s desire to learn and grow. 

To equip your frontline leaders with the skills they need to excel in any environment, download our paper, Surviving the Trial by Fire: Five Crucial Capabilities for Today’s Frontline Leaders. Contact us today to discuss how we can help you transform your team’s success.

1. US Bureau of Labor and Statistics, “Number of Unemployed Persons Per Job Opening, Seasonally Adjusted,” February 2023. https://www.bls.gov/charts/job-openings-and-labor-turnover/unemp-per-job-opening.htm#. ︎
2. Emily Rose McRae, Peter Aykens, Kaelyn Lowmaster, and Jonah Shepp, “9 Trends That Will Shape Work in 2023 and Beyond,” Harvard Business Review, January 18, 2023. https://hbr.org/2023/01/9-trends-that-will-shape-work-in-2023-and-beyond. ︎
3. US Bureau of Labor and Statistics, “Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary,” February 2023. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.nr0.htm. ︎
4. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and Jonathan Kirschner, “How the Best Managers Identify and Develop Talent, Harvard Business Review, January 9, 2020. https://hbr.org/2020/01/how-the-best-managers-identify-and-develop-talent.  ︎
5. Harvard Business Publishing, “Trial by Fire: Five Crucial Capabilities for Today’s Frontline Leaders,” 2022. ︎
6. Harvard Business Publishing Corporate Learning, “Leadership Reframed for the Workplace of the Future: 10 Capabilities and 7 Superpowers,” 2022. ︎

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