We believe leadership’s strength comes from human values, ingenuity, and connection. AI in leadership development accelerates and deepens our programs and research, but human expertise ensures what we create is trustworthy, ethical, meaningful, and actionable.

By combining rigorous research methods with advanced technology, we’ve designed an approach where humans and AI work together to reveal insights that drive lasting leadership impact and responsibly advance leadership development.

A Case Study: Using AI to Help Senior Leaders See Data About How They Lead

Our HiFi Conversation Analytics tool combines human expertise with AI in one of our leadership programs. HiFi helps senior leaders understand their behaviors in the Looking Glass, Inc.® simulation of our Leading for Organizational Impact program.

HiFi uses wearable technology to capture leaders’ conversations during the simulation, tracking data such as speaking time and interactions with others. While technology excels at measuring and detecting patterns we can’t easily see, humans provide essential context, judgment, and developmental guidance that AI can’t replicate. This collaboration exists at every stage — from designing the solution and validating data to implementing insights in a program — to ensure AI’s contributions to our leadership development program are accurate, ethical, and meaningful.

Here’s a deeper look at each stage.

Design: Human Judgment Guides AI Potential

Measurement without purpose is just noise. The most sophisticated AI tool isn’t useful if it doesn’t help leaders change what matters. That’s why our design process for integrating HiFi into our Leading for Organizational Impact program started with a human question: What behaviors, if measured and made visible, would help senior leaders grow?

The program helps leaders see themselves as part of an organizational system, not standalone actors. Our emphasis on system-wide influence is based in part on an AI-powered language model we use to analyze thousands of leadership challenges that senior leaders reported to us — 6 of the top 10 senior leader challenges involve working within a larger system.​

When we designed HiFi for this program, we prioritized metrics that reveal interdependence: Whose perspective did you seek? How did that impact your influence? Those questions came from decades of leadership research on systems thinking, the program’s learning objectives, and what we know drives behavior change — not from what AI happened to capture easily.

While AI enables breadth (capturing everything), humans provide focus (choosing what matters). We’re now leveraging advancements in AI to deepen HiFi’s analytical capabilities — but the same principle holds. AI expands what we can measure and analyze while human judgment determines whether those insights help leaders grow.

Validation: Helping AI Align With Human Expertise

Humans must supervise AI inputs and outputs. Before HiFi analyzes conversations, we validate it through a rigorous, cyclical process borrowed from decades of assessment science: content analysis.

Expert human coders review conversation transcripts line by line, making judgments based on well-supported leadership frameworks. For example, is this statement focused on making sure the group achieves its objectives, or on recognizing the contributions of individual members? When multiple coders agree on their assessments, those judgments then guide the AI on what to look for. The AI isn’t leading; it’s learning to replicate expert human judgment at scale.

This is supervised learning in action. We’re skeptical of deploying models without this kind of fine-tuning, because unsupervised AI can miss context and produce misleading results.

Even as we integrate more sophisticated AI capabilities into HiFi, the research perspective remains: human experts set the standard, and technology is evaluated against that standard. AI expands our capacity to analyze conversations at scale, but it earns that role by proving it can reliably mirror the judgments humans would make.

Implementation: Humans Make AI Insights Meaningful

The data itself doesn’t create change — the conversation about the data does. During their Leading for Organizational Impact journey, participants receive HiFi-generated behavioral feedback alongside peer ratings and collective impact data. But sensemaking is a deeply human process. What matters is whether leaders can understand the data, connect it to their experience, discuss it with their peers and facilitators, and see how to use it to guide their development. That’s where human expertise is essential for AI in leadership development to have real impact.

Our facilitators are deeply involved in observing what resonates with leaders, what confuses them, and what sparks insight. Their feedback shapes how we present the data: which visualizations work best, what language makes the data accessible, how much data is too much. These aren’t technical decisions an algorithm can make — they require human judgment about what helps people learn.

During one session, for example, the HiFi insights showed a leader had high speaking time and strong influence scores — technically good data. But the facilitator noticed something: every time this leader spoke, their counterpart went quiet. The algorithm saw influence. The leader saw they had taken space to the detriment of the group. That’s the conversation the group needed to have, and the facilitator in the room helped surface it.

Facilitation also means tailoring programs to fit the client’s context. We implement HiFi through custom programs in partnership with clients, integrating it with other solutions to achieve specific goals. For example, when an organization wanted to improve how leaders give and receive feedback, we combined HiFi with our Situation – Behavior – Impact (SBI) feedback model. A knowledgeable facilitator who understood the client’s culture and challenges collaborated closely with them, leveraging an AI-supported tool to co-design a better experience.

What This Means for Your Organization

AI expands what’s possible in leadership development. But it’s human expertise in design, validation, and implementation that ensures those possibilities help your leaders’ development become a reality. As you explore AI-enabled tools for your organization, and consider where deploying AI in leadership development programs might fit, ask yourself: Who’s making the critical decisions about what gets measured, what it means, and how it helps leaders develop?

Ready to Take the Next Step?

At CCL, we’re exploring how human expertise can shape the use of AI in leadership development. Our Leading for Organizational Impact program leverages insights from HiFi, plus 360 assessments and executive coaching, to help senior leaders become more strategic and effective in their organizations.

The post The Power of Both: Integrating Human Expertise & AI in Leadership Development appeared first on CCL.

The key to successful AI integration across the organization is helping leaders at all levels understand how their use of AI connects to the organization’s collective mission. One way to achieve this is by assisting leaders in understanding the soft skills required to thrive during AI transformation.

Why Soft Skills Are Important for AI Transformation

In the context of leadership, soft skills are key qualities like empathy, compassion, and authenticity that help us form strong connections with others. These skills are just as important, if not more so, than technical skills, such as the ability to use AI. It’s tempting for organizations to think leveraging AI and soft skills means helping all their employees understand how to use AI to work more efficiently in their roles. While AI advancements can significantly enhance operational efficiency and help individuals uncover new insights, they cannot replace the uniquely human aspects of leadership.

At CCL, we believe that human leadership will guide and shape the future. The true strength of leadership lies in the uniquely human qualities that AI cannot replicate, such as empathy, vision, curiosity, and the ability to inspire others. Understanding the relationship between AI and soft skills is crucial for leaders to effectively harness AI’s potential while maintaining a human-centered approach.

The value of leadership soft skills extends beyond individual interactions; they’re essential for navigating complex challenges, fostering innovation, and building resilient teams. Collectively leveraging these soft skills across the organization is an essential factor in successfully navigating AI transformation. While leaders at all levels require a foundational understanding of AI, and some soft skills are important regardless of level, the essential soft skills for leveraging AI look different at different levels.

Senior Leaders: Guiding Ethics, Innovation & Vision

Senior leaders are often charged with designing a strategy in alignment with their organization’s mission, vision, and values. They’re also guiding the organization through uncharted territory. AI transformation is causing rapid change, and senior leaders play a key role in helping their organizations both navigate this change and thrive amidst it. Here are 4 key soft skills senior leaders need to guide their organizations through AI transformation.

• Communication: Senior leaders must drive clear and transparent communication about AI initiatives, goals, and integration. Such transparency helps foster a culture of psychological safety and builds commitment throughout the organization by helping the employees (or everyone) understand the collective vision of why AI transformation is essential.
• Trust: Senior leaders build trust by explaining the benefits, limitations, and implications of AI to stakeholders. This vulnerability can signal to the rest of the organization that “we’re in this together” and build buy-in for key initiatives.
• Ethics: Senior leaders must champion ethical AI practices in their organizations, and they serve as the role models for the rest of the organization’s leaders to follow. Organizations that lack clear ethical guidelines for AI risk eroding trust, inviting bias or misuse, and undermining both employee and public confidence in their leadership and decisions.
• Learning Agility: Senior leaders must cultivate a culture of continuous learning and innovation within their organizations by modeling the traits and behaviors they seek. By creating opportunities for skill development and recognizing learning-oriented behaviors, they also influence others in the organization to experiment and innovate, further shifting organizational culture.

Managers: Translating Strategy & Execution

Managers bridge the gaps between strategic direction and operational reality. Middle managers often find themselves pulled in multiple directions — upward toward senior leaders, sideways toward peers, and downward toward direct reports — so interpersonal skills like clear communication, influence, and collaboration become as critical as technical competence. Here are the 4 skills managers need to best leverage AI transformation.

• Collaboration: Managers need to navigate organizational politics and structures to connect AI potential with strategic goals. To achieve this, they must lead with empathy and adaptability, understanding their organization’s AI strategy, how it will reshape workflows and operations, and foster collaborative and productive working relationships between and across teams and functions.
• Communication: Managers must ensure clear communication about AI’s role and implications to employees to build trust and psychological safety. Serving as the bridge between individual contributors and senior leadership, they help foster understanding and collaboration across organizational boundaries.
• Learning Agility: Managers must continually identify opportunities for their teams where AI can enhance efficiency and productivity. By being adaptable, and helping model that adaptability for their teams, they can quickly integrate AI into existing workflows or spot opportunities for creating new workflows.
• Influence: Managers must encourage teams to explore AI tools and foster a psychologically safe environment for innovation. They should leverage their influence to build consensus and drive commitment toward adopting AI technologies in an ethical and productive way.

Individual Contributors: Innovators Inspired by AI 

Individual contributors are at the frontline of AI transformation. They’re often the first to integrate AI into their everyday work, and they’re experimenting with ways to do more and do better with AI. Individual contributors play a vital role in shaping strategy and executing AI initiatives, yet they often lack the communication, influence, and self-awareness skills required to translate their expertise into broader impact. Here are the key soft skills individual contributors need to best navigate AI transformation:

• Learning Agility: Individual contributors need to invest in personal AI literacy — understanding AI’s capabilities, AI tools, and how to take full advantage of AI to enhance their current role. Embracing learning agility can give these contributors the versatility, adaptability, and growth mindset to best leverage AI.
• Creativity: Individual contributors can immediately leverage AI to enhance their creativity. For example, they can use AI to augment problem-solving, facilitate brainstorming, and spur innovative thinking by exploring new ideas (or working with AI to challenge existing thinking).
• Resilience: While AI can be empowering, it can also be a threat in terms of replacing roles. For individual contributors, building a resilient mindset can help navigate this uncertainty — they can do this by leveraging AI to amplify their own skills as well as helping others remain resilient and be ready for what AI trends emerge next. This requires individuals to challenge and refine AI-generated output to ensure relevance and reliability.
• Collaboration: Individual contributors can serve as educators in their organizations, helping others understand terminology, promote ethical usage, and identify when to and when not to best leverage AI in the flow of work. Turning AI into a collaborative tool in your organization can enhance impact at multiple levels: individuals, teams, and the organization.

Navigating AI Transformation — A Leadership Imperative

To thrive amid AI transformation, leaders must embrace AI as an essential tool while cultivating the soft skills that define effective leadership. AI can certainly provide productivity gains and organizational efficiencies, but it’s not a substitute for the essential human qualities that make up good leadership. Whether you are a senior leader, manager, or individual contributor, understanding and developing these skills will enable you to navigate AI transformation by bolstering both your own individual performance and your organizational impact.

When leaders at all levels leverage soft skills along with AI capabilities, their organizations can best harness AI’s potential. Embrace this opportunity to grow and lead with AI, ensuring you and your organization are ready for the future.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

We have a number of leadership solutions to help you upskill your talent with soft skill development, in the format that’s best for your unique situation.

The post Essential Soft Skills to Lead Through AI Transformation appeared first on CCL.

The missing link isn’t technology, it’s culture: helping people understand how their individual contributions connect to the organization’s collective mission, especially as AI changes what work looks like.

But what do we mean by culture?

Culture is the self-reinforcing web of beliefs, practices, and behaviors that drive how leaders and organizations make decisions and the way things get done. In short, culture makes strategy happen. For AI integration, understanding the relationship between AI & culture change is vitally important.

Why Is Culture Change Necessary for AI Integration

Successful AI adoption across an organization requires a collaborative culture. When individuals use AI in isolation, productivity gains stay isolated. When teams use AI collaboratively — sharing insights, challenging outputs, building on one another’s work — the impact compounds. That shift happens when senior leaders intentionally shape the culture to support AI integration.

We’ve spent decades researching organizational culture change, and our experience has given us insight into how organizations can successfully move toward more interdependent, collaborative ways of working that are better positioned to leverage AI’s potential. Senior leaders play a critical role: they model the behaviors, set the expectations, and create the conditions where interdependent leadership culture takes root.

In previous research, we identified 5 principles that increase the likelihood of successful culture change. Here, we apply those principles to help senior leaders shift workplace culture to enable effective AI integration.

5 Principles for Shifting Culture to Effectively Integrate AI

1. Culture change is a guided, public-learning process.

Senior leaders architect the organization’s AI strategy and play a pivotal role in aligning AI efforts with the organization’s mission, vision, and values. But strategy alone doesn’t drive adoption; transparency does. As senior leaders adopt AI, they must embrace transparency, openly communicate what’s working and what isn’t, and learn from missteps.

AI adoption creates uncertainty. Workflows change. Roles evolve. People worry about relevance. When senior leaders publicly navigate that uncertainty — sharing their own experiments, setbacks, and adjustments — they signal that it’s safe for others to do the same.

What this means for your organization: Be transparent about how AI is adopted and used.

• Clearly communicate guardrails for AI use.
• Model behavior by being open and vulnerable about what you and your organization are learning about AI, sharing personal successes / failures with AI.
• Keep messaging about AI’s role aligned to your organization’s mission.

By fostering a culture of open experimentation and communication, you can both proactively model the culture change needed and create an environment where it can thrive.

2. Senior leaders must do the change work first.

Our research of nearly 300 leaders over 2.5 years showed that teams with high degrees of psychological safety reported higher levels of performance and lower levels of interpersonal conflict. For AI adoption, creating psychological safety at work is critical: people need to feel safe with experimenting with new tools, admitting when they don’t understand how AI works, and challenging AI outputs without fear of judgment.

Senior leaders create that safety by going first. When they model new behaviors — using AI transparently, sharing their learning process, admitting when they need to adjust — they signal that experimentation is welcome. The rest of the organization watches what leaders do, not just what they say.

What this means for your organization: Model psychological safety and drive change by emphasizing 3 key areas: resilience, experimentation, and accountability.

• For resilience, help your organization understand how to weather disruption, whether that’s because of the impact of AI or the leadership needed to navigate polycrisis — the web of interconnected, interrelated challenges we face today.
• For experimentation, create space for new and potentially wild ideas, fostering a learning culture that’s willing to take risks and learn from mistakes.
• For accountability, take responsibility for integrating AI throughout the organization and be willing to admit when adjustments are needed.

3. Developing vertical capability transforms your leadership culture.

Individual AI skills matter — knowing how to ethically use the tools, write effective prompts, and validate outputs. But organizational AI adoption requires something deeper: a culture where leaders think differently, not just work differently.

This is called vertical development. It means developing more complex and sophisticated ways of thinking, greater wisdom, and clearer insights. It involves gaining new perspectives and leadership mindsets needed to make your organizational strategy work.

Without vertical development, leaders optimize their own productivity but miss how AI could transform collaboration, innovation, or strategy execution across the organization. They see AI as a personal efficiency tool, not as a lever for organizational change.

What this means for your organization: Develop and encourage the mindset to ask bigger questions.

• How does AI change how we collaborate?
• How do we balance individual AI experimentation with organizational alignment?
• What does it mean to lead when AI is reshaping workflows and roles?

Vertical development gives leaders the capacity to navigate these questions, which is especially helpful during culture change — not with perfect answers, but with the sophistication to hold complexity and guide the organization through it.

4.  Leadership culture changes by advancing beliefs and practices simultaneously.

Real cultural shifts come from understanding how beliefs and behaviors shape and reinforce each other. New beliefs lead to new practices, which in turn reinforce or reshape beliefs, creating a continuous cycle. Senior leaders play a pivotal role in connecting and maintaining this cycle for their organizations.

What this means for your organization: You probably hear a range of beliefs about AI. Some leaders are skeptical, others see it as useful, and some view it as essential to productivity. Many leaders may already be integrating AI into their work and championing it to colleagues. But true cultural growth is unlikely to occur unless senior leaders harness the relationship between belief and action.

• Start with belief barriers: What explicit or implicit beliefs are holding your organization back? For example, does your organization have a culture of “not my problem” around certain issues or change initiatives? Do leaders view AI as someone else’s responsibility — IT’s job or the innovation team’s project — rather than a shared strategic priority?
• Then shift practices: If the belief is “AI isn’t my concern,” create practices that make it everyone’s concern. Require senior leaders to share how they’re using AI in team meetings. Build AI experimentation into strategic planning sessions. Make collective AI learning part of leadership development.

When beliefs and practices shift together, they reinforce each other. Leaders who experiment with AI develop new beliefs about its potential. Leaders who believe in AI’s strategic value create new practices to leverage it. The cycle compounds.

5. Managing culture change is a learn-as-you-go process, embedded in the work of the organization.

Organizations that want to adopt AI effectively need an agile, reflective approach to understand how AI is impacting the organization and what opportunities it creates. The same is true for culture change — it takes time, develops unevenly, and can’t be forced. Continuous learning is essential for navigating both, showing up at multiple levels:

• Individual: Leaders develop AI literacy, test and learn with new tools, and share insights.
• Team: Teams figure out how AI changes collaboration and innovation, and experiment with new processes.
• Organizational: The organization develops governance models, decides where to centralize vs. decentralize AI adoption, and adjusts strategy based on what’s working and what isn’t.

What this means for your organization: Ask questions and use the answers to derive deeper insights: 

• How will your organization adapt to the impact of AI at different levels?
• How will it adopt AI strategically?
• What governance models will it develop to effectively harness AI across functions?
• Will a decentralized approach, where each function best determines how to incorporate AI into its work, be more appropriate than an organization-wide model?

Organizations committed to continuous learning will be more prepared to tackle these questions, learn from successes and missteps, and apply those lessons to future decisions.

From Strategy to Action: Integrating AI for Organizational Impact

Effectively integrating AI in your organization requires a leadership development strategy that connects individual leader performance to collective achievement. By pursuing a strategic approach to leadership that adopts AI as a transformative tool across individuals, teams, and the organization, you can expand mindsets, foster innovation, and propel organizational success.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

If you and the rest of the senior leadership team are ready to start transforming your organization, partner with the experts in our Organizational Leadership practice to assess the effectiveness of the executive team, evaluate your current and needed future leadership culture, and ensure it supports your business strategy and priorities.

The post How AI & Culture Intersect: 5 Principles for Senior Leaders appeared first on CCL.

Here’s what our insights show: a single negative relational energy tie cancels out 4 positive relational energy ties. Before we unpack what this means for leaders and its impact on creating a positive work environment, let’s define what “relational energy” is.

What Is Relational Energy? 

Energy is an important individual resource. Personal energy can be conceptualized as physical energy (the objective energy that powers our body and comes from food, exercise, and sleep) and emotional energy (the subjective, affect-based energy related to emotional activation). Relational energy isn’t a third type; instead it represents the idea that social interactions are a source of positive or negative emotional energy. In essence, relational energy is the energy you get from others at work — it can boost your motivation and help you get more done or deplete you and negatively impact your work.

Past research shows that relational energy has an impact even after taking into account workplace social support and the quality of the relationship between a leader and team member. Prior work shows that positive relational energy with leaders is related to higher job engagement and better job performance. In workplace social networks research, de-energizing relational ties are related to reduced thriving, lower motivation, and increased turnover.

Relational Energy: What It’s Not 

Let’s clarify 2 key distinctions:

First, relational energy isn’t about the intrinsic emotional value of the topic — it’s about how people interact while discussing it. Two people can address a topic that may be perceived as negative, such as budget cuts, but still keep a high level of energy during the conversation. Similarly, 2 people can discuss a topic that may be perceived as positive, such as winning new business, but do so in a way that depletes energy.

Second, relational energy is distinct from employee voice, which is when employees speak up to leaders with ideas, concerns, suggestions, and process improvements. Employee voice is a proactive behavior motivated by a desire to improve the organization. Research shows that employee voice is positively related to work process improvements, organizational innovation and creativity, greater organizational learning, and better decision making.

Unfortunately, employee voice isn’t always well received, particularly by certain leaders. Past research shows that leaders with low self-efficacy (such as a low perceived ability to meet the high competence expectations associated with a leadership role) are much less receptive to employee voice. They’re more likely to negatively evaluate employees who speak up and are less likely to solicit input from employees due to their own ego defensiveness. Ironically, our research found that being more receptive to employee voice would likely make these individuals better leaders.

Although it may be tempting to dismiss employees who speak up as having “negative” relational energy, this misconstrues what relational energy really means. We encourage leaders to carefully rethink such judgments and reflect on whether these views are an ego defense mechanism.

Our Research on Relational Energy: What We Did & What We Found

In our Leadership at the Peak program, we collect data in our Team Vantage assessment. Team leaders and members rate how interactions with each person “typically affect” their energy level. This provides us with round-robin ratings of relational energy, which we analyze by rater source and link to team outcomes. We’ve collected data from more than 600 teams of 4–16 members each (an average of 7), totaling more than 34,000 relational ties.

First, the good news. More than 91% of relational ties were rated as either neutral or energizing. In contrast, de-energizing ties were rare — only 9% of all possible relationships.

Some teams had zero de-energizing ties, while others had more than a third of their relationships that drained energy. Overall, the proportion of de-energizing ties within a team ranged from 0% to 38%.

Now, the bad news. Those de-energizing ties tend to have outsized effects. Across the measures of team effectiveness that we examined, the standout finding is striking: removing a single negative energy tie is equivalent to adding 4 positive energy ties. (This is based on comparing the predictive effects of the total number of de-energizing and energizing ties within a team, then calculating the ratio of these 2 values.)

For team leaders aiming to foster a positive work environment, this underscores the significant challenge of counteracting the impact of even one negative energy tie in the team. That’s why a crucial metric is the team’s ratio of energizing to de-energizing relational ties.

Overall, our results reveal that a team’s relational energy is linked to multiple team outcomes. For example, when predicting psychological safety, having more strongly de-energizing relationships affects the team about 4 times more than having more strongly energizing ties. Put another way, as a team leader you would need to cultivate 4 strongly energizing connections among team members to neutralize the impact of one strongly de-energizing relationship — and that only brings the team back to neutral. To propel the team toward positive energy, you’d need to foster even more strongly energizing relationships.

You might wonder whether the impact of negative relational energy depends on someone’s role. Unfortunately, it does, and strongly. A negative energy tie with a team leader has 3 times more impact on team outcomes like psychological safety than a negative energy tie with a team member.

Recognizing Negative Relational Energy 

Before we get to practical advice for leaders, let’s identify what negative relational energy looks like. And, yes, there is some agreement about who brings the negative energy to the team. Below are some behaviors and attitudes that consistently drain the team’s energy and enthusiasm.

Some red flags are:

• Frequent complaining, with a focus on problems rather than solutions
• Viewing most situations in a negative light — win-lose or lose-lose scenarios rather than win-win scenarios
• Stirring up conflict by escalating minor issues and drawing others into the fray
• Often critiquing or blaming others, without taking personal accountability
• Showing little empathy for others’ needs, feelings, or situations
• Unnecessarily taking up significant time, attention, and energy to meet excessive demands

Given this list, you might wonder (as we often do) why anyone would choose to dwell in this negative energy space. While we can’t fully answer that, it may be because even though it doesn’t feel good, it may feel comfortable because it’s familiar. People often prefer comfort over the discomfort that comes with change.

Managing Energy at Work

Tips for Team Leaders

Frustration with others is one of the top leadership challenges, and managing negative relational energy on your team can be difficult. It’s important to be aware of the positive and negative impacts among your team members and look for significant changes in energy dynamics when certain team members are present or absent.

Pay attention to changes in conversational contributions; collaboration rates among team members; and conflict, disengagement, and team morale. Be wary of the inclination to downplay or dismiss the impact of negative relational energy, and realize that it takes significant effort and valuable emotional energy for team members to recover from negative relational interactions.

Although it’s good to have compassion for team members who bring negative relational energy, you also have a responsibility to limit their ability to negatively impact the team and its outcomes. Choosing to do nothing signals acceptance of the behavior.

Here are 3 strategies you can use:

1. Set clear expectations for behavior. Clearly communicate and model the positive, solution-focused behavior and attitudes you expect. Address behavior that doesn’t align with these expectations.
2. Offer support and development. In addition to giving feedback, provide opportunities for team members to develop new skills and strategies for managing problematic behavior. This may include training, mentoring, or coaching. If a team member shows no interest in changing their behavior, this is a clear signal about their self-focused intentions.
3. Take firm action when needed. These decisions are never easy, but if there’s no progress despite coaching and support, protecting the team becomes the priority. Consider structural changes (such as reassignment to a different role or limiting group interactions) to safeguard team psychological safety while continuing to work with the individual.

We recognize that one of the reasons negative relational energy can be so challenging to address is because it’s not clear bad behavior like sexism, racism, or abuse. Instead, it’s like the small, steady drip of acidic water on a rock. Over time, those tiny drops create fissures that can fracture a team and drive valuable members away.

Tips for Team Members

We often have no choice about who we work with, but we can influence how we work with others. If you have an energy vampire dynamic with someone on your team, here are actions you can take (no garlic required):

• Maintain your own positive energy. Keep an upbeat attitude and focus on solutions rather than problems to avoid getting drawn into negativity. When possible, choose to work with teammates who are an energetic match with you.
• Practice self-care and identify practices that recharge you. Ensure you’re mindful of your physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing and regularly engage in practices that replenish your energy at home (time in nature, exercise, hobbies) and at work (conversations with high-energy teammates).
• Focus your time. Managing energy at work includes managing your time effectively. If you must interact with negative relational energy, keep interactions brief. Refuse to spend time listening to complaints, blame, or unnecessary drama. When possible, communicate in ways that work best for you, like email, rather than synchronous interactions. Schedule meetings for when your energy is highest.
• Set personal boundaries. Be clear about what behaviors you will not tolerate, and communicate those boundaries directly. Be assertive in holding your boundaries and use “I” statements to explain the impact of someone’s behavior or attitudes on you and your work. If necessary, bring your team leader into the mix.
• Reflect and learn. Rather than ruminating about negative interactions, reflect on them productively to see what you can improve. Try new behaviors such as redirecting conversations to be more productive, seeking support from positive relational energy peers, and finding the humor in such interactions. The strategies you learn at work can likely be useful in your personal life, too. Recognize that the only things you have control over are your own behaviors and attitudes. 

Highlighting Relational Energy Awareness

Our recommendations focus on managing negative, rather than positive, relational energy. This is intentional, given the outsized impact it has in teams.

We hope this work raises awareness of relational energy and inspires a kind of energy consciousness: a habit of noticing what or who energizes or depletes you.

Above all, relational energy is authentic. This isn’t about faking positivity or forcing team members to display energy that they don’t feel. To do so would be merely performative (not to mention exhausting) and requires surface acting, which is related to higher stress and lower job satisfaction.

We’ve all experienced the impact of relational energy at work. Many of us understand it intuitively, even if it’s hard to explain. We hope that our research can help you name and claim your experiences and provide legitimacy for them. These insights and suggestions can help you recognize — and better manage — the profound impact relational energy has on your workplace experience.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

Shifting relational energy on your team starts with better conversations. Develop the coaching skills to listen deeply, give effective feedback, and create psychological safety with our Better Conversations Every Day program.

The post Power Cord or Power Drain? How Relational Energy Shapes Your Team appeared first on CCL.

Together, they’re helping local nonprofit leaders grow and achieving results none could reach alone, demonstrating the power of a unified approach.

“The nonprofit work in our community is very rich, and as we look to expand its scale and sustainability, we recognize that it starts with the leaders,” says Ashley Douglas, Vice President of Southern Dallas Thrives, an initiative led by the United Way of Metropolitan Dallas. “This partnership is investing not only financially but also in the success of nonprofit leaders, their organizations, and the lasting impact they create.”

Building Leadership Capacity To Strengthen Impact

Southern Dallas faces challenges like limited access to quality education, economic opportunity, and healthcare — barriers shared by cities across the country and felt acutely here. Southern Dallas Thrives addresses these issues by delivering new programs, resources, capacity building, and partnerships to create real community impact.

Their Southern Dallas Roundtable brings together about 35 foundations from corporate, community, and family sectors to promote strategic, collaborative investment. Organizers help the roundtable focus on what to fund, how to fund it, and why it matters for both immediate and long-term results.

In recent years, Southern Dallas Thrives has also been asking local nonprofit executives about their challenges and examining existing capacity-building programs to look for gaps. An important theme emerged — community changemakers need more support for leadership development to keep making strong, lasting changes.

“Everything came back to giving our leaders the skills to be effective with funders and build relationships with other nonprofits,” Douglas says. “If leaders don’t feel confident in their skills to sustain and grow their work, that says a lot about the organization’s direction and potential to grow.”

Says Dr. Froswa’ Booker-Drew, a consultant who has worked in Southern Dallas for decades: “We wanted a program that could help leaders on the front lines do the work that they do even better.”

Although nonprofits recognized the need for leadership development, most lacked the budget to support it. That’s where a funder from the roundtable suggested the Center for Creative Leadership. We’re a nonprofit too — and as part of our mission, we provide leadership development opportunities that strengthen community and nonprofit leaders worldwide.

Featured Solutions

Foundations & Philanthropic Leadership

Learn more about how we're partnering with foundations for philanthropic leadership to drive change by offering professional development to build leadership capacity.

Leadership for Social Change

We strive to strengthen education, community, and nonprofit leadership. Learn more about our work to advance leadership and social change.

A Data-Driven Response to Leadership Needs

CCL joined a Southern Dallas Roundtable meeting where we discussed how to collaboratively identify the community’s leadership strengths and gaps, and how this would help us create a program tailored to those needs.

From these talks, we initiated a Leadership Explorer for the Nonprofit Sector (LENS) report focused on Southern Dallas. LENS is a free tool that helps funders and corporate social responsibility teams make data-based decisions about leadership development needs for their grantees or staff.  We received 49 anonymous responses from Southern Dallas nonprofit leaders, revealing which skills, competencies, and capabilities matter most  for success.

The report confirmed what funders and organizers had heard — nonprofit leaders want leadership development that closes capability gaps in areas such as data-driven decision making and change management, and helps them put skills into practice. It clarified the program’s vision by highlighting the specific growth priorities and preferred formats for learning.

“The report helped us make the case for why a leadership program mattered here,” Douglas says. “The LENS report’s data and detailed insights from so many organizations made CCL’s approach stand out.”

Discussions with funders emphasized how leadership development for nonprofit executive directors creates a ripple effect — strengthening organizations, residents, neighborhoods, and the broader community — and how funders can link this impact to their investments when presenting to their boards.

Importantly, 4 funders in the Southern Dallas Roundtable came together to pool their resources and get the program started.

A Custom Leadership Program Takes Shape

Working with the partner foundations and Southern Dallas Thrives, CCL developed the Southern Dallas Executive Leadership Institute — a 9-month journey shaped by the LENS report and tailored to the needs of nonprofit leaders from many different backgrounds.

The first cohort includes 8 participants representing a range of nonprofits — from large organizations with multimillion-dollar budgets to smaller grassroots groups. This diversity was intentional to encourage sharing and learning among participants beyond the formal lessons. Douglas and Booker-Drew aimed for a more intimate experience than the traditional capacity-building programs in the area, which often included 50 or more people.

“Participants found a space, made specifically for them, where they could be vulnerable much earlier than expected,” Douglas says.

The journey combines assessments and 1:1 executive coaching with in-person learning sessions on topics such as Direction – Alignment – Commitment (DAC), influential leadership, Better Conversations Every Day, decision making, strategic thinking, and collaboration in funding.

There are leadership circles for honest reflection and sessions with funders and participants to share the program’s impact. These moments are helping to deepen learning and relationships, and to strengthen the work being done across Southern Dallas.

“Participants are gaining a supportive community that will help them sustain transformation after the program,” Booker-Drew says. “Funders are given an opportunity to walk alongside us during the program. Even funders who didn’t pay for this cohort have been showing up to hear first-hand about its impact.”

Douglas praises CCL’s authentic and flexible approach, which allowed the program to be tailored for Southern Dallas.

“Together, we curated a program specific to this community and moment,” she says. “There’s magic in that.”

Organizers Say

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