Climbing the High Summits: Why Every Leader Must Master Human Skills to Get the Most Out of AI

Diane Belcher

November 10, 2025

At Machu Picchu’s Sun Gate, a clear view of the citadel can vanish in minutes. Skies that seem calm turn quickly into downpours, leaving the path slick with rain and the descent treacherous. Those prepared for the unpredictable weather are glad to have their rain jackets, but gear alone is not enough. What makes the difference is the ability to adapt and stay resilient as conditions change.

Today’s organizations are climbing into their own unpredictable conditions, an era of relentless disruption, technological advances, data security threats, volatile markets, and geopolitical risk. Within view is an unprecedented capability to reimagine strategy, accelerate performance, and unlock value at scale and speed. But reaching the summit requires something more than high-tech gear.

It requires every member of the organization—from the CEO and C-suite to managers, frontline teams, and technical experts—to master the complementary human strengths that no machine can replace. In the face of unexpected turns, humans bring a kind of adaptability, judgment, and creativity that technology can’t yet match. And it’s these capabilities that make the difference between stalling short of the peak and reaching it.

The Gear Is Critical, but It’s Not the Guide

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the modern expedition’s gear: precise, powerful, and more functional than anyone could have imagined only a few years ago. But the gear is not the guide.

The guide’s role is to read the mountain, adjust the route to conditions, set the pace, make safety-critical decisions, and ensure the team’s resources, skills, and morale are all there. Teamwork and resilience make all the difference, just as in business. Rapid, continuous change exhausts even very capable workforces. Leading through it takes leaders with strong social and emotional intelligence, the ability to create psychological safety, and a genuine interest in people’s well-being.

The most successful AI adoption comes from a distributed leadership model. The CEO sets the tone and embeds AI into the business strategy, but the chief information officer, chief operating officer, functional heads, and line managers must all take responsibility for integrating AI into workflows, decision making, and customer experiences. Without that shared commitment, AI doesn’t get scaled to its full potential.

That’s why AI literacy for everyone matters too. Ensuring that every team member understands both AI’s capabilities and its blind spots helps them know when to trust the model and when to trust their instincts. In a truly AI-enabled organization, frontline employees aren’t just end users. Instead, they’re active contributors who spot risks, surface opportunities, and feed insights back into the system.

Reading the Signs Machines Can Miss

Even in clear weather, strong leaders question assumptions, reassess the plan, and prepare alternatives. They look for hazards the map can’t show and act before those hazards become crises. When crises do occur, they size up the problem with a sense of proportion and draw on their creativity to improvise solutions when necessary.

Just as in business, leaders must cultivate integrative thinking, which is the ability to hold competing perspectives, connect dots across functions, and generate new paths forward. As research from Harvard Business School has shown, the strongest creative ideas often emerge when humans and machines work together, combining human originality with AI’s ability to refine ideas and test their feasibility. This is what turns AI potential into transformative capabilities.

The Partnership That Gets You to the Top…and Back Home

The most successful digital transformation strategies rely on constant coordination between people and technology. Despite detailed plans, it’s the team who decides when to deviate to avoid danger, preserve energy, or seize an unexpected break in the weather.

For high-performing organizations, the C-suite, product leads, operations managers, legal teams, human resources departments, engineers, customer-facing teams, analysts, and even administrative staff learn to collaborate with AI tools in ways that elevate both their work and the organization’s overall performance.

Leading at Extreme Altitude

The companies that succeed won’t just be the ones with the most advanced AI tools. They’ll be the ones that have deliberately elevated the human capabilities that give those tools purpose and given everyone a role in finding new ways forward.

They will:

• Enhance human strengths, developing emotional intelligence, ethical judgment, resilience, creativity, and integrative thinking in every role.
• Build widespread AI literacy, so every employee can partner effectively with AI.
• Share ownership of creating the organization’s future, engaging the leadership team and broader workforce in seeking ideas to leverage AI, not isolating it within a single function.

Reaching the summit involves building a digitally literate workforce, whose human capabilities have also been sharpened. When leaders at every level champion these complementary elements, the organization doesn’t just climb higher, it becomes more capable of navigating whatever terrain lies ahead.

The post Climbing the High Summits: Why Every Leader Must Master Human Skills to Get the Most Out of AI appeared first on Harvard Business Impact.

Transforming Leadership Development: Why Leaders Must Challenge Their Patterns and Paradigms

Diane Belcher

August 9, 2024

Like many of you, I’ve recently spent many hours watching Olympic coverage.  I’m struck by how many of these athletes have faced challenges and obstacles in the years leading up to these Paris games.  But we’re also watching them overcome obstacles right in front of the spotlight!  I watched in awe as several gymnasts modified their routines to account for injuries or to ‘play it safe’ in order to ensure they would qualify for the next meet.  After years of practicing, they are able to let go of muscle memory and do what they need to do to represent and win for their country.

Leaders today are faced with a similar challenge: adapting to unfamiliar situations and approaching them in new ways.

Our recent study involving more than 1,100 leadership development professionals identified the need to address this demand on leaders as one of four key objectives for leadership development today.

Help Leaders Get Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable

The patterns that guide humans in making decisions and taking action operate largely unconsciously. This is a survival skill—if we had to think deeply every time we ordered a cup of coffee or sent a text message, we would be immobilized. Leaders need to triage issues quickly, make decisions with limited information, and operate under chronic stress. Relying on past experience and habit-based responses is necessary to make it through the day.

But, like the Olympic athletes, leaders face an increasing number of complex, novel challenges that require new thinking and new skills. In their Harvard Business Review article “The Work of Leadership,” Ronald Heifetz and Donald Laurie referred to these situations as adaptive challenges—murky, systemic problems with no easy answers. They explain that “adaptive work is required when our deeply held beliefs are challenged, when the values that made us successful become less relevant, and when legitimate yet competing perspectives emerge.”¹

In this environment, leaders need to recognize that they are entering unfamiliar territory and then be ready to adapt—trying new approaches or skills that may be uncomfortable or counterintuitive.

How Leaders Can Recognize and Adapt to New Challenges

But how do leaders recognize when they need to stop and choose a different approach? In their 2023 Harvard Business Review article “How to Become More Adaptable in Challenging Situations,” Jacqueline Brassey and Aaron De Smet state that it begins with developing a capacity they call Deliberate Calm, which involves taking a moment to choose how you respond to a situation and rationally considering a response that doesn’t rely on habits. This approach “enables leaders to act with intention, creativity, and objectivity, even in the most challenging circumstances, and it helps us to learn and adapt to novel challenges when the stakes are highest. The practice of Deliberate Calm…changes our relationship with uncertainty.”²

Of course, recognizing the need for a new, rational approach to a situation is only the beginning. In our recent study on Leadership Fitness³ we identified important ways that leaders need to see differently and lead differently to adapt to the unfamiliar. They include seeking diverse perspectives before deciding, conducting experiments with different approaches, and demonstrating openness and curiosity when confronting an adaptive challenge.

Equipping Leaders for Unprecedented Challenges

As the saying goes, “things that never happened before happen all the time.” At no time has this been truer for leaders. Fortunately for those of us tasked with equipping leaders to thrive in these uncertain times, the capacity to adapt can be learned and developed. To learn more about how, download a copy of our report, Time to Transform Leadership Development.

Explore Further

This is the second post in our series on transforming leadership development. Explore the other posts in the series below:

• Why Widening Skill Sets is Crucial for Today’s Leaders
• 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. Ronald Heifetz and Donald Laurie, “The Work of Leadership,” HBR.org, December 2001. ︎
2. Jacqueline Brassey and Aaron De Smet, “How to Become More Adaptable in Challenging Situations,” HBR.org, March 3, 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 Leaders Must Challenge Their Patterns and Paradigms appeared first on Harvard Business Impact.

How to Develop Leadership Fitness in Your Organization

Diane Belcher

April 24, 2024

In the previous post, we introduced you to the four dimensions of leadership fitness that were uncovered in our recent research—Balance, Strength, Flexibility and Endurance.¹ We referred to these dimensions as “capacities”—underlying qualities and resources that leaders call upon to make sense of situations, adapt to their realities, and bring their best selves to their work.

How to Building Leadership Capacity

But how do we help our leaders build these capacities? Developing a skill is often a fairly straightforward task—not without effort, of course, but the path to developing a new leadership skill is well trodden. We as learning leaders have been in the skill development arena for years. But when it comes to developing the deeper, underlying qualities and resources, that can be a very different story. In many organizations, talent and business leaders have seen this as a go or no-go scenario; either a leader has the internal resources to, say, recover from setbacks and adapt while staying focused during change (aspects of the Endurance capacity), or they don’t.

Fortunately, research has shown that all four dimensions of leadership fitness can be developed. But this type of development is a longer (and sometimes messier) game.  Initial awareness and attention can provide real developmental progress, but the journey for a leader in these areas never really ends. And learning and talent leaders can support that journey in powerful ways.

The Learning Cycle for Capacity Development

The learning cycle for capacity development is similar in some ways to traditional skill and capability development, but there are a couple of important differences. The graphic shows the three parts of the learning cycle—Challenge Thinking, Develop Strategies, and Test Approaches.

Three Parts of the Learning Cycle

1. Challenge Thinking

The goal here is to break a leader out of their current thinking and operating paradigms, helping them reframe how they see situations, largely by helping them reframe how they see themselves and their own thinking—their underlying assumptions, biases, triggers, and thought patterns. This has two important effects.

• First, they can gain some clarity and objectivity about what is really happening around them and how they typically respond, which may or may not be optimal.
• Second, it creates a compelling motivation for the next step—developing new strategies for their newfound reality.

Tools like formal assessments, coaching, or immersive role-playing feedback can be great resources for challenging thinking. In developing these underlying capacities of leadership fitness, it’s important for a leader to invest the time and attention in the Challenge Thinking part of the learning cycle if they are to move into the next step prepared for real change.

2. Develop Strategies

Using the new insights gained by challenging their thinking, it’s time to develop new strategies to grow. This step is similar in many ways to skill development, with structured learning, informal and peer learning, and self-study work. Where it perhaps differs the most, though, is that there is more than just concept and practice but also a serious investment in action planning to bring it back to the job.

3. Test Approaches

Testing approaches is a little different from the typical on-the-job application. The goal here is to deepen and refine a shift in mindset, which helps the leader grow into a new way of seeing and leading over time. We ask leaders to develop and conduct experiments with new behaviors and approaches to situations, and to see what emerges from them. There are no failures, only learning. The reason the experimentation mindset is so important is that capacity development happens in layers, over time, and the reflection on their experiments leads to insights that take them back to the beginning of the cycle—challenging thinking once again.

How the Learning Cycle Differs from Traditional Development

On the surface, these steps may seem like just good practices in a skill-development process. But where this approach differs from traditional skill building the most is in the focus on the first and third steps. Formal learning alone can have only a marginal impact on developing capacity, just as teaching someone how to run a marathon will not build the strength and conditioning required to even finish a race, let alone compete effectively. Capacity develops over time, with daily challenges, experiments with new behaviors, and reflection to shift thinking.

And, speaking of formal learning, we have also found that the approach of learning over time² that many organizations are adopting—where learning sessions are focused on smaller chunks of learning, with time in between for application and reflection—is particularly helpful in capacity development. The elements of the learning cycle fit naturally in this approach to structured learning.

The Commitment to Leadership Fitness

The journey to building the dimensions of leadership fitness requires intentionality and patience at both the individual and organizational levels. But through that effort, leaders can move toward bringing their best to their organizations and teams. It is the type of ongoing growth that, over time, helps leaders to be grounded, resilient, and open regardless of circumstances—in short, to thrive in the unpredictability and stress that go with the work of leadership today.

Learn More

To learn more about the dimensions of leadership fitness, including how learning and talent leaders can help grow these capacities in their leaders, download our paper “Leadership Fitness: Developing the Capacity to See and Lead Differently Amid Complexity.”

Perspectives

Leadership Fitness: Developing the Capacity to See and Lead Differently Amid Complexity

Download

1. “Leadership Fitness: Developing the Capacity to See and Lead Differently Amid Complexity,” Harvard Business Publishing, April 2024. ︎
2. “The AGES Model can help learning stick,” Chief Learning Officer, November 2019. ︎

The post How to Develop Leadership Fitness in Your Organization appeared first on Harvard Business Impact.

Leadership Fitness: Four Capacities Leaders Must Develop

Diane Belcher

April 9, 2024

Even those of us who don’t watch much (or any) college basketball have probably heard of Caitlin Clark. She recently broke the all-time NCAA basketball scoring record (for women’s AND men’s leagues) well ahead of the end of her fourth season.

Watching Clark play is mesmerizing—effortless shooting from anywhere on the court, maneuvering around other players like they’re standing still, counterintuitive passing where her other teammates just seem to appear at the right time. Her command of the game is truly remarkable, especially for a 21-year-old player.

Some might say that Clark is just a highly skilled player. But there is much more to it. She has developed a capacity that coaches call “court vision.” She can see plays developing, anticipate the other team’s mistakes before they occur, and make sense of everything happening on the court all at once. This is not a skill; it’s a highly sophisticated capacity that typically is developed across a player’s entire career. Through very intentional work, Clark has developed this capacity at an accelerated rate.

Developing Capacities for Leadership

There are several parallels between Clark’s development as an elite athlete and the way that leaders develop. While skills are important, there are also underlying capacities for leadership that enable leaders to thrive in the complexity of today’s operating environment.

In a recent study we conducted to better understand how leaders can provide their organizations with a truly human-centered leadership approach, we were looking for leadership skills—what behaviors or competencies are necessary for leaders to show up differently for their people and teams.

Leadership Skills vs. Capacity

This study told us two things. First, there are some specific skills that leaders need so they can develop an authentic, human-centered approach with their teams and peers. While the insights into skills were helpful, the real insight we gained in the study was something we didn’t expect at all.

What we learned is that the skills and behaviors of human-centered leadership are things that many leaders do naturally when they are with people they like, when they are not under a lot of pressure, and when they are dealing with situations that are clear, unemotional, and well defined. But the pressure and complexity of the leadership environment today are pushing leaders past their limit.

Leadership Fitness: Capacities for Leading

The most significant barrier we found to human-centered leadership—and to effective leadership in general—is that leaders may lack certain underlying capacities required to operate in this new environment. Our study identified four critical capacities that leaders need to be effective. Together, we call these capacities Leadership Fitness.

Taken together, these dimensions can reframe how leaders see their environment and how they can lead differently through it. By embracing complexity and uncertainty, leadership fitness provides a new way of looking at leadership capacity that can be used to equip leaders to not only cope but also thrive in an environment of constant flux.

The very good news is that, like Clark’s court vision, these capacities can all be developed. And learning and talent leaders are in a great position to lead and support that work.

The Four Dimensions of Leadership Fitness

Our study identified four capacities leaders must develop—what we call the four dimensions of Leadership Fitness. These are balance, strength, flexibility, and endurance.

You will notice that we used terms for the dimensions that most of us associate with physical fitness and performance. We felt that this helps underscore the nature of these dimensions. Like the ongoing conditioning that we need in order to keep ourselves physically fit, leaders need to be conditioning themselves in these areas on an ongoing basis. And, as with physical fitness, there may be some great initial gains in any one of these once a leader is aware and focused on it. But building these capacities is a journey that never really ends.

The other thing to note is that there could very well be other underlying capacities beyond these four that leaders may need to develop. But these were the four that emerged in our study, and we feel a focus on these dimensions will bring real benefits to leaders and their organizations.

Each dimension has an aspect of seeing differently, making sense of what is happening all around, as well as leading differently, and taking purposeful action.

Dimension 1: Balance

Balance is the capacity to apply a systems mindset for embracing and managing tensions between opposing forces and ideas.

Today’s leaders face paradoxical situations that require them to navigate complex dilemmas rather than simplistic cause-and-effect problems. Balance enables leaders to see polarities and paradoxes for what they are, lead teams to embrace them, and avoid the trap of trying to come to a quick solution to quell the noise. The dimension of balance is well described by Wendy Smith and Marianne Lewis in their Harvard Business Review article, Solving Tough Problems Requires a Mindset Shift¹, where they discuss the power of “Both/And Thinking” – an approach to surfacing, embracing and processing tensions that exist in paradoxical situations.

Dimension 2: Strength

Strength is a leader’s capacity to recognize, cultivate, and exercise their innate talents and qualities and to orient their work toward areas where those strengths will have the most impact.

As Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall say in their book, Nine Lies About Work, “…the research into high performance in any profession or endeavor reveals that excellence is idiosyncratic. The well-rounded high performer is a creature of theory world. In the real world, each high performer is unique and distinct, and excels precisely because that person has understood his or her uniqueness and cultivated it intelligently.”²

Leaders also see others through that same lens; they actively watch for strengths in others and may even experiment with assignments to test or develop strengths in others. With this way of seeing people and work, they can assemble diverse teams with complementary strengths and surround themselves with people who balance their weaknesses. And in areas where they have a gap that they need to close, they will choose to be “responsibly average”—to get just good enough at something so it doesn’t hold them back.

Dimension 3: Flexibility

Flexibility is the capacity to leverage new strategies and behaviors in response to changing circumstances or shifts in organizational and team needs.

Leaders who have developed this dimension are aware of their own rigidity and biases, and they can see when they need to be open and curious, which helps them see more clearly where their typical response to a situation might be a bad fit. With this lens on situations, especially during change, they can lead differently. This includes seeking out diverse perspectives, trying out new skills or approaches, and seeking out feedback so they can learn.

Like the other dimensions, Flexibility can be developed over time. In the 2023 Harvard Business Review article, It Takes Versatility to Lead in a Volatile World, the authors state that “research on the links between personality and leader behavior suggests that versatility is largely a learned capability.”³ Going further in their analysis, they state that what versatile leaders primarily 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.”

Dimension 4: Endurance

Endurance is the capacity to withstand and adapt to challenges, setbacks, and pressure while maintaining focus and effectiveness in achieving long-term strategic goals.

Leaders with this capacity can embrace reality with tempered optimism—things are hard, but in the end, we will get there. They also know their emotional triggers and how they behave when not coping well with stress. And they see situations not as isolated but through the lens of their larger purpose. As a result, they can reframe difficulties around purpose and focus themselves and their teams on what they can control. They also accept the reality that they cannot run on empty for long periods. They intentionally create time for recovery and reflection.

The Bottom Line

We believe that these underlying dimensions of leadership fitness can help leaders thrive—like Clark on the basketball court. By seeing differently and leading differently, they can become “bigger than their jobs” and excel in the complex and demanding environment of leadership.

Learn More

To learn more about the dimensions of leadership fitness, including how learning and talent leaders can help grow these capacities in their leaders, download our paper Leadership Fitness: Developing the Capacity to See and Lead Differently Amid Complexity.

Perspectives

Leadership Fitness: Developing the Capacity to See and Lead Differently Amid Complexity

Download

1. Marianne W. Lewis and Wendy K. Smith (2022), Solving Tough Problems Requires a Mindset Shift, Harvard Business Review. ︎
2. Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Godall (2019), Nine Lies About Work: A freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World, Harvard Business Review Press. ︎
3. Robert B. Kaiser, Ryne A. Sherman and Robert Hogan (2023), It Takes Versatility to Lead in a Volatile World, Harvard Business Review. ︎

The post Leadership Fitness: Four Capacities Leaders Must Develop appeared first on Harvard Business Impact.

The Case for Leadership Character

Diane Belcher

February 13, 2024

When we think of leaders who possess character, we typically envision ethical behaviors such as telling the truth, standing up for what’s right, and treating others fairly. The notion of “ethics” is often viewed synonymously with “character,” and a recent survey found that 88% of all employees believe that there is a need for “moral leadership” among the most senior levels in their organization.¹ But there is more to a leader’s character than just ethics, integrity, and morals.

The business benefit of leadership character

Before going further, many may wonder whether there is a business benefit to organizations that have leaders who operate with character. According to research outlined in the book Return on Character: The Real Reason Leaders and Their Companies Win by Fred Kiel, organizations led by CEOs whose employees gave them high marks for character had an average return on assets that was five times higher than that of organizations whose leaders received low character scores.²

What’s interesting is that this study looked at more than simply being “ethical”; instead, it also considered factors such as a CEO’s willingness to serve others, show compassion, and extend forgiveness—all traits that go beyond ethics and morals.

In the years since the research from Return on Character was conducted, the idea that leadership character involves operational excellence as well as working within regulatory guidelines and governing fairly has taken hold. It drives decision making and performance on the job more than originally thought. And because character is reflected in the actions of all leaders—not just those in the senior-most roles—it is an important leadership trait for people in charge of leadership development to consider.

Character and its relation to judgment and decision making

One of the most significant developments shaping our thinking on leadership character is the fact that organizations have pushed decision making further down the organizational structure. Decision making is now a key capability not only for leaders but for employees, and we know that character plays a key part in the process of making decisions.⁴

A workplace analysis of the last six decades shows the share of jobs requiring employee decision-making has grown from 8% to 34%.⁵ This means that daily, a third of a company’s workforce is making important decisions ranging from the cut-and-dried to more complex “judgment calls” with far-reaching implications beyond a person’s immediate sphere of influence. In each of these decisions is the expression of leadership character.

Broadening our definition of leadership character

Leadership character exists in the space between the individual’s values and morals and the key activities facing any leader, including decision making.

Based on extensive research from HBS faculty, Harvard Business Impact thought leaders and leadership authors, and client learner and advisory groups, Harvard Business Impact has identified seven key leadership qualities, sometimes referred to as “super-powers.” They are all important character traits of leaders.

Seven important character traits of leaders

1. Integrity
2. Self-awareness
3. Determination
4. Empathy
5. Courage
6. Optimism
7. Curiosity/open-mindedness

Leaders uphold and demonstrate their character through the daily habits they follow and the decisions they make, as well as the decision-making environment they create for their employees.

To align their values, morals, and decisions, leaders can continually ask themselves:

• Who am I becoming when I am busy doing?
• What character traits do I most strongly identify with? Which ones feel uncomfortable for me to demonstrate? Why might that be?
• Is my decision making aligned with the values of my organization?
• Do I recognize when I am or am not demonstrating strong leadership character?
• Could I have blind spots? If so, am I creating an environment for my team to tell me when I miss the mark?
• How can I provide direction, clarity, and role modeling to my team so they understand how to make daily choices that align with their values and those of the organization?

By checking in on themselves in this way, leaders can more effectively foster a culture of value-based decision making that extends beyond themselves to influence their teams and colleagues.

Can character be developed in leaders?

While managerial skills (such as delegation, conflict resolution, and business acumen) are trainable, many argue that character traits such as courage, curiosity, and self-awareness can’t be taught per se.

However, I believe these character traits can be nurtured and enhanced through feedback, practice, and coaching. Because character and decision making are intertwined and have a direct impact on organizational success, it stands to reason that companies should invest as much time and energy into nurturing character in their leaders as they do in developing managerial skills. Yet employee surveys suggest this isn’t always the case. While close to two-thirds of leaders are perceived as behaving with integrity or determination, our own research indicates that only around half of employees report seeing their own leader display courage or curiosity.⁶

Even with investment and focus on nurturing these traits, the motivation for leaders to practice and model character is, in large part, dependent on their environment. For example, perhaps a middle manager has shown courage in the past by standing up to senior leadership only to be told (repeatedly): “Stay in your lane”; “I hear that you’re underfunded, but we still need you to deliver”; or “Our shareholders won’t support that.” An organizational culture that discourages leaders from speaking up is a powerful deterrent to the demonstration of that character attribute. Strong character must be systematically supported.

When leaders demonstrate character, it drives trust and business results. While character traits can’t be trained outright, they shouldn’t be left to chance. Through feedback, coaching, practice, and modeling, leaders throughout an organization can enhance their authenticity, integrity, courage, and other critical attributes of character that drive a healthy organizational culture.

Learn more

To equip your leaders with the skills they need to excel in any environment, download our paper Leadership Fitness: The Path to Developing Human-Centered Leaders Who Drive Employee Fulfillment. Contact us today to discuss how we can help you transform your team’s success.

Perspectives

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

Download

1. “The State of Moral Leadership in Business”, The HOW Institute for Society, 2022. https://thehowinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/moralleadershipbiz_Digital-Spreads-Dec-2022-1.pdf
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2. Harvard Business Review, “Measuring Return on Character, April 2015, https://hbr.org/2015/04/measuring-the-return-on-character.
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3. Bazerman, Max H., “A New Model for Ethical Leadership,” HBR.org, September 2020. https://hbr.org/2020/09/a-new-model-for-ethical-leadership
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4. Matthew Jordan and David G. Rand, “The Role of Character Strengths in Economic Decision-Making.” Judgment and Decision Making, July 1, 2018. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3171194
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5. Harvard Business Publishing Corporate Learning, “Who Is Really Making the Decisions in Your Organization—and How?” 2022. https://www.harvardbusiness.org/insight/who-is-really-making-the-decisions-in-your-organization-and-how/.
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6. Harvard Business Publishing Corporate Learning, “Leadership Reframed for the Workplace of the Future: 10 Capabilities and 7 Superpowers,” 2022. https://www.harvardbusiness.org/download/leadership-reframed-for-the-workplace-of-the-future/. ︎

The post The Case for Leadership Character appeared first on Harvard Business Impact.

The Global Workforce is Shrinking. How Should L&D Respond?

Diane Belcher

November 14, 2023

It’s a demographically undeniable fact: the talent pool available to companies is shrinking. Changes in our society such as an aging workforce and declining birthrates means that employers face an uphill battle to hire the talent they need to compete in the global marketplace.¹  The reality of the “shrinking workforce” places pressure on HR and L&D leaders to strengthen their engagement and retention practices; more than ever, organizations seek to create an organizational culture where employees feel valued and are less likely to seek greener pastures.

A smart place for organizations to look for added value is their leadership development practices. Investing in leaders is a strategic move that not only benefits individual employees but also has a significant positive impact on the organization, leading to increased retention and higher employee engagement. Engaged employees are more committed to their work and the organization. Effective leaders can inspire and engage their teams, increasing overall productivity. Moreover, investing in leadership development signals to employees that the company is committed to their growth, which can boost loyalty and aid in retention.

Three best practices for effective leadership development

In our work with organizations, we’ve discovered several key leadership development lessons for companies looking to tackle the twin challenges of keeping employees engaged and ensuring they stay. Here are three best practices to consider.

1. Rethink career development for the contemporary workforce

Career development in the modern workplace presents many complexities for companies looking to prepare their workforce for the future. Today, not all career paths are linear, so leaders must be far more resourceful when providing growth opportunities to their employees. Organizations need to develop leaders who can grow their employees’ skills throughout a career that will have many twists and turns—and may even downshift at some point. Employees are hungry for growth and want opportunities that challenge them “above and beyond their current job description,” so it’s incumbent on HR and L&D professionals to build systems and deliver on programs that don’t just improve individual performance in employees’ roles today, but also unlock their future potential.

Access to growth—for both employees and leaders—has implications for retention. When leaders are adept at creating development opportunities for their team members, employees realize they can grow within their organization, which reduces the likelihood they’ll seek employment outside the organization. Providing robust and meaningful leadership development has a dual benefit for organizations: leaders become more adept at providing the career development employees crave and those employees are also more likely to remain with their current employer. For example, Atos invested in a leadership development program focused on digital transformation, strategy, and customer-focused decision making, and found that the attrition rate for alumni of that program was 6% compared to their organizational average of 16.5%.²

2. Elevate the senior leader’s role in learning and development

Our client stories tell us the most successful leadership development programs are those that employ a “leaders-as-teachers” model in their coursework. These organizations engage their leadership community by encouraging them to participate in development work. This includes engaging members of the C-suite team, which demonstrates a commitment to learning from the highest levels of the organization. An operations and supply chain director at a global medical devices manufacturer explains how the company executes this strategy: “We’re selecting key leaders to come to our sessions and be those keynote speakers, depending on the content and how it relates to their strengths.”

Another example of this approach is how Cinépolis, the world’s fourth-largest movie theater chain, built leaders’ participation into their training and development practices. They employed a leader-as-teacher model and found it to be an extremely effective method for reaching everyone in the organization. They used a cascading approach in which senior leaders co-taught the corporate manager program, and then corporate managers taught their own teams. Through gamification, participants earned points toward prizes for completing program elements. The movie theater industry faces extreme pressures from other media sources, and these approaches established an innovative energy that led to a higher level of communication and idea generation.

“I think the challenges some companies are facing is that leaders tend not to be learners themselves … a lot of leadership development is focused on the more junior people in the organization. Our CEO is a role model, a cultural sort of trigger for everybody else to follow suit. When we design a program, we design a role for the CEO, whether it’s to teach or share their experiences. In a great program, our learners are hearing from our leaders.”

—Chief People Officer at a Global Technology Company

3. Train leaders around critical skills that drive employee engagement and retention

We believe that the best leaders are highly motivated to create positive change for their people, their organizations, and society at large. And we know that L&D and HR professionals are tasked with determining how to frame and develop the skills leaders need to achieve positive change. When we embarked on research to uncover what leaders most need for the workplace of the future, we discovered several key leadership capabilities that drive

Organizations we surveyed ranked the following leadership capabilities as having the most positive impact on employee engagement and morale:

• Champions Inclusion
• Leads Authentically
• Develops Others
• Leads through Uncertainty and Change

The capabilities offer an insight into both the issues employees are expecting their leaders to address and the types of leaders that employees need to feel committed and enthusiastic about their work and workplace. Thus, it is critical that HR and L&D professionals prioritize these capabilities in their development programs.

Moreover, we found a compelling business case for “Leads Authentically” and “Leads Strategically.” Companies who reported exceeding expectations for revenue, customer experiences and employee engagement (the top 7% of those surveyed) were markedly more likely to emphasize these two leadership capabilities.³

Success story highlight: Bringing it all together at Arch Insurance

Arch Insurance has seen firsthand the connection to employee engagement and their leadership development practices. Arch, who implemented a leadership development program aligned to where people are in their leadership journey (first-time, frontline, mid- and senior-level managers) has experienced success in tackling the organizational challenges of engaging and developing employees.

Through a balance of synchronous, virtual sessions and asynchronous, personalized learning built on Harvard ManageMentor and Harvard ManageMentor Spark®, learners at Arch are using the insights they’ve gained to improve their performance and challenge themselves above and beyond their current roles. One hundred percent of program participants have reported an ability to make smart decisions and increased confidence in leading strategically. This confidence in their skill development has led to the growth of Arch’s leadership pipeline, with 71% of participants having been promoted or expanded their responsibilities—which has been critical for employee retention.

Furthermore, senior leaders have played an elevated role in learning experiences. For example, virtual sessions facilitated by Harvard Business Impact moderators feature Arch senior leaders, who coach and train mid-, frontline, and first-time managers on skills critical to leading productive, engaged teams, such as championing inclusion and leading through change. As a result, leaders at all levels are more prepared to develop, inspire, and support their teams—all critical capabilities for engaging and retaining top talent.⁴

To learn more about Arch’s high impact development experiences, download the full client story now: Elevating Leadership Excellence and Empowering Growth at Arch Insurance.

1. https://www.prb.org/articles/want-another-perspective-on-the-u-s-labor-shortage-talk-to-a-demographer/ ︎
2. https://www.kaltura.com/index.php/extwidget/preview/partner_id/506471/uiconf_id/46057571/entry_id/1_j6hufmjz/embed/dynamic ︎
3. Research report: Leadership Reframed for the Workplace of the Future ︎
4. https://www.harvardbusiness.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Elevating-Leadership-Excellence-and-Empowering-Growth-at-Arch-Insurance.pdf ︎

The post The Global Workforce is Shrinking. How Should L&D Respond? appeared first on Harvard Business Impact.

The Global Workforce is Shrinking. How Should L&D Respond?

Diane Belcher

November 14, 2023

It’s a demographically undeniable fact: the talent pool available to companies is shrinking. Changes in our society such as an aging workforce and declining birthrates means that employers face an uphill battle to hire the talent they need to compete in the global marketplace.¹ The reality of the “shrinking workforce” places pressure on HR and L&D leaders to strengthen their engagement and retention practices; more than ever, organizations seek to create an organizational culture where employees feel valued and are less likely to seek greener pastures.

A smart place for organizations to look for added value is their leadership development practices. Investing in leaders is a strategic move that not only benefits individual employees but also has a significant positive impact on the organization, leading to increased retention and higher employee engagement. Engaged employees are more committed to their work and the organization. Effective leaders can inspire and engage their teams, increasing overall productivity. Moreover, investing in leadership development signals to employees that the company is committed to their growth, which can boost loyalty and aid in retention.

Three best practices for effective leadership development

In our work with organizations, we’ve discovered several key leadership development lessons for companies looking to tackle the twin challenges of keeping employees engaged and ensuring they stay. Here are three best practices to consider.

1. Rethink career development for the contemporary workforce

Career development in the modern workplace presents many complexities for companies looking to prepare their workforce for the future. Today, not all career paths are linear, so leaders must be far more resourceful when providing growth opportunities to their employees. Organizations need to develop leaders who can grow their employees’ skills throughout a career that will have many twists and turns—and may even downshift at some point. Employees are hungry for growth and want opportunities that challenge them “above and beyond their current job description,” so it’s incumbent on HR and L&D professionals to build systems and deliver on programs that don’t just improve individual performance in employees’ roles today, but also unlock their future potential.

Access to growth—for both employees and leaders—has implications for retention. When leaders are adept at creating development opportunities for their team members, employees realize they can grow within their organization, which reduces the likelihood they’ll seek employment outside the organization. Providing robust and meaningful leadership development has a dual benefit for organizations: leaders become more adept at providing the career development employees crave and those employees are also more likely to remain with their current employer. For example, Atos invested in a leadership development program focused on digital transformation, strategy, and customer-focused decision making, and found that the attrition rate for alumni of that program was 6% compared to their organizational average of 16.5%.²

2. Elevate the senior leader’s role in learning and development

Our client stories tell us the most successful leadership development programs are those that employ a “leaders-as-teachers” model in their coursework. These organizations engage their leadership community by encouraging them to participate in development work. This includes engaging members of the C-suite team, which demonstrates a commitment to learning from the highest levels of the organization. An operations and supply chain director at a global medical devices manufacturer explains how the company executes this strategy: “We’re selecting key leaders to come to our sessions and be those keynote speakers, depending on the content and how it relates to their strengths.”

Another example of this approach is how Cinépolis, the world’s fourth-largest movie theater chain, built leaders’ participation into their training and development practices. They employed a leader-as-teacher model and found it to be an extremely effective method for reaching everyone in the organization. They used a cascading approach in which senior leaders co-taught the corporate manager program, and then corporate managers taught their own teams. Through gamification, participants earned points toward prizes for completing program elements. The movie theater industry faces extreme pressures from other media sources, and these approaches established an innovative energy that led to a higher level of communication and idea generation.

3. Train leaders around critical skills that drive employee engagement and retention

We believe that the best leaders are highly motivated to create positive change for their people, their organizations, and society at large. And we know that L&D and HR professionals are tasked with determining how to frame and develop the skills leaders need to achieve positive change. When we embarked on research to uncover what leaders most need for the workplace of the future, we discovered several key leadership capabilities that drive

Organizations we surveyed ranked the following leadership capabilities as having the most positive impact on employee engagement and morale:

• Champions Inclusion
• Leads Authentically
• Develops Others
• Leads through Uncertainty and Change

The capabilities offer an insight into both the issues employees are expecting their leaders to address and the types of leaders that employees need to feel committed and enthusiastic about their work and workplace. Thus, it is critical that HR and L&D professionals prioritize these capabilities in their development programs.

Moreover, we found a compelling business case for “Leads Authentically” and “Leads Strategically.” Companies who reported exceeding expectations for revenue, customer experiences and employee engagement (the top 7% of those surveyed) were markedly more likely to emphasize these two leadership capabilities.³

Success story highlight: Bringing it all together at Arch Insurance

Arch Insurance has seen firsthand the connection to employee engagement and their leadership development practices. Arch, who implemented a leadership development program aligned to where people are in their leadership journey (first-time, frontline, mid- and senior-level managers) has experienced success in tackling the organizational challenges of engaging and developing employees.

Through a balance of synchronous, virtual sessions and asynchronous, personalized learning built on Harvard ManageMentor and Harvard ManageMentor Spark®, learners at Arch are using the insights they’ve gained to improve their performance and challenge themselves above and beyond their current roles. One hundred percent of program participants have reported an ability to make smart decisions and increased confidence in leading strategically. This confidence in their skill development has led to the growth of Arch’s leadership pipeline, with 71% of participants having been promoted or expanded their responsibilities—which has been critical for employee retention.

Furthermore, senior leaders have played an elevated role in learning experiences. For example, virtual sessions facilitated by Harvard Business Publishing moderators feature Arch senior leaders, who coach and train mid-, frontline, and first-time managers on skills critical to leading productive, engaged teams, such as championing inclusion and leading through change. As a result, leaders at all levels are more prepared to develop, inspire, and support their teams—all critical capabilities for engaging and retaining top talent.⁴

To learn more about Arch’s high impact development experiences, download the full client story now: Elevating Leadership Excellence and Empowering Growth at Arch Insurance.

1. https://www.prb.org/articles/want-another-perspective-on-the-u-s-labor-shortage-talk-to-a-demographer/ ︎
2. https://www.kaltura.com/index.php/extwidget/preview/partner_id/506471/uiconf_id/46057571/entry_id/1_j6hufmjz/embed/dynamic ︎
3. Research report: Leadership Reframed for the Workplace of the Future ︎
4. https://www.harvardbusiness.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/CRE6219_ENT_Client-Story_Arch_June2025.pdf ︎

The post The Global Workforce is Shrinking. How Should L&D Respond? appeared first on Harvard Business Impact.