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

Why Soft Skills Are Important for AI Transformation

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

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

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

Senior Leaders: Guiding Ethics, Innovation & Vision

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

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

Managers: Translating Strategy & Execution

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

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

Individual Contributors: Innovators Inspired by AI 

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

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

Navigating AI Transformation — A Leadership Imperative

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

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

Ready to Take the Next Step?

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

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

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

What Is Relational Energy? 

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

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

Relational Energy: What It’s Not 

Let’s clarify 2 key distinctions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recognizing Negative Relational Energy 

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

Some red flags are:

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

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

Managing Energy at Work

Tips for Team Leaders

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

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

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

Here are 3 strategies you can use:

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

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

Tips for Team Members

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

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

Highlighting Relational Energy Awareness

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

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

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

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

Ready to Take the Next Step?

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

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

One of the largest regional credit unions in the United States was built on a directive approach to leadership, where leaders control and are responsible for the goals and work of their teams. This leadership style worked well as the credit union grew.

However, the COVID-19 pandemic changed how the organization worked, introducing a hybrid work model and a heightened emphasis on employee wellbeing. The credit union’s members increasingly expected a modern, digital experience and so did newer employees. In addition to its technology, it needed to modernize its leadership and people development strategy.

As it looked to the future, the credit union recognized the imperative to transform.

A Cultural Paradigm Shift

The increasing relevance of digital transformation brought a new lens; it was the perfect setting to take a closer look at the organization and begin making improvements to better equip employees so that they could, in turn, take even better care of members. To do this, the credit union introduced leadership development as an official function in the organization, and in doing so realized transformation required significant shifts.

“People often forget that transformation starts with changing mindsets, and that can be a massive leap for a traditional organization that has always done things a certain way. Our senior executives understood that to continue to hold our position at the forefront of finance, we had to embrace new ways of communicating, relating to, and leading people,” said the credit union’s Vice President of Leadership Development. “We had the will; we just needed the way.”

The credit union already had, in pockets of the organization, people who were actively mentoring and supporting leaders, but wanted to make the shift to deliver consistent leadership development at scale and gain buy-in across an organization during a fundamental cultural shift.

The Center for Creative Leadership (CCL)® came alongside to support them.

Featured Solutions

All-in-One Leadership Development Subscription: CCL Passport

Access tailorable training and tools with an all-in-one leadership development subscription to help you support and scale your in-house corporate leadership training initiatives.

Better Conversations Every Day

Our conversational skills training program increases communication, active listening, and feedback skills, providing coaching training for leaders that improves organizational culture.

Solution

“When the credit union came to us, we knew the first thing we needed to do was really listen to understand. We also wanted to make sure that they knew they were not alone,” said Anne Credi, CCL Strategic Business Partner.

“Since COVID, organizations have been coming to us, in some phase of transformation — each knowing that the change is inevitable to their survival, yet struggling with its complexity within an increasingly unpredictable environment. We knew the credit union was headed in the right direction, and we were impressed that they knew they had to engage and motivate all people leaders around this shift. The question was, how?” recounted Credi. “Our priority was to join forces with the credit union — understanding their needs and leveraging our evidence-based solutions to achieve their goal. We understood they needed meaningful leadership at scale, where leadership development wasn’t limited to small groups of high-potentials; rather, a solution that allowed everyone to be included — allowing a rising tide of shared understanding, practice, and language of leadership.”

The solution? CCL Passport.

A Subscription to Trusted Leadership Development

CCL Passport offers a flexible, licensed leadership development subscription to content that organizations can modify and add their brand to. But Passport isn’t just a subscription — it’s a partnership. We work closely with organizations to provide unlimited use of our programs, content, and tools, and help them navigate and make the most of their leadership development journey. Backed by our 50+ years of research and experience pioneering industry best practices, Passport makes scaling leadership development affordable, replicable, and fast.

“CCL Passport was exactly what we needed. At the time, there were just 2 of us in the newly formed leadership development function, and Passport helped us prioritize goals with content that is fully developed and ready to implement. It had digital content that we could scale to all 1,400 leaders and in-person classroom content with presentation decks, facilitation guides, workbooks, and communication plans. Passport is very much like the easy button for leadership development content. The only hurdle was deciding which content to launch and when, and that’s where our partnership with CCL has been instrumental,” said the VP.

We collaborated with the credit union to identify the best place to start. They chose Better Conversations Every Day (BCE), a coaching skills program designed to help participants improve their leadership, coaching, and communication skills with in-person classroom training and practice.

Initially, the credit union invited all senior leaders to voluntarily participate in the BCE program with the goal of creating evangelists on the executive and senior leadership teams. We ran the first session, training and certifying 3 credit union trainers to ensure they felt confident delivering the program.

A group of 24 senior leaders attended the first session. While the VP and her team had anticipated a slow rollout to the rest of the organization, the participating leaders were so enthusiastic about the experience that they insisted BCE be rolled out for all credit union leaders within 2 months.

To date, over 1,000 of the credit union’s 1,400 leaders have voluntarily attended BCE.

Results

The impact has been magnetic. “What has taken me most by surprise is the demand for more and the dedication to communicating better. We have leaders who have asked to return to class because they feel that they need one more practice day with their peers of having better conversations,” said the VP. “The demand is high and attendees are constantly asking us what else we have to offer.”

The impact has not just been on other leaders — the VP has experienced it herself.

“As the VP of a brand-new department at a large organization, I needed (and still do) all of the support I could get. I truly credit our CCL success manager with coaching and encouraging me, challenging my own limiting beliefs, and supporting me through this journey,” said the VP. “One of the most surprising impacts we’ve seen has been how leaders who thought they were going to a program to learn how to get their people to do their jobs better come out of it having become more self-aware, with a better understanding of their own leadership opportunities for development and better equipped to lead. Another important impact is the connections leaders make with each other because of BCE, and their willingness to support and coach each other long after leaving the classroom.”

By the Numbers

Meaningful Impact

The VP reports that she and her team hear of leaders who are going back to their teams and asking for a reset on how they’ve been leading.

“One of my favorite stories is of a direct report who did not know that their leader was going to the BCE training. That leader came back and began to implement the learnings by truly listening and asking powerful questions. The direct report could not figure out what had happened to change this leader’s communication style. So the direct report resorted to checking the leader’s calendar to try to figure out what could possibly have happened to instigate this big of a change. It’s stories like this that make me feel so grateful that a meaningful shift is happening — one person at a time,” reported the VP.

To help the development stick, the credit union intends to make BCE mandatory for all newly hired or promoted leaders. The credit union also plans to include CCL Passport content in their leadership onboarding program and include BCE communication competencies in job descriptions. The credit union is currently exploring delivering digital Passport content to support the development of all 8,000+ employees.

“CCL has been a consistent support system for our small team. From the beginning, CCL has been careful to truly understand the needs of the organization as well as the goals of leadership development. They’ve been very responsive and supportive for the entire time we have worked together, always providing timely updates to content and suggestions that expand our mindset of what is possible. CCL Passport has equipped us to scale true impact very quickly. We would not be where we are today without CCL,” concluded the VP.

Participants Say

The post How a Regional Credit Union Scaled Leadership Development to Thousands With a Team of 2 appeared first on CCL.

Anyone guiding a group toward a shared result will encounter challenges along the way — but what’s most challenging about leading organizations today? What are the top challenges of leadership, and have they shifted since the pandemic?

Our research team has been exploring such questions for decades now to stay abreast of the challenges and issues most commonly faced by leaders at every level. (See our 2023 research brief, 2021 technical report, and 2013 white paper for more information.)

Our Research Into the Challenges of Leadership

Based on the collective challenges reported in over 7,000 organizations around the world, and using anonymized data on individuals collected through our global 360 assessments, our research team has examined what over 48,000 leaders have identified as their most critical leadership challenges over the past several years.

Using an AI-powered language processing model to review and analyze their responses, we identified the most consistent challenges of leadership across many industries and sectors around the world. We further analyzed the data to determine how these challenges evolved in the wake of the pandemic.

The Most Common Challenges of Leadership at Every Level

Here we present what our research has found are today’s biggest challenges of leadership — the top 5 challenges faced by leaders at each of level of the organization — ranked by their relevance post-pandemic. And because development is more effective when it uses data to support the challenges of leaders at different levels, this list of leadership issues can be the focus for training & development efforts in all organizations, everywhere in the world.

For Frontline Managers

1. Frustrations with people and time

2. First time managing people

3. Deficient operational processes

4. Team performance

5. Personal improvement

For Mid-Level Managers

6. Personal limitations

7. Challenging business context

8. Ineffective interpersonal style

9. Cross-functional influence

10. Competing people and project priorities

For Senior Leaders

11. Credibility gaps

12. Limited market / sales growth

13. Process improvement across groups

14. Limited self-awareness

15. Transitioning into a new role

For Executives

16. Dynamic business environment

17. Strategic responsibilities

18. Interpersonal rigidity

19. Organizational readiness

20. Lack of cooperation

The Top Leadership Challenges of Frontline Managers

Regardless of where they live or work, those managing others in supervisory roles reported that their most common leadership challenge is frustrations with people and time — and this issue has only increased in frequency since the pandemic. Here are the top 5 most common challenges for frontline leaders, based on our research:

Frustrations With People and Time

Many frontline managers reported that their top leadership issue is feeling overwhelmed with inefficiencies and frustrated with others. This includes challenges with offering guidance to direct reports, overcoming resistance to change, dealing with difficult employees, and adjusting communication and feedback styles to collaborate more effectively with different people. And again, this appears to have become an even bigger concern for leaders at this level since the pandemic.

First Time Managing People

Another common leadership challenge among new managers is learning to juggle day-to-day challenges — such as managing others who were formerly peers, or employees who are older than they are — and just generally gaining respect as a new, first-time people leader.

Deficient Operational Processes

Needing stronger operational processes to address organizational problems was another frequently cited leadership challenge for this group.

Team Performance

First-level leaders also reported challenges with developing teams, giving effective feedback, providing direction, holding coaching conversations, and dealing with resistance from direct reports.

Personal Improvement

Learning to be better at active listening to understand the perspectives of others, improving flexibility, and being less reactive in pursuit of an “ideal self” are other commonly reported challenges for leaders on the front lines, our research found.

The Top 5 Leadership Challenges of Mid-Level Managers

Managers who are leading from the middle — with senior leaders above them and direct reports below — face many similar challenges of leadership as well. Our research found that the most common issues for mid-level managers were:

Personal Limitations

A top challenge for leaders at this level is their own personal limitations and feelings of inadequacy, as they often must overcome their own doubts about their abilities and readiness to lead — as well as the doubts of their peers or supervisors. Dealing with the challenge of personal limitations requires overcoming impostor syndrome, humility to seek the input of others, courage to do the right thing, and projecting confidence while communicating effectively.

Since the pandemic, mid-level managers have reported this as an issue even more frequently. With new cultures brought on by remote and hybrid workplaces, overcoming common limitations in order to make an impact as a leader has become even more challenging.

Business Challenges

In a tumultuous work environment, managers (particularly mid-level leaders) may struggle to deliver results. Leading within a challenging business context requires the careful deployment of limited resources, improved processes, and keeping employees engaged and motivated.

Ineffectiveness

When a mid-level leader has an ineffective interpersonal style, they struggle with relationships. This can play out on a spectrum, from dominating interactions to lacking the self-confidence to be assertive. On the other hand, effective interpersonal styles and embodying the characteristics of a good leader allow for open and honest conversations.

Influence

Successful leadership requires the ability to influence others beyond one’s group — often without formal authority. For those leading from the middle, the challenge of influencing others across functions includes building credibility, developing cross-organizational networks, and building and bridging partnerships.

Competing Priorities

Mid-level leaders report that they often find it difficult to balance competing people and project priorities, especially when they’re sandwiched between project-based deadlines and their employees’ engagement. It’s an important paradox that leaders must manage both relationships and tasks effectively. When resources are limited, motivating team members who vary in personality, abilities, and experience can feel at odds with effective project management.

The Top 5 Leadership Challenges for Senior Leaders

We noticed that the pandemic shifted the top leadership challenges for this group somewhat. Before COVID, limited self-awareness was cited as the most frequent leadership issue among senior leaders who head up functions, business units, departments, divisions, and regions, but the frequency of this challenge dropped significantly more recently. The challenge of overcoming credibility gaps, on the other hand, has become more pressing after the pandemic.

Credibility Gaps

This includes the challenge of building credibility as an organizational leader. Examples include gaining the trust of stakeholders and enhancing visibility within an organization. Senior leaders may also need to strengthen their leadership image or presence to be most effective.

Limited Market / Sales Growth

Making strategic shifts to maximize market growth and sales is another top challenge of senior leaders. This may include expanding the organization beyond core products, extending market reach, shifting to a market / customer orientation, and better aligning of sales.

Process Improvement Across Groups

Another key challenge for senior leaders is influencing the organization to improve and accept new processes, which requires being a strategic leader, effective boundary spanning leadership, and developing a broader perspective by taking a systemic view.

Limited Self-Awareness

Understanding how others perceive them and recognizing their impact on others — along with improving their confidence, approachability, and communication style (particularly when delivering difficult messages) — can be especially challenging for leaders at the senior level.

Transitioning Into a New Role

Adapting to changes in responsibilities and managing new people or former peers is a final key leadership issue at this level. This challenge may be brought on by a promotion, a new role, a functional shift, or a geographic move, or simply through preparing for the C-suite.

The Top 5 Leadership Challenges for Executives

Finally, senior executives leading the enterprise told us that their top 5 leadership challenges are as follows.

Dynamic Business Environment

For C-level leaders, the challenge of working in a dynamic business environment topped their list of leadership issues. This challenge can be brought about by new regulations, market and economic conditions, competition, or growth. To be effective, leaders must be able to develop and keep the talent needed to support change and revise their organization’s models and systems as required.

Notably, this challenge experienced the biggest rise in the wake of the pandemic. Even before the pandemic, senior executives were already used to leading their organizations in adapting to ever-changing circumstances, but COVID and its fallout accelerated that need even more.

Strategic Responsibilities

Developing strategy for an organization is another top leadership challenge for senior executives. This includes aligning priorities and initiatives across groups and developing teams to support strategic efforts. It’s helpful when senior leaders are able to link business strategy to leadership strategy.

Interpersonal Rigidity

For many senior leaders, shifting the way they interact with others to be more effective and the ability to adapt their style for varying situations or stakeholders is an important challenge. Leaders in C-suite need to have different techniques for flexing their approach, including in how they communicate the vision, manage or influence others, or leverage power over others to get things done.

Organizational Readiness Amid Uncertainty

Preparing their organizations for a turbulent future is an ongoing issue for senior executives. This challenge of leadership is experienced most often when there are organizational mission shifts, significant resource constraints, technology changes, or when new ways of working are needed.

Lack of Cooperation

Lastly, influencing others toward collaboration is a key leadership challenge for senior executives. This is especially common when they’re new to a role, managing former peers or more experienced colleagues, or collaborating with others on the senior team.

How to Respond to These Top Leadership Challenges

Tips to Help Leaders Address the Most Common Leadership Issues

Now that you know the most common challenges of leadership, how do you begin addressing them? One way is by looking at the larger themes that emerged from our leadership challenge research. Across all levels of the organization, we found that the challenges of leadership generally fall into 3 high-level themes, related to:

• Challenges of personal growth,

• Challenges related to managing people and getting work done, and 

• Challenges in managing across the organization and within a larger system.

Here are some recommended ways to respond to these 3 common themes in our overall leadership challenges research.  Many of these suggestions are part of developing the core leadership skills needed in every role, at every stage of a career.

1. To respond to leadership challenges related to your personal growth, work to maximize personal value.

Personal shortcomings and the aspiration to become a better leader define our first theme. Challenges here include learning to be more assertive during interactions, developing confidence, and understanding how others perceive you.

Individuals overcome leadership issues and create value for their organizations by focusing on the unique contributions that only they can make. Understanding what those unique values are, and delegating everything else (or as close to everything else as possible), allows leaders to maximize their value.

It’s important to recognize your own characteristics, behaviors, and habits in order to know what may be triggering challenges for you in your career. This way, you can work toward increasing your self-awareness and strengthening specific skills and growing as an individual leader.

Some internal challenges that many leaders face include a lack of confidence, a fear of failure, maintaining authenticity during self-promotion, impatience, resistance in responding to new ideas, or struggling to manage conflict in the workplace. All of these can be potential roadblocks to leadership success.

Understanding your own strengths and weaknesses and maximizing your unique value are part of improving your personal leadership brand.

2. To respond to leadership challenges around managing people and getting work done, focus on delegating more to others.

Our second leadership challenge theme involves the demands of managing both people and tasks. Specific challenges include managing for the first time, building cooperation between people, and overseeing multiple projects that compete for importance and resources.

You’ll be more productive, give your colleagues a greater sense of ownership, and build more trust on your team if you delegate, as well. But effective delegation requires more than just getting a task off your desk — it involves a repeating cycle of 4 key steps:

1. Understanding your preferences. Effective delegators prioritize their workload and decide which tasks to keep and which to give to someone else. They also understand how much feedback they want while the person they’ve delegated to works on the task.
2. Knowing your people. To delegate effectively, you must assign tasks to others with the necessary knowledge and skills. That means that you have to understand people’s preferences and abilities, using delegation to help direct reports develop, and coach people while allowing them to learn as they take on new tasks.
3. Being clear about the purpose of the task. A task’s purpose gives it meaning. By aligning this purpose with team or individual beliefs and goals, delegation can become part of purpose-driven leadership and an opportunity for personal growth.
4. Assessing and rewarding. You should engage in collaboration and work with your direct reports to develop ways to help them, and you, decide if a task has been completed properly, and to reward them appropriately.

3. To respond to leadership challenges related to managing across the organization, work to increase boundary spanning and build high-performing teams.

Working within the larger system of an organization is our third high-level leadership challenge. Examples include working in a dynamic business environment, needing stronger operational processes, and creating cross-functional influence.

As a leader, you must be able to create and lead teams effectively. To build high-performing teams, use our team effectiveness framework, which has 4 components:

• Core: Communicate a team’s reason for being so that all team members understand their core purpose and value. (A team charter can help with this.)
• Collective Mindset: Be sure everybody on the team knows what it takes to be a good team member. Teams adopt a collective mindset when they understand all members’ roles and responsibilities, as well as team norms for how team members work together.
• Cohesive Relationships: Ensure team members relate interpersonally by fostering a psychologically safe work environment where everybody feels a sense of belonging, is treated with respect, and communicates effectively.
• Connection: Teams can have a broader organizational impact when collaborating across boundaries. In other words, when colleagues who have different backgrounds and experiences connect, innovation and collaboration are enhanced.

A Final Word for HR Leaders on Our Leadership Challenges Research

Focus Development Efforts to Address the Top Challenges of Leaders

Developmental initiatives are more effective when they align with the real challenges that leaders are facing. For those who work in HR or Learning & Development, understanding these common leadership issues can be the catalyst for creating initiatives that truly address real-world needs, growing needed leadership capabilities for your organization’s talent pipeline.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

Build your team’s capacity for overcoming common leadership challenges. Our array of leadership development programs are carefully designed to address the leadership challenges faced by leaders at every level. 

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