• Direction is agreement within your organization on overall goals
• Alignment means coordinated work in your organization
• Commitment is a feeling of mutual responsibility in your organization

Together, these 3 elements are the outcomes of leadership, and they’re essential to tackling any challenge — including the one of integrating AI (artificial intelligence) into organizational workflows and culture.

Strengthening DAC isn’t optional — it’s an imperative for individuals, teams, and organizations to be able to thrive amid complexity, uncertainty, and change.

And our research suggests a strong correlation between high levels of DAC in an organization and high levels of AI maturity or adoption.

The 4 Stages of AI Maturity

To better understand the potential connections between AI maturity and leadership, we turned to MIT’s CISR Enterprise AI Maturity model, which depicts 4 stages of organizational AI maturity:

Stage 1: Discovering (Experiment & Prepare)

At this stage, organizations are curious about AI and have started to reflect on the human implications on AI. Organizations in this stage focus on educating the workforce on AI, establishing acceptable use policies, improving data accessibility, ensuring data-driven decision-making, and identifying where human input is necessary in processes.

Stage 2: Adopting (Build Pilots & Capability)

At this stage, organizations recognize AI’s relevance to their strategy and are starting to experiment and integrate. This includes simplifying and automating processes, creating use cases, sharing data via APIs, leveraging a coaching and communicative management style, and using both traditional and generative AI models to enhance work.

Stage 3: Transforming (Develop AI Ways of Working)

At this stage, organizations are fully aware of how AI impacts their work and are building new workflows and process for effective AI integration. This involves expanding process automation efforts, adopting a test-and-learn approach, designing for reuse, incorporating pre-trained models and exploring proprietary AI models, and investigating the use of autonomous agents.

Stage 4: Differentiating (Become AI Future-Ready)

At this stage, organizations are recognized as leading the way in AI transformation and are imagining and prototyping new methods of using AI. This involves embedding AI into decision-making and processes; developing and offering AI-augmented business services; and integrating traditional, generative, agentic, and robotic AI.

AI Maturity & Leadership: Our Research Findings

For our research, we created a survey based on MIT’s AI Maturity model to create a survey that measures AI adoption /AI maturity and leadership outcomes (levels of DAC) within an organization. We hoped to learn:

• What do organizations seek to gain by using / integrating AI? (This gets at shared Direction.)
• How will organizations and teams work together to effectively leverage AI? (This suggests group Alignment.)
• And how will organizations foster the trust and psychological safety required to achieve the buy-in to integrate AI? (This signals shared Commitment.)

After surveying 406 respondents based in APAC, EMEA, and the Americas, we found that DAC was a strong and significant predictor of higher levels of AI maturity. In other words, it’s fair to suggest that organizations need high levels of shared leadership to progress along their AI maturity journey, from Stage 1 to Stage 4.

Recommendations for Building Stronger AI Maturity With DAC

While the research doesn’t show causation (we can’t say for certain that increasing your organization’s DAC will automatically make AI integration easier), we can say that without high levels of shared Direction, Alignment, and Commitment at your organization, your chances of successfully moving up the stages of AI maturity are much lower.

So, how can leaders help their organizations foster strong DAC, particularly as it relates to improving their organization’s AI maturity?

• To increase shared Direction: Clearly communicate how AI will empower the business strategy through value creation, innovation, and impact across the organization. Seek out ways to help teams leverage both AI and soft skills to help them thrive.
• To facilitate more Alignment: Ensure leaders, teams, and systems coordinate in how to leverage AI, creating shared priorities and eliminating silos. To do this, explore what method of governance would work best for your organization. For instance, you could explore a shared decision-making model where overall AI usage across your organization is governed by a cross-functional team. Or, you could have shared policies but a decentralized AI governance structure, where individual functions oversee their own AI usage but align to shared organizational policies.
• To support greater Commitment: Foster psychological safety, continuous learning, and a growth mindset to empower your organization to embrace AI-driven change. Consider how AI and culture impact each other. By helping your organization embrace a culture that prioritizes continuous learning, you can help shift your organization to one that can best embrace and leverage what AI can enable.

Embracing Leadership for Greater AI Maturity

Leveraging AI within organizations requires more than just technological adoption; it demands robust leadership, characterized by our Direction – Alignment – Commitment (DAC) framework. Our research underscores the critical role DAC plays in progressing through the stages of AI maturity, revealing that high levels of DAC are strongly correlated with advanced AI integration.

Furthermore, MIT found that financial performance generally improves as an organization moves through the 4 stages of AI maturity as well, which further emphasizes the value of strong shared Direction, Alignment, and Commitment in navigating AI transformation.

By clearly communicating AI’s value, ensuring coordinated efforts across teams, and fostering a culture of psychological safety and continuous learning, your organization can not only enhance DAC levels and strengthen the outcomes of leadership, but increase in AI maturity — and thrive in an era of complexity and uncertainty.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

Ready to help leaders at your organization understand how to become more effective in setting direction, building commitment, and creating alignment to support greater AI maturity? Partner with us to craft a customized learning journey using our research-based modules. Available leadership topics include Boundary Spanning, Communication, Conflict Resolution, the DAC Framework for Effective Leadership, Emotional Intelligence, Listening to Understand, Psychological Safety, and more.

The post Why Leadership Is Important for Organizational AI Maturity appeared first on CCL.

The Society for Industrial & Organizational Psychology (SIOP) is the premier professional association for the science and practice of Industrial-Organizational (I-O) psychology, which focuses on the scientific study of human behavior in organizations and in the workplace. The SIOP Frontiers Series focuses on cutting-edge research in I-O psychology and related fields.

The chapter, titled “Framework for Matching Leaders’ Challenges with Leadership Development: A Case Study of AI in Action,” was co-authored by CCL’s Ramya Balakrishnan and Jean Brittain Leslie alongside Scott Tonidandel of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and Stephen Young of Caterpillar, Inc. and introduces the Leadership Challenge Ladder framework.

Using data from 37,000 leaders across 6,000 organizations, the research project used AI to identify 42 persistent leadership challenges that researchers organized into 3 key themes: personal growth, people and task demands, and working within a larger system.

The chapter also discusses how the framework was applied to redesign CCL’s flagship Leadership Development Program (LDP)^®, resulting in a 100% participant recommendation rate, a 98% relevance rating, and a 50% improvement in team performance metrics.

“The inclusion of our leadership challenges research in the SIOP Frontiers Series underscores CCL’s commitment to advancing the science of leadership while ensuring practical relevance,” said Ramya Balakrishnan, co-author and Data Scientist at CCL.

“By applying cutting-edge, AI-based approaches and embedding these insights into our Leadership Development Program redesign, this work demonstrates the practical application of scientific research to real-world needs and the transformative potential of AI in organizational psychology.”

Learn more about our leadership development research or read our Leadership Challenge Ladder technical report.

The post CCL’s AI-Driven Research Findings on Top Leadership Challenges Published by SIOP appeared first on CCL.

You may be pretty familiar with the model of the external leadership coach. But what if you need to coach a subordinate or a peer within your organization?

One of the most powerful responsibilities of leadership is helping others grow. Yet many leaders hesitate when it comes to putting themselves in the role of a coach. It may feel like a challenging task to coach a colleague or direct report, and you may wonder: What do I ask? How do I guide without simply giving advice?

That’s where a proven coaching framework and knowing some key coaching principles for leaders can help.

At CCL, we know from experience that coaching doesn’t have to be complicated. With the right approach, leaders at any level can use coaching conversations to build trust, improve relationships, and strengthen performance. Our world-class executive leadership coaches use our proven coaching framework and principles to coach others.

By applying the same coaching model and tips in your own conversations, you’ll improve your skills, confidence, and impact. These are the essential coaching principles for leaders to master, and the foundational coaching model they’re built upon.

The Assessment – Challenge – Support Coaching Model: A Practical Tool

Assessment – Challenge – Support (ACS) is our simple, proven leadership coaching framework that provides a clear path for guiding coaching conversations. Instead of relying on a script or feeling pressured to have all the answers, ACS helps you spark self-awareness, stretch thinking, and encourage follow-through.

Here’s what using this coaching framework looks like in practice.

Step 1: Assess — Where Are They Now?

Every good coaching conversation begins with curiosity. The Assess phase is about understanding your coachee’s current reality and inviting them to reflect.

Rather than jumping in with solutions, you create space for them to surface their own insights. This step helps build trust and sets the stage for growth.

Sample questions you might ask:

• What’s working well for you in this situation?
• Where are you feeling stuck?
• How do you see your role in this challenge?

By encouraging them to slow down and assess, you help the other person feel heard and increase their self-awareness, and you gain a clearer picture of where to guide the coaching conversation.

Step 2: Challenge — What’s Possible?

Once you’ve listened, it’s time to stretch their thinking. A key principle of coaching is creating a safe, supportive, yet challenging environment. Challenge isn’t about criticism; it’s about encouraging people to reframe and explore new possibilities.

A well-placed challenge helps your coachee to recognize assumptions, uncover hidden biases, or consider bolder options. Often, this is where breakthrough insights happen.

You might ask:

• What assumptions might you be making here?
• What options haven’t you considered yet?
• If you weren’t afraid of failing, what would you try?

Challenge opens the door to growth and invites people to look beyond their comfort zones and step into new possibilities and different ways of thinking and acting.

Step 3: Support — What’s Next?

Coaching isn’t complete without encouragement and follow-through. The Support phase is about helping the person translate any insight into action.

Playing the role of coach, you provide accountability and reassurance, but the ownership stays with them. This is where momentum builds.

Questions to consider asking:

• What’s one action you can commit to this week?
• How can I support you as you move forward?
• Who else could help you succeed?

Support ensures the coaching conversation isn’t just talk. It becomes a catalyst for real change.

6 Core Principles of Effective Coaching for Leaders

While ACS gives you a practical model for everyday coaching conversations, effective leadership coaching is also grounded in broader foundational principles and strategies.

Whether you’re an external executive coach or a leader coaching others within your organization, what it takes to coach people is fairly similar, and these 6 coaching principles for leaders will help you succeed.

1. Create a safe and supportive, yet challenging environment.

Coaching is most effective when people feel both safe and stretched. Too much challenge without support erodes trust. Too much support without challenge leads to stagnation. Strive for balance. (ACS is built on this very foundation.)

You want to build trust and confidence, encourage honesty and candor, boost morale, and help your coachee feel psychologically safe at work. It’s up to you to create an environment where risk-taking feels rewarding, not risky, so keep your attitude as open and as nonjudgmental as possible, and let the coachee know you support and respect them, even as you test their knowledge and skills.

2. Work within the coachee’s agenda.

Coaching isn’t about your personal priorities. When holding a coaching conversation, let the coachee decide which goals to work on and even how to go about improving. If you need to address organizational needs, shift into a managerial role so that the coaching relationship remains collaborative. This is an important coaching principle that leaders should know to preserve trust and effectiveness.

3. Facilitate and collaborate.

The best coaches don’t give answers; they ask good questions. Focus on using active listening skills when coaching others. Really hear the coachee’s needs and avoid filling the lesson with your own life stories and theories. Active listening and collaboration ensure that the coachee owns their next steps. Action items rest with the coachee — with you acting as the facilitator and collaborator. Your role is to guide, not to lecture.

4. Advocate self-awareness.

You want your coachee to recognize their own strengths and weaknesses — a prerequisite skill for any good leader. In the same way, you should understand how your behaviors as a coach impact the people around you. Demonstrate a sense of awareness in yourself, and you’re more likely to foster a similar self-awareness in your coachee. You may also want to share some specific ways to boost self-awareness.

5. Promote learning from experience.

Most people can learn, grow, and change only if they have the right set of experiences and are open to learning from them. As a coach, you can help your coachee reflect on past events and analyze what went well (and what didn’t). Foster experiential learning and using experience to fuel development, and your coachee will continue to improve long after the end of your lessons.

6. Model what you coach.

Be a leader yourself.

This, the last of the 6 principles of coaching for leaders, may be the most difficult to embody — as it means putting into practice the leadership lessons you’ve been trying to communicate.

And remember, if you don’t feel you have the capacity to coach on a particular issue, refer your coachee to someone else who has experience in that area or a trusted executive coaching services provider.

Why Coaching Principles Matter

Coaching is no longer the domain of outside experts alone. Leaders at every level and in every industry are expected to support growth and development within their teams.

By combining our proven and practical ACS leadership coaching framework with these 6 coaching principles that leaders should know, you can transform everyday conversations into powerful opportunities for performance and growth.

The result? Your team feels safe, stretched, supported — and equipped to step into the future.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

Improve your leadership and enhance your ability to coach others with our Better Conversations Every Day coaching & conversational skills training to gain practical coaching tips and strategies to be a more effective leader-coach.

The post The 6 Principles of Leadership Coaching, Based on Assessment – Challenge – Support 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.

When somebody disappoints you, fails to deliver what you expected, or lets you down in some way, what do you do?

If you’re like most people, you make assumptions that are usually not positive: “That guy isn’t a team player… he’s lazy… doesn’t care… or just doesn’t get it.”

And then you take action: “I’ll just find a workaround… get somebody else to do the work… rethink responsibilities… initiate discipline.”

We often don’t even realize that we create stories about people in our heads, especially when they disappoint us. This happens all the time. We see a behavior, assume we know why the other person acted a certain way, and react based on those assumptions.

But many difficulties can be avoided by having a clarifying discussion. Though people usually intend to do the right thing, sometimes something gets scrambled or misinterpreted along the way, and the impact is far from what they intended.

The only way to know what someone intended is to ask them — and the only way to let a person know their impact is to tell them. These important conversations rarely happen, though, and we move through our days in a tangle of misperceptions and actions, based on incorrect assumptions.

So, how do you, as a leader, tackle difficult conversations to find out why a person chose to behave a certain way? We recommend using our research-based, widely-recognized method for delivering feedback, Situation-Behavior-Impact, or (SBI).

The benefits of using SBI to give feedback and explore impact vs. intent are clear: Using the SBI method helps both parties become more comfortable with the feedback process. Our research shows that SBI reduces anxiety around giving feedback, as well as the defensiveness of the recipient in hearing it. We also found that employees rate managers as more effective when they give feedback more frequently.

What Does Situation-Behavior-Impact Mean?

The Situation-Behavior-Impact (SBI) method for giving someone feedback is simple and direct. You simply:

1. Clarify the Situation,
2. Describe the specific Behaviors observed, and
3. Explain the Impact that behavior had on you.

How Can You Use Situation-Behavior-Impact With Team Members?

The SBI feedback model is helpful when holding talent conversations with employees or when giving different types of feedback, as in these examples:

1. Situation:

Describe the specific situation in which the behavior occurred. Avoid generalities, such as “last week,” as that can lead to confusion.

• Example: “This morning at the 11 am team meeting…”
  

2. Behavior:

Describe the actual, observable behavior. Keep to the facts. Don’t insert any opinions or judgements.

• Example: “You interrupted me while I was telling the team about the monthly budget,” instead of “You were rude.”

3. Impact:

Describe the results of the behavior. Because you’re describing exactly what happened and explaining your true feelings — not passing judgement — the listener is more likely to absorb what you’re saying. If the effect was positive, words like “happy” or “proud” help underscore the success of the behavior. If the effect of the behavior was negative and needs to stop, you can use words such as “troubled” or “worried.”

• Example: “I was impressed when you addressed that issue without being asked” or “I felt frustrated when you interrupted me because it broke my train of thought.”

The success of Situation-Behavior-Impact is enhanced when the feedback, which is one-way, is accompanied by an inquiry about intent, which makes the conversation two-way.

Providing feedback to others about their performance is a key developmental experience. Learn how to make the feedback you give even more effective so that others can benefit from your message.

Build Trust By Exploring Intent vs. Impact With SBII

Extend the SBI Method for Feedback to Include Inquiring About Intent

Extending the Situation-Behavior-Impact (SBI) tool for delivering feedback to be Situation-Behavior-Impact-Intent (SBII) allows you to have a conversation to learn more about the intentions behind a person’s actions or behaviors. Inquiring about intent can demonstrate compassionate leadership and prevents veering off in the wrong direction based on faulty assumptions. To do this, simply add a final step to Situation-Behavior-Impact:

4. Intent:

Inquire about the person’s original intentions. Inviting them to share where they were coming from helps you understand more about the other person’s experience of the situation and explore the gap together between intentions vs. impact, building greater trust and understanding.

• Example: “What were you hoping to accomplish with that?” or “What was going on for you?”

Then actively listen to the other person as they share their perspective. Simple solutions usually follow.

Asking about intent is also where good coaching starts. When you inquire about intention, motivation, or what’s behind an action, you’re essentially engaging in a coaching conversation — one that can make a positive difference well before a performance review or disciplinary conversation.

So, the next time you need to give someone some feedback, rather than making assumptions, just have a conversation with them. And remember to use Situation-Behavior-Impact-Intent (SBII).

Ready to Take the Next Step?

Upskill your team’s ability to give difficult feedback holding candid conversations and using SBII with a customized learning journey for your leaders using our research-based modules. Available leadership topics include Conflict Resolution, Emotional Intelligence, Feedback That Works, Listening to Understand, Psychological Safety, and more.

The post Use Situation-Behavior-Impact (SBI)™ to Understand Intent appeared first on CCL.

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.

How Might Our Definition of Leadership Be Surprising?

When people think of leadership or leaders, they often think of one person in a positional role of responsibility. We define leadership as a social process that occurs with any group or team, regardless of position. And even when someone holds the title or the position of leader, it’s rarely one heroic act that creates leadership. It always involves other people.

Therefore, it’s important to think about leadership as a property of a group of people co-creating something. This relational approach to leadership is essential in today’s complex and rapidly changing, uncertain environment.

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

What Signs Indicate Leadership Is Present?

Leadership is a process, and processes create outcomes. So, you need to look at the outcomes that your leadership is intended to create. What are you trying to achieve with the act of leading or leadership?

In the context of a nonprofit or philanthropic organization, the desired outcomes might include increased funding, improved service delivery, or greater social impact. These outcomes require the collective effort of the entire team. They cannot be achieved by a single individual, no matter how competent or charismatic. This is why it’s crucial to consider leadership as a social process and to evaluate its effectiveness based on the outcomes it produces.

What Core Outcomes Does Effective Leadership Create?

Based on our research and extensive experience, we know that when leadership is effective, 3 primary outcomes are achieved: Direction, Alignment, and Commitment, or DAC. Our DAC framework helps us diagnose and improve the leadership process:

• Direction refers to the shared agreement on the group’s goals. It’s not enough for the leader to have a clear vision or strategy; everyone in the group must understand and buy into this vision or strategy. This shared agreement on the direction is critical to effective leadership.
• Alignment is about coordinating work across the group. It involves ensuring that everyone is working toward the same goals and understands how their role contributes to the overall success of the organization. Without alignment, efforts can become disjointed, and the effectiveness of the team can be compromised.
• Commitment means that group members all feel mutually responsible for the group’s success, meaning they are willing to put the group’s needs above their own when necessary. This is perhaps the most challenging aspect of the DAC framework, as it requires individuals to put aside personal interests for the greater good. However, it’s also one of the most powerful aspects, as it fosters a sense of shared responsibility and ownership among team members.

Why Is the DAC Framework Vital for Leadership in Uncertainty?

When people are uncertain and can’t see the future clearly, especially if they’re in a leadership position, they tend to turn inward and feel the responsibility to be the source of clarity for the people they lead. They start to lean on their knowledge and skills, thinking they must figure it out by themselves.

In fact, the opposite is true. When facing uncertainty, the DAC framework becomes even more critical. When the future is unclear, and the environment is constantly changing, it’s vital to leverage the talents and perspectives of others and to have shared direction, alignment, and commitment from all team members.

Going through this process with other people allows you to surface assumptions that could otherwise lead you astray. In times of change and uncertainty, you may create your own narratives to function and make progress. By involving others in the process, you can challenge these assumptions and ensure everyone is moving in the same direction and working well together to achieve success. This leadership approach can help your team navigate through uncertainty and emerge stronger.

What Can Help Nonprofit & Philanthropic Leaders Navigate Uncertainty?

Involve your team. Leadership is a social, relational process. Include your team in setting and adjusting the direction, aligning efforts, and fostering commitment. This not only ensures that everyone is on the same page but also helps to build a sense of ownership and commitment among team members.

Communicate clearly and frequently. Make sure everyone understands the organization’s direction and their role in it. Clear communication is key to achieving alignment. Regular updates, meetings, and feedback sessions help keep everyone informed and engaged.

Monitor alignment and commitment. Regularly check in with your team to ensure their work is well-coordinated, especially in disruptive times. Pay attention to team dynamics and how well people are supporting one another amidst the complexity and uncertainty. This continuous monitoring can help you identify and address any issues early on, preventing minor problems from escalating into major challenges.

Be flexible and adaptable. In times of uncertainty, be prepared to adjust your direction, realign your team, and renew their commitment. Flexibility and adaptability are key to maintaining alignment and commitment in a changing environment. Don’t be afraid to change course if the situation demands it.

By focusing on the process of leadership and considering it a property of the group, you can steer your organization through the chaos and toward success.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

Navigating leadership in uncertainty requires all team members to create direction, alignment, and commitment. If you, like us, believe in the power of leadership to drive social change, contact us to start a conversation about how we can partner together.

The post Ask the Expert: Guidance for Leadership in Uncertainty appeared first on CCL.

A research-based, time-tested, classic guideline for developing managers, the 70-20-10 rule emerged from over 30 years of our Lessons of Experience research, which explores how executives learn, grow, and change over the course of their careers.

According to the 70-20-10 rule, leaders learn and grow from 3 types of experience, following a ratio of:

• 70% challenging experiences and assignments
• 20% developmental relationships
• 10% coursework and training

The underlying assumption of the 70-20-10 rule is that leadership can be learned — that leaders are made, not born.

We believe that today, more than ever, a manager’s ability and willingness to learn from experience is the foundation for leading with impact.

In the face of unrelenting disruption, effective leadership is what’s needed most. Download our new Talent Development report to learn how investing in talent development today will position your organization to succeed tomorrow.

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Go Beyond the 70-20-10 Rule With Experience-Driven Development

The 70-20-10 framework seems simple, but you need to take it a step further. All experiences aren’t created equal.

Which experiences contribute the most to learning and growth? And what specific leadership lessons can be learned from each experience?

To help you (and your boss or direct reports) match your learning needs to the experiences most likely to provide that learning, we’ve researched and mapped out the links between experiences and lessons learned.

We’ve studied on-the-job learning and experience-driven talent development extensively, and we even extended our long-standing findings (rooted in U.S.-based corporations) to a global audience. Our researchers collaborated with organizations in India, China, and Singapore to extend what we know about how leadership is learned.

Sources of Leadership Learning From Experiences

Our research across China, India, Singapore, and the U.S. has found that there are important similarities and differences in the way leadership is learned from experiences. But, from our studies of these 4 countries, 5 universally important sources of leadership learning stand out:

1. Bosses and superiors
2. Turnarounds
3. Increases in job scope
4. Horizontal moves
5. New initiatives

Additionally, each respective country draws from 2 unique primary sources of leadership:

• China: personal experiences and mistakes
• India: personal experiences and crossing cultures
• Singapore: stakeholder engagements and crises
• United States: mistakes and ethical dilemmas

Among the leadership lessons learned from experiences, all 4 countries rank these 3 as universally important: managing direct reports, self-awareness, and executing effectively.

To adapt and grow, leaders need to be constantly involved in new experiences and challenges that foster learning. Some of these new opportunities will come their way through new jobs, crises, or significant challenges.

But it isn’t necessary to change jobs to find powerful learning experiences in the workplace. And in any job situation, leaders need to seek out or strengthen relationships with bosses, mentors, and peers that will contribute to their own growth in leadership.

At CCL, our research team did a paper that built upon the 70-20-10 rule to reveal the power of putting experience at the center of talent management. It’s an approach that emphasizes the pivotal role of challenging assignments in attracting, developing, and retaining talent — and at the same time, highlights how the power of on-the-job experience is enhanced when surrounded by developmental relationships and formal learning opportunities.

In fact, our research on the 70-20-10 rule shows that challenging assignments are the primary source of key learning experiences in managerial careers.

The Amplifier Effect of the 10% for Coursework & Training in the Classic 70-20-10 Framework

What about coursework and training? Although it’s seen as contributing just 10% to a leader’s development, well-designed coursework and leadership training programs have an amplifier effect — clarifying, supporting, and boosting the other 90% of your learning. A program module that incorporates tools and experiential practice sessions can help managers become more effective learners and leaders.

The 70-20-10 rule reveals that individuals tend to learn 70% of their knowledge from challenging experiences and assignments, 20% from developmental relationships, and 10% from coursework and training. Skilled training specialists can help an organization establish a shared knowledge base and align its members with respect to a common leadership vision and the 70-20-10 rule.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

Build the most effective 10% possible for the coursework and training in your team’s 70-20-10. Partner with us to build critical leadership skills needed in your organization. Learn more about our Talent Development solutions.

The post The 70-20-10 Rule for Leadership Development appeared first on CCL.

There’s no magic bullet to ensure that people apply what they learn. But there are steps you can take to create leadership programs, experiences, and support mechanisms that improve learning transfer and support lasting growth and behavior change. Over time, new skills, perspectives, or behaviors can be reinforced, until they become unconsciously and competently put to use.

As a professional interested in learning and development, you may be in a position to acknowledge and help overcome the challenges of learning in your organizations. You are likely in a position to influence supervisors and executives, as well as potential participants, in leadership development efforts. You may also have a role in creating and supporting a learning environment.

The Challenges of Improving Learning Transfer

Individuals — and organizations — face significant challenges in their efforts to apply and integrate learning and develop the leadership capacity they need. These challenges include the following:

• Formal training is just one aspect of learning.
• Leadership — and its development — is always dependent on the people involved and the context.
• Leaders are already overloaded.
• Learning isn’t always aligned with what matters most.
• The learning culture clashes with the operational culture.

Given these realities, though, you can still begin to help leaders and your organization overcome challenges to learning transfer — and earn greater benefit from leadership development investments.

In the face of unrelenting disruption, effective leadership is what’s needed most. Download our new Talent Development report to learn how investing in talent development today will position your organization to succeed tomorrow.

Get the Report

How to Improve Learning Transfer for Leadership Training

Learning is a process and works best when it’s viewed as more than merely a program. Leadership development can include formal or classroom-based training — but it’s just one piece of the learning puzzle that must have corresponding pieces back on the job.

Research supports the value of extending learning into the workplace and connecting the workplace into formal learning. Most executives cite on-the-job experiences as the key events that shaped them as leaders and taught them important skills, behaviors, or mindsets. In fact, research shows that senior executives distribute their sources of key developmental experiences as 70% on-the-job challenges, 20% other people, and 10% formal coursework and training. At CCL, we use the 70-20-10 “rule” as a guideline rather than a formula for creating learning experiences. Yet, we know that experiences that focus on creating learning in all 3 categories can boost learning transfer and accelerate development.

Learning transfer is also a social process. Learning — and the desired performance that comes from learning — doesn’t take place in isolation. The work context, including the level of support from role models, mentors, peers, coaches, and bosses, has a powerful impact on turning lessons learned into leadership in action.

Drawing on our understanding of and experience with adult learners, we produced a white paper on making learning stick and explaining our 3 x 3 x 3 model for learning transfer. This framework informs our leadership development work — and can be applied to development programs or initiatives within your organization.

Our 3 x 3 x 3 Model for Learning Transfer Helps Make Learning Stick in Development Initiatives

Our 3 x 3 x 3 model for learning transfer and making leadership learning stick is:

• Think in 3 Phases: Learning isn’t a one-time event, but rather it occurs over time, as explained more below.
  • Prepare
  • Engage, and
  • Apply.
• Use 3 Strategies: Use at least 3 different approaches to provide a chance to deepen and reinforce learning.
  • A key leadership challenge,
  • In-class accountability partners, and
  • At-work learning partners.
• Involve 3 Partners: They each have to take responsibility to ensure learning happens and isn’t a passive activity.
  • The learner or participant,
  • The organization, and
  • The training provider.

This 3 x 3 x 3 model for learning transfer helps organizations that need to look at organizational change and leadership development in large-scale and deeply-personalized ways. It also outlines the critical steps that are required of the leadership development sponsor in the organization.

Improve Learning Transfer by Designing Development in 3 Phases: Prepare, Engage & Apply

For making learning stick, what happens before and after the formal part of a program or development effort is just as important as the program content and delivery. This is true whether the initiative is long or short, in-person or virtual, ongoing or one-time.

At CCL, we design leadership development keeping the 3 phases of “Prepare, Engage, and Apply” in mind, to help both individual leaders and organizations get the most out of their investment in leadership development.

The Prepare Phase

As soon as a person is tapped for or has chosen to participate in a formal leadership training effort, the development process begins. Consider:

• How might you help participants start learning right away?
• How do you get them thinking about their leadership experiences, challenges, and needs?
• How do you help them connect to the purpose, content, and value of their development experience?

This is a time when boss support is crucial. The Prepare phase involves good communication about logistics and expectations — but also begins to build an emotional connection to personalize the learning experience. It’s a chance to engage and excite the learner — rather than approaching the process as another item on their to-do list. Research shows that participants begin to engage in a development experience when they’re able to make plans with a boss, mentor, or coach and discuss the support they’ll need and understand how the program will benefit them.

At CCL, we carefully prepare participants for their learning experiences in our leadership programs by providing guidelines for selecting raters and completing 360 leadership assessments, interviewing key stakeholders, selecting real-life challenges they’re facing to apply to course learning, and asking the learners and their colleagues to complete self-assessments and reflections on their leadership style and skills. Other activities during the Prepare phase could include asking participants to read material ahead of time or watch welcome videos from course faculty.

The Engage Phase

The content of a learning experience is important, but so is the way it’s presented. Listening to speakers and reading information is a passive learning process — and information is less likely to stick than processes that connect and engage each person through applied practice. So when designing leadership development initiatives, we always consider how we might create opportunities for guided practice and skill development throughout the program to help improve learning transfer.

At CCL, we ensure our learning experiences include a variety of ways to keep learners engaged, whether in a live, in-person setting or a virtual leadership program. We use a mix of activities such as skill-building, action learning, reflection, simulations, experiential activities, goal-setting, and coaching.

The Apply Phase

Reinforcement and support at work — away from the learning environment and over time — is also essential for learning transfer. How might you create opportunities for the participants to use and continue new learning at work and beyond? Most people need structures that foster the application of new concepts and practice of new skills to achieve lasting behavior change. To improve learning transfer, participants need support and encouragement to get past the initial awkward phase that accompanies the application of new skills.

At CCL, we often use tools such as action-learning projects tied to real work issues; conversations to help connect new learning to an existing business challenge; follow-up lessons through reading, discussion, toolkits, and job aids; and executive coaching focused on making progress on goals.

A Closing Word on Making Learning Stick

We know that leadership development can create competitive advantage, but organizations rightfully want to ensure that their investments pay off through sustained behavior change. With a better understanding of the 3x3x3 model for learning transfer, you can help your organization improve learning transfer and realize multiple benefits, including a greater impact from investments in development, more effective leaders, and a stronger organizational culture.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

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The post Make Learning Stick: Improve Learning Transfer to Get the Most Out of Leadership Development appeared first on CCL.