In the current era of perpetual crisis and disruption, organizations must stay competitive so their leaders are able to navigate change and execute new strategies. At the same time, employees are eager to find meaning in their work and advance in their careers. Organizations with cultures that support growth and learning are the ones best positioned to be agile and innovative, with high levels of employee engagement and retention.

So how can your organization create a culture that puts learning at the forefront — in a way that’s practical, behavioral, and scalable? It starts with planting seeds for a learning culture to thrive.

What Is a Learning Culture?

A learning culture is an environment that demonstrates and encourages learning at both the individual and organizational levels, where sharing and gaining knowledge is prioritized, valued, and rewarded. A learning culture happens when learning becomes part of the ecosystem of the organization.

While it’s no small feat, there are 4 important components that can help transform your organization’s current culture into a learning culture.

4 Steps to Cultivate a Learning Culture at Your Organization

1. Attract and develop agile learners.

If you’re looking to upskill your workforce or perhaps reskill yourself, learning agility is one of the most critical skillsets to develop. Our research has long shown that the most successful leaders with the longest careers have the key leadership trait of learning agility.

Learning-agile leaders exemplify a growth mindset by learning from experience, challenging perspectives, remaining curious, and seeking new experiences. (This is why research suggests that great leaders are great learners.)

Because employees with learning agility continue to grow their skills and capabilities regardless of their current job, these individuals are in demand in the quest for talent. The workplace of yesterday no longer exists, and organizations need agile learners who understand how to transfer their current skillset to solve new problems and build capabilities for tomorrow.

• When hiring new talent: Seek out team members who learn from experience and challenge perspectives. Look for the critical skill of learning agility by asking interviewees how they’ve approached difficult situations in the past, how they’ve learned from mistakes, and how they prepare themselves for new challenges. Inquire about how they’ve applied their learnings to their next opportunity.
• For your current team members: Encourage people to remain curious and open. Provide ample opportunities for on-the-job learning and stretch assignments, along with support in the form of tools, mentoring, and coaching. Provide access to development opportunities for employees across your organization — don’t just limit skill-building to a small subset deemed “high potentials.”

Building a learning culture that democratizes leadership development and values a growth mindset will help you attract and retain a workforce that truly wants to learn, and help others learn as well.

2. Create a psychologically safe environment.

Looking at the teams and groups in your organization, are you fostering the trust and collaboration needed to sustain a strong learning culture? By creating safe spaces to be open and take interpersonal risks, you can build a foundation of psychological safety at work and encourage the learning that contributes to innovation and productivity.

Psychological safety is about promoting risk-taking and candor in a group, to create a secure environment for optimal learning. It’s the belief that candor is welcome, that employees can ask questions often and early, and that people can freely admit mistakes without fear of retribution.

Encourage team members (especially senior leaders) to admit mistakes openly and share stories of “failing forward.” Also, make sure executives know how to encourage innovation, not unintentionally sabotage and undermine it.

Ensuring leaders can create psychological safety for their teams allows team members to learn collectively and leads to a strong learning culture in your organization, where groups are willing to find lessons in setbacks and hardships, listen to one another, and invite differing opinions and candid conversations.

Remember, it’s not about being polite, but rather about being open. The openness to take interpersonal risks and glean lessons from mistakes to achieve something greater signifies a culture where growth is valued, which leads to a stronger organization that puts learning in the forefront.

Key tips and takeaways: 

• Promote risk-taking and transparency within your organization.
• Encourage team members to ask questions often and early.
• Welcome candor and encourage employees, as well as the senior leadership team, to admit mistakes and share lessons learned, without fear of consequence.

3. Encourage conversations and feedback throughout the organization.

When determining how to cultivate learning culture, remember that effective communication and feedback should be woven throughout the organization and be encouraged and expected as a part of the norm. When feedback becomes a part of regular conversations, employees are aware of their personal developmental areas, resulting in continuous gains and fewer surprises at end-of-year reviews.

Giving feedback routinely and well often dramatically improves your talent development — but requires a particular skillset, which can fortunately be developed.

Encourage employees to give, and seek, both positive and developmental feedback. Positive feedback can help them leverage what’s working well already, and developmental feedback allows them to see what can be improved upon or done differently to have greater impact.

Because a conversation, by definition, involves 2 or more people, the collective communication competency of an organization is greatly enhanced when all employees are knowledgeable and skilled at holding high-quality conversations. Put simply, better culture starts with better conversations.

And that’s why our clients who have partnered with us to scale our conversational skills training program across their organizations have seen such positive results: When a critical mass of people shares a common understanding around what constitutes an effective conversation, it allows new skills to be applied to everyday work, and to spread organically through the organization. Widely applied, improved conversational skills benefit the organization by creating more robust, innovative, stress-tested solutions and a more dynamic and psychologically safe, learning culture.

Key tips and takeaways: 

• Improve conversational skills across your entire organization with scalable training to build a common leadership language.
• Participate in meaningful conversations and provide valuable, actionable, and constructive feedback.
• Encourage everyone in your organization to truly listen to one another and seek feedback.

4. Make learning an explicit organizational priority.

If you want to show that learning is a real priority within your organization, send clear signals to your workforce that you’re all in.

Examine your policies, rewards systems, and opportunities to establish and reinforce a learning culture. Consider making these types of scheduled events a common practice at your organization:

• Lunch-and-learns, where senior leaders are storytellers who share their experiences and what they’ve learned recently and throughout their career journeys.
• After-action reviews, where teams regularly take a few minutes to share what they learned from a project or experience.
• Learning communities, where individuals can share what they’ve learned with similarly situated peers, and they can discuss together how they’re applying these learnings in their everyday work.
• Designated development days, where team- or company-wide sharing of lessons learned is expected and honored.

To show that your organization believes that learning is for everyone, make development opportunities inclusive and accessible across the entire organization. The practice of scaling learning will be unique for every organization, but be sure to provide an array of opportunities for “soft skill development” in a wide array of delivery formats to meet learner needs and abilities, including options that are asynchronous, in-person, self-paced, and virtual. (We’ve found that there are many unexpected benefits of using online learning for leadership development.)

Also, to ensure that you’re building a true learning culture, provide organizational support for learning not only in the form of tools and resources, but also by providing the necessary time and space for growth. Encourage leaders to allocate time for themselves and to set aside time for their teams to absorb and practice new skills.

When every employee sees that the organization values both individual and collective growth, you’ll strengthen your learning culture and gain commitment from your team members.

Key tips and takeaways: 

• Create a strong learning culture by naming it as an explicit organizational priority.
• Examine company policies, rewards systems, and career development opportunities — what’s missing and what can be improved?
• Make it a common practice to share insights with others by hosting events such as lunch-and-learns, after-action reviews, and designated development days.

Build a Learning Culture That’s Tailored to Your Organization

To tailor your learning strategy to your organization, make sure to align your business strategy and leadership development opportunities, as well as your organization’s broader values, language, and brand. Examine the capabilities needed both today and into the future, and ask employees what type of development would be most valuable for them, as well as how they prefer to learn.

It’s important to acknowledge that not everyone is in a place to jump in right away. Keep in mind that behavior change is difficult. Meet people where they are, encouraging small steps, risk-taking, and sharing through peer support. Use metrics to keep a pulse on what’s resonating and having an impact so that you can adapt as needed and evolve your learning culture strategy as you grow.

Every organization is different, so the path to truly creating a culture of learning that will become a part of the ecosystem will be different as well. But with an intentional focus and commitment from the leadership team, you can plant the seeds today that allow a learning culture to flourish at your organization — resulting in a more agile work environment that’s prepared for the challenges of tomorrow.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

Build a learning culture in your organization by providing ample access to growth and development opportunities. Take advantage of our leadership development subscription, CCL Passport for unlimited access to our world-renowned training content and our most comprehensive package of proven, transformative leadership solutions. If you license our content, you can bring our proven research, programs, and tools in-house to leaders at all levels of your organization.

Frequently Asked Questions About a Learning Culture

More questions? Our experts are here to help. Let’s have a conversation!

The post Cultivate a Learning Culture Within Your Organization appeared first on CCL.

The best solutions may be unknown and finding them isn’t an individual task. Leadership is a social process, and discovering solutions to complex challenges requires senior leadership teams to embrace collective problem-solving through sensemaking of the situation: unpacking complexities, working through polarizing dilemmas, and aligning responses and actions.

What Is Collective Sensemaking?

Sensemaking is the act of pausing to reflect on a situation or challenge and creating shared understanding amid complexity and chaos. Like leadership, sensemaking too is a social process, one which is most productive when leaders come together as a team to engage in collaborative inquiry, exploring perceptions of current reality to create situational awareness.

Building a collective understanding of the problems that need solving helps leaders generate potential solutions and decide what to do. This process requires senior leadership teams to commit to immersing themselves in facilitated, reflective dialogue.

The 3 Steps to Collective Sensemaking

Drawing on decades of experience with senior teams, we guide leaders through 3 sensemaking steps that bring clarity and purposeful action for collective problem-solving that addresses their organization’s most complex challenges. These steps are:

1. Framing current reality by naming the challenges confronting the organization
2. Assessing and exploring the most problematic challenges (taking a “deeper dive”)
3. Generating responses, actions, and solutions from the discussion

Below, we offer questions to help structure the conversation during the first 2 steps to provoke deeper thought and richer discussions. Putting the challenges in the center of the conversation and resisting the temptation to go into solution mode is required to get the most out of the dialogue.

That gets flipped with Step 3, where the discussion moves from articulating the situation to determining what to do about it — with the goal to emerge with specific actions and commitments for collective problem-solving. Here’s a closer look at each step.

Framing Current Reality

The process of framing is designed to develop a collective understanding of the current reality, the associated challenges, and any unknowns or issues that haven’t been discussed. This can be accomplished by addressing 4 questions:

• How are today’s challenges presenting threats?
• How are today’s challenges presenting opportunities?
• How are the challenges we’re encountering familiar?
• How are we challenged in ways for which we have no prior experience?

There is no specific order for discussing these questions. A second round of questions helps the senior leadership team go deeper to articulate what’s confronting them:

• What are the sources of threats, and how might we recast them as opportunities?
• What do we need to do to bring opportunities forward?
• What do we need to do to ensure we’re capitalizing on our strengths?
• What capabilities do we need to develop to address challenges for which we have no experience?

Once the team has fully addressed these questions and created a shared understanding of their current reality, it’s time to advance the conversation to assessing the current state and determining how they can respond to the challenges.

Assessing Key Challenges

To further unpack the challenges that have been identified through framing, here are 2 approaches that can deepen the conversation:

Using our Direction – Alignment – Commitment (DAC) model, senior leadership teams can explore the extent to which they are making leadership happen in the context of the current state and the associated challenges. In the spirit of continuing with dialogue throughout this process, the team responds to 3 questions:

• To what extent do we have clarity of vision and agreement on the overall goals? (Direction)
• To what extent is work coordinated and integrated? (Alignment)
• To what extent do we act with mutual responsibility for the whole to make the success and wellbeing of the organization the priority? (Commitment)

By completing a DAC assessment, the team can identify areas that may be compounding the challenges and require strengthening. This dialogue produces useful insights that can be carried into the third generating step.

The second framework that can deepen conversation is polarity thinking, which helps identify whether the senior leadership team is looking at a problem to be solved or a polarity to be managed. Many of the challenges that teams are facing today have multiple solutions and defy the notion of the “one best answer.”

In such cases, the conversation needs to move from “either / or” to “both / and,” and now the team is dealing with polarities. Also described as managing a paradox, conundrum, or contradiction, a polarity is a dilemma that’s ongoing, unsolvable, and contains seemingly opposing ideas.

To explore a polarity, the team conducts a facilitated discussion with the following structure:

1. Articulate the 2 “poles” that seem to be competing or at odds. For example, requiring all employees to work in the company office spaces or allowing hybrid / remote employees.
2. Explore the positive outcomes and potential upsides from focusing on one pole over the other.
3. Explore the negative outcomes and possible downsides of focusing on one pole over the other.
4. Identify how to gain and maintain the positive results from each polarity, and the early warning signs to watch for if embarking into the downsides of each.

The exercise ultimately provides greater insights into the multiple facets of challenges as well as sets the team up for arriving at conclusions on how best to lead the organization through the complexity they’re encountering. 

Generating Actions and Solutions

Some senior leadership teams may be satisfied with framing their current reality and stop there, while others may choose to invest more time assessing. Regardless of the amount of time and effort that goes into the sensemaking exercise, it’s important to save some brainpower and collective mindshare for getting tactical and generating actions to take from the session to implement collective problem-solving. This discussion takes shape in 3 steps:

1. Review: Inventory the outputs from the conversations, identifying the key takeaways and insights.
2. Reflect: Discuss the themes and patterns that emerge from the insights and identify what needs to happen to activate what is emerging.
3. Apply: List specific decisions and actions that need to come from the sensemaking session, with owners, dates, and follow-up tactics.

Becoming a Sustainably Adaptive Organization

To anticipate and adapt to today’s leadership challenges amid disruption, organizations must build their capacity for collective problem-solving and collaborative inquiry. These are muscles that can be strengthened by routinely incorporating sensemaking practices into discussions whenever the organization encounters shifting dynamics and new challenges.

By engaging more levels of the organization in sensemaking, leaders set in motion a shared, collective view that enables the organization to continuously assess and adapt its capabilities to meet the challenges of today and the unknowns of the future.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

Our Organizational Leadership Practice partners with organizations to build leadership strategies that foster collective sensemaking — facilitating dialogue and creating shared understanding that helps senior leadership teams with collective problem-solving.

The post Collective Sensemaking in an Environment of Constant Disruption appeared first on CCL.

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When leaders execute their organization’s business strategies, they can’t forget their organization’s culture — the self-reinforcing web of beliefs, practices, patterns, and behaviors — because, as has often been said, culture trumps strategy every time.

Your organization’s culture is the way things are done; it’s the way people interact, make decisions, and influence others. Leaders’ own conscious and unconscious beliefs drive decisions and behaviors, and repeated behaviors become leadership practices. Because these practices eventually become the patterns of your organization’s leadership culture, leaders must understand their responsibility in creating — or changing it.

And the type of organizational culture you have, combined with how your organization approaches and understands the definition of leadership itself, together dictate how successful your business strategies will be.

In the face of perpetual crisis, leaders must adapt, not just react. Explore our guide to Leadership in Disruption to learn how leading with culture, vision, and collective agility helps organizations thrive through complexity.

Get the Guide

3 Types of Organizational Leadership Cultures

Dependent, Independent, and Interdependent

In our research, we describe organizational leadership cultures in a hierarchy of 3 types:

• Dependent leadership cultures operate with the belief that people in authority are responsible for leadership.
• Independent leadership cultures operate with the belief that leadership emerges out of individual expertise and heroic action.
• Interdependent leadership cultures operate with the belief that leadership is a collective activity to the benefit of the organization as a whole.

And in our experience, we’ve found that organizations, like people, tend to evolve along a path over time, moving from dependent to independent to interdependent leadership cultures. Each successive culture moves the organization to a greater level of capability for dealing with complexity and accelerated change.

But how do you identify the organizational leadership culture that you have at your organization? And going even further, how can you determine whether you have the culture you need for the strategy you’ve set?

How to Identify Your Organization’s Leadership Culture

One way to decode what type of organizational culture you have is to assess how leaders go about creating direction, alignment, and commitment (DAC), which are the outcomes of leadership, at your organization. DAC is a key part of how leadership works in organizations.

The process of creating DAC may vary greatly from organization to organization, depending upon the predominant type of organizational culture, as shown below and explained in our white paper.

Direction

Direction determines how your organization decides on a way to go. Looking at the chart above, you can see that, depending upon the type of organizational culture you have, the approach to setting direction could be primarily rooted in compliance (in dependent cultures), influence (in independent cultures), or shared exploration (in interdependent cultures).

Alignment

Alignment refers to how you coordinate your work so that it fits together. Similar to direction, the approach to creating alignment varies depending upon your  organization’s culture and maturity. In dependent cultures, alignment results from fitting into the expectations of the larger system. In independent cultures, it results from negotiation. And in more mature, interdependent cultures, it results from ongoing mutual adjustment.

Commitment

Commitment speaks to mutual responsibility for the group — when people prioritize the success of the collective over their individual success. In dependent cultures, that commitment results from loyalty to the source of authority of the community itself. In independent cultures, it results from evaluating the benefits for self while benefiting the larger community. And in interdependent cultures, commitment results from engaging in a developing community.

Is Your Leadership Strategy in Sync With Your Organizational Culture?

You may be able to see how, as you move through the levels and types of organizational culture, that the most mature types of organizational cultures are interdependent. (Curious to learn more? Discover the 5 principles for interdependent leadership.)

Once you have identified what type of organizational leadership culture you have now, it’s time to ask:

• To what extent is our culture having a positive or negative impact on performance?
• Is our culture helping us to achieve the business strategies we’ve set?

If your business strategy and leadership culture are at odds, your leaders need to get serious about changing themselves — so they can create greater direction, alignment, and commitment and, over time, boost performance and meet strategic business goals. This is especially critical if you’re about to embark on a large-scale change initiative. Are your leaders ready and able to help you transform your organization?

For optimal outcomes, you must carefully link your business strategy, leadership strategy, and organizational culture. And make sure that your organization’s leadership development initiatives are aligned and crafted to support these, as well.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

Partner with our experts to identify what type of organizational culture you have and ensure that your leadership culture and strategy are aligned. Learn more about our approach to Organizational Leadership Culture Change.

The post Can You Identify Your Organization’s Leadership Culture? appeared first on CCL.

To answer these questions, you must think about a different kind of learning and development. Yes, you want to ensure that you’re preparing a pipeline of leaders for the future. But how exactly are you doing that?

Your organization needs both horizontal and vertical development to get you there.

The Difference Between Horizontal & Vertical Leadership Development

As outlined in our white paper, when we say horizontal development, we mean the traditional kind of talent development: increasing technical skillsets and building the most important leadership competencies. If your organization is like most, you’re probably already providing all sorts of opportunities for horizontal development — disseminating more knowledge, skills, and information to people. These skills are essential and necessary — but they aren’t sufficient amid the perpetual disruption that organizations face today.

In contrast, vertical development is entirely different. What is vertical development?

Vertical development is about developing more complex and sophisticated ways of thinking, greater wisdom, and clearer insights. It’s called vertical development because it’s based on levels, or vertical stages, of thinking. It involves gaining new perspectives and leadership mindsets needed to make your organizational strategy work.

For example, with vertical development, managers and groups learn to tackle a problem with inquiry — questions, observation, and reflection — before jumping into advocating, lobbying, or deciding. This sensemaking opens the door to deeper understanding, greater clarity, more options, and multiple right answers — which are especially needed for leading in complex, uncertain situations.

In short, horizontal development builds skills, while vertical development helps build a more interconnected, interdependent leadership culture in your organization.

In the face of perpetual crisis, leaders must adapt, not just react. Explore our guide to Leadership in Disruption to learn how leading with culture, vision, and collective agility helps organizations thrive through complexity.

Get the Guide

How Vertical Development Happens

3 Conditions That Catalyze Vertical Development for Leaders

Our research has found that these 3 primary conditions support vertical leadership development:

1. Heat experiences
2. Colliding perspectives
3. Elevated sensemaking

Many well-intentioned leadership development programs fail to deliver lasting results because they hit on only 1 or 2 of the conditions needed for vertical development. And any one of the above can provide some value, but it’s not until you combine all 3 that you have vertical development, and vertical growth really takes off. Let’s take a closer look at each of these 3 conditions.

Heat Experiences: The What

When leaders face complex situations that disrupt and disorient their habitual ways of thinking, when they know the pressure is on and the results matter, they are in heat experiences. These situations help leaders discover that their current way of making sense of the world is inadequate. As a result, they seek out new and better ways to make sense of their challenge. Heat experiences are the what that initiates vertical development.

For example, a general manager who’s been successful in the US gets transferred to India to open a new facility. She’s out of her depth, and the consequences of failing are real.

Colliding Perspectives: The Who

Leaders also can challenge their existing mental models when they’re exposed to others with different worldviews, opinions, backgrounds, and training. These relationships increase the number of perspectives through which leaders experience their world. Colliding experiences are the who that enables vertical development.

For example, bringing together leaders from different functions and departments who normally wouldn’t work together and asking them to solve real problems together. Suddenly, they’re exposed to beliefs, perspectives, and priorities that they had little or no exposure to before.

Elevated Sensemaking: The How

As leaders process and make sense of these perspectives and experiences, they enter an elevated stage of vertical development. A larger, more advanced worldview emerges and, with time, stabilizes and becomes their new way of thinking. This is the how that integrates development, particularly when preparing high-potential leaders for the unknown.

For example, members of an executive team use action inquiry tools to examine a difficult issue. As they uncover the beliefs and thinking behind their behavior, they begin to discard, keep, or update their mindsets to align with the leadership culture needed for their organizational strategy.

Is Your Organization Focused on Both Horizontal & Vertical Development?

Questions to Ask

Are both horizontal and vertical development factored into how you think about your organization’s culture, and how you are tackling talent development challenges? Consider these questions:

• Does our organization understand the difference between horizontal vs. vertical development? Are both horizontal and vertical development incorporated strategically into our leadership development methods and approach? If not, why?
• Is our organization aligning our leadership culture to our strategy? Organizational leadership cultures develop through different stages: dependent, independent, and, eventually, interdependent. Has our team worked out which leadership culture our strategy requires? Are we designing leadership development to match?
• Do we understand how leaders make different sense of disruption and systemic crises at each of the stages? Whether explicitly or implicitly, is this understanding blended into the way we develop our leaders? Development that helps leaders overcome belief barriers enables systemic solutions to systemic problems.

The Benefits of Investing in Vertical Leadership Development

Developing more complex mindsets alone won’t be successful if you don’t also pursue a leadership culture that supports them, according to our research. You must change embedded beliefs to change culture; when you do, vertical growth can help the whole organization win. Our research with clients has identified 5 organizational outcomes that vertical development creates:

• Silo-busting: Trust builds across silos. Collaboration spans boundaries and creates more productive partnerships.
• Agile decisions: Decisions are made with a system-wide perspective. Team and organizational challenges are visible and managed in an environment where people support one another.
• Enterprise ownership: Leaders are committed to the entire organization’s performance, not just their own division or team.
• Dilemma-readiness: Instead of insisting on one correct view, senior leaders use “both / and” polarity thinking, seeing tensions as ongoing dilemmas rather than problems to solve. Multiple perspectives align the organization to new approaches through debate and dialogue.
• Strategic complexity / disruptive capability: As leaders share information across boundaries, they learn to work together effectively. The team strengthens collaboration and creates a culture of full engagement.

Your Role in Tailoring Development, Both Horizontal & Vertical

Employees come into their roles with different experiences, skills, perspectives, and stages of development. L&D leaders must put experience at the center of talent management, tailor development, and meet people where they are — as not everyone is ready for the same challenges at the same time.

For example, you may emphasize horizontal development for your early-career talent, but you can plant the seeds for vertical development for them, too. Learning from heat experiences, witnessing colliding perspectives, and helping elevate their sensemaking can support frontline leaders through many of the common challenges that first-time managers face.

And for experienced executives, senior leaders need different leadership skills, so their process of vertical development will likely be more complex and collaborative — but their mindsets or approaches may be more fixed.

There’s an important difference between helping a leader grow and trying to force it, though. At each stage of development, both horizontal and vertical development are important. Your role is to create the right conditions in which many different people can grow and develop.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

Partner with us for both horizontal and vertical development that’s tailored to your organization’s unique context and culture. Learn more about our talent development services and solutions.

The post Vertical vs. Horizontal Development: Why Your Leaders Need Both to Succeed appeared first on CCL.

Welcome to the succession-centric era of leadership development.

Whether you’re here to decode the patterns of past leadership transitions, pinpoint the forces shaping talent development today, or get a framework for understanding the needs of tomorrow’s leaders, this is your guide to making sense of succession planning.

Our research connects the dots between cultural stories, scientific insights, industry case studies, and actionable frameworks to help you and your leadership team navigate one of the most critical challenges in leadership. We break down some of the biggest wins and losses in leadership transitions, reveal emerging trends reshaping succession planning, and give you data-informed strategic recommendations to make decisions.

How to Make Our Succession Planning Research Work for You

• Know your why. Before diving in, ask yourself: Why I am here? What am I solving for? Are you here to design a long-term succession strategy? Strengthen your leadership pipeline? Learn more about how your teams understand and experience succession? Avoid the traps that have taken down others? The best way to use this succession planning research is to read with a purpose. And that purpose is yours.
• Think playbook, not textbook. You don’t need to read every word we’ve written to get value from our research. Start with the executive summary for the big picture. Then, pick the sections that align with your opportunities and challenges. For some it will be lessons from high-stakes stories of transition. For others, it will be evidence-based best practices or frameworks you can put into action today.
• Engage actively, apply impactfully. Take notes, flag key insights, and concentrate on execution. Succession isn’t a passive process. It’s an evolving mindset that shapes the future of your organization. Use our research to ask better questions, start critical conversations, tell impactful stories, and design leadership transitions that fill today’s gaps while creating stronger tomorrows.

Read Our 4-Part Research Feature

The post Succession Planning Reimagined: Research for Navigating Leadership Transitions appeared first on CCL.

It’s critical for companies to hire and develop more effective managers and leaders capable of moving their organization forward during both good and challenging times. That requires looking beyond traditional strategies for management development and cultivating the skills most important for success.

One of those skills, perhaps unexpectedly, is empathy — a vital leadership competency.

Empathetic leadership means having the ability to understand the needs of others, and being aware of their feelings and thoughts. Unfortunately, empathy in the workplace has long been a soft skill that’s overlooked as a performance indicator. Our research, however, has shown that today’s successful leaders must be more “person-focused” and able to work well with people from varying teams, departments, countries, cultures, and backgrounds.

To determine if empathy influences a manager’s job performance, our research team analyzed data from 6,731 mid- to upper-middle-level managers in 38 countries. The leaders in our study were rated by their peers, direct reports, and superiors on their level of empathy through a Benchmarks® 360-degree feedback assessment.

As noted in our white paper, we found that empathetic leadership is positively related to job performance, particularly among mid-level managers and above.

In other words, our research found that managers who practiced empathetic leadership toward direct reports were viewed as better performers by their bosses. The findings were consistent across the sample: those managers who were rated as empathetic by subordinates were also rated as high performing by their own boss.

The ability to be compassionate and connect with others is critical to our lives, both personally and professionally. Demonstrating empathy in the workplace — a key part of emotional intelligence and leadership effectiveness — also improves human interactions in general and can lead to more effective communication and positive outcomes, in both work and home settings.

Defining Empathy in the Workplace

Empathy is the ability to perceive and relate to the thoughts, emotions, or experiences of others. Those with high levels of empathy are skilled at understanding a situation from another person’s perspective and lead with compassion.

Empathetic leadership in the context of the workplace simply means that people leaders are able to establish true connections with one another that enhance relationships and performance.

It’s important to remember the difference between sympathy and empathy, as the 2 are often confused.

• Sympathy is typically defined by feelings of pity for another person, without really understanding what it’s like to be in their situation.
• Empathy, on the other hand, refers to the capacity or ability to imagine oneself in the situation of another, experiencing the emotions, ideas, or opinions of that person.

Both in and out of the workplace, empathy is often more productive and supportive than sympathy.

How to Show More Empathetic Leadership

4 Ways to Increase Your Empathy in the Workplace

Displaying empathetic leadership can take many shapes and forms. We recommend leaders take the following 4 steps to show greater empathy in the workplace and with their colleagues and direct reports.

1. Watch for signs of burnout in others.

Work burnout is a real problem today, and it comes at greater risk during times of intense stress and pressure. Many people are stressed, putting in more work hours than ever before and finding it difficult to separate work and home life.

Managers who are skilled at empathetic leadership are able to recognize signs of overwork in others before burnout becomes an issue that results in disengagement or turnover. This might mean taking a few extra minutes each week to check in with team members and gauge how they’re handling their current workload and helping them to recover from overwork.

2. Show sincere interest in the needs, hopes, and dreams of other people.

Part of leading with empathy involves working to understand the unique needs and goals of each team member and how to best match work assignments to contribute to both performance and employee satisfaction. Team members who see that their manager recognizes them in this way are more engaged and willing to go the extra mile. Showing kindness in the workplace can boost performance and culture.

3. Demonstrate a willingness to help an employee with personal problems.

Lines between work and personal life are becoming increasingly blurred. Empathetic leaders understand that their team members are dynamic individuals who are shouldering personal problems while having to maintain their professional responsibilities. They recognize that it’s part of their role to lead and support those team members when they need it most.

Keeping open lines of communication and encouraging transparency is a good way to foster psychological safety and help team members feel comfortable sharing.

4. Show compassion when other people disclose a personal loss.

Real connections and friendships at work matter, and empathetic leadership is a tool that managers can use to establish bonds with those they’re privileged to lead. We’ve all been through personal loss, so even if we can’t relate to the specific loss our team member experiences, we can act empathetically and let them know they’re supported. This is key for compassionate leadership.

How Organizations Can Encourage Empathetic Leadership

Some leaders naturally show more empathy at work than others and will have an advantage over their peers who have difficulty expressing empathy. Most leaders fall in the middle and are sometimes or somewhat empathetic.

Fortunately, it’s not a fixed trait. Empathetic leadership can be learned. If given enough time and support, leaders can develop and enhance their empathy skills through coaching, training, or developmental opportunities and initiatives.

Organizations and HR leaders can encourage a more empathetic workplace and help managers improve their empathy skills in a number of simple ways.

5 Ways to Encourage Empathy in the Workplace

1. Talk about empathy at work to signal its value.

Let leaders know that empathy matters. Many managers consider task-oriented skills such as monitoring and planning to be more important in controlling the performance of their team members. But research shows that understanding, caring, and developing others is just as important, if not more important, particularly in today’s workforce.

Your organization should put an emphasis on leadership soft skills needed at every leader level, and explain that giving time and attention to others fosters empathy, which in turn enhances team performance and improves perceived managerial effectiveness.

2. Teach listening skills.

To understand others and sense what they’re feeling, managers must be good listeners, skilled in active listening techniques, who let others know that they’re being heard and express understanding of concerns and problems.

When a manager is a good listener, people feel respected, and critical trust on the team can grow. To show the highest levels of empathy in the workplace, managers should focus on listening to hear the meaning behind what others are saying by paying attention to not only the words being said, but also the feelings and values being shown, through nonverbal cues such as tone, pace of speech, facial expressions, and gestures.

3. Encourage genuine perspective-taking.

Leaders should consistently put themselves in the other person’s place. For managers, this includes taking into account the personal lived experiences or perspectives of their employees. It also can be applied to solving problems, managing conflicts, or driving innovation. It’s very helpful for individuals to understand the role social identity plays as well.

4. Cultivate compassion.

Support managers who care about how others feel, and consider the effects that business decisions have on employees, customers, and communities. Go beyond the standard-issue values statement and allow time for compassionate reflection and response. Remember, your employees care about social responsibility; your organization should too.

5. Support global managers.

The ability of your middle managers to be empathetic leaders who can collaborate across boundaries is especially important for those working in global or cross-cultural organizations. Leading a multicultural team requires cultural intelligence and the ability to understand people who have very different perspectives and experiences.

A Closing Thought on Empathy in the Workplace

And as the data we shared above shows, when managers hone their empathetic leadership skills, they improve their effectiveness and increase their chances of success in the job. Empathetic leaders are assets to organizations, in part because they are able to effectively build and maintain relationships and retain talent — a critical part of leading organizations anywhere in the world.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

Model empathetic leadership and help your people develop greater empathy in the workplace with a customized learning journey for your leaders using our research-backed modules. Available leadership topics include Boundary Spanning Leadership, Communication, Emotional Intelligence Training for Leaders, Listening to Understand, Psychological Safety & Trust, and more.

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