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

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

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

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

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

Here’s a deeper look at each stage.

Design: Human Judgment Guides AI Potential

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

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

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

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

Validation: Helping AI Align With Human Expertise

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

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

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

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

Implementation: Humans Make AI Insights Meaningful

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

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

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

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

What This Means for Your Organization

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

Ready to Take the Next Step?

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

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

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.

Founded in 2005, The Cynefin Company is renowned for the Cynefin Framework, a tool that aids leaders in identifying decision-making contexts and guiding their actions. Over time, The Cynefin Company has expanded its offerings to include additional tools and frameworks that facilitate sensemaking in complex situations. The organization’s services extend to the nonprofit, government, and education sectors through the Cynefin Centre.

CCL’s partnership with The Cynefin Company seeks to integrate the Cynefin Framework with our leadership development solutions, creating a unique offering that fully addresses the needs of leaders across the globe. The collaboration will focus on leadership challenges such as:

• Making effective decisions in complex and uncertain environments
• Asking the right questions to understand decision-making contexts
• Gauging the timing of decisions and actions
• Managing complexity during action-taking
• Avoiding biases from prior decision-making approaches

The Cynefin Framework has also been incorporated into Decision Dynamics, a 1-day program offering that equips leaders with the tools needed to tackle today’s complex challenges, take decisive action, and communicate a compelling rationale.

“In today’s increasingly complex world, leaders need more than traditional tools — they need frameworks that help them make sense of and even embrace uncertainty. Our partnership with The Cynefin Company brings powerful new capabilities to our leadership development products and offerings, enabling leaders to navigate complex decision making with greater clarity and confidence,” said Elisa Mallis, Global Vice President, Research, Innovation, and New Content Creation at CCL.

Through a shared commitment to leadership impact and aligned values, the partnership aims to combine the value of The Cynefin Framework with our world-class approach to leadership development, reinforcing our dedication to our mission of advancing the understanding and practice of leadership for the benefit of society worldwide.

The post CCL Partners With The Cynefin Company to Strengthen Leadership Decision-Making in Complex Environments appeared first on CCL.

Organizations today are under pressure to deliver both personalization and scale in leadership development — a sometimes challenging task to balance. Coaching can deliver a real impact in both ways. Though it’s often seen as a selective benefit for a few leaders — when integrated into a broader leadership development strategy, it becomes a catalyst for transformation across the enterprise.

In this webinar, we’ll explore how to embed coaching into your leadership development approach, so it aligns with organizational priorities, drives measurable outcomes, and builds leadership capacity at scale. Drawing on our latest research, we’ll unpack common pitfalls organizations face when coaching is treated as a standalone intervention and share practical steps for building a sustainable culture of learning and development.

What You’ll Learn

In this webinar, you’ll learn:

• Why treating coaching as an exclusive perk limits impact and ROI
• How to align coaching with organizational priorities, using proven practices such as starting with the end in mind, contextualizing the experience, leveraging multiple modalities, and measuring outcomes
• The benefits of integrating coaching into leadership development
• How to avoid the most frequent coaching pitfalls, from misalignment to superficiality

The post Integrating Leadership Coaching and Training: Driving Meaningful Outcomes That Deliver Strategic Impact appeared first on CCL.

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

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

Building Leadership Capacity To Strengthen Impact

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

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

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

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

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

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

Featured Solutions

Foundations & Philanthropic Leadership

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

Leadership for Social Change

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

A Data-Driven Response to Leadership Needs

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Custom Leadership Program Takes Shape

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Organizers Say

The post How Philanthropic Partnerships Are Strengthening Nonprofit Leadership in Southern Dallas 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. 

The post The Top 20 Leadership Challenges appeared first on CCL.

Amplify: Heighten Your Impact

Based on over 50 years of leadership research and experience, Amplify is a flexible online nonprofit leadership program that positions participants to learn new skills to advance their missions and apply insights within their organizations — improving outcomes, increasing sustainability, and heightening impact. It offers engaging online learning, frameworks, and tools tailored to the unique challenges and opportunities faced by nonprofit professionals.

Amplify participants learn to navigate complex challenges, inspire teams, and adapt to an ever-evolving social sector landscape. The learning journey equips nonprofit professionals with the mindsets and skillsets needed to elevate their impact, cultivate resources to build momentum, and achieve outcomes aligned with their purpose.

The program focuses on expanding vital leadership and evaluation capabilities, including:

• Learning Agility: Developing an evaluative mindset
• Theory of Change: Staying focused and evaluating the programs in service of the mission
• Direction – Alignment – Commitment (DAC): Approaching leadership as a social process and engaging all stakeholders
• Social Identity & Emotional Intelligence: Understanding yourself to help inform strategic decisions
• Evaluation Design & Data Collection: Measuring impact and alignment to organizational mission
• Storytelling & Influence: Communicating your story for greater impact

It also features practical applications that participants can develop into actionable insights in real time, applying learnings directly to their work and throughout their organizations.

“Amplify is more than a course — it’s a catalyst for transformation,” said Marie Leonard, Digital Learning Product Manager at CCL. “We’re helping nonprofit leaders build the skills and confidence to lead with purpose, measure their impact, and create lasting change.”

The Amplify initiative was made possible through generous support from the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, whose grant and PropelNext program design has enabled CCL to expand access to high-impact leadership development for mission-driven organizations.

The program has also been shaped by our philanthropic partners such as the Scattergood Foundation, which played a vital role in developing its evaluation framework. Their collaboration has helped to ensure Amplify is grounded in real-world impact measurement and aligned with the needs of nonprofit leaders working in behavioral health and social services.

“We believe in Amplify … because this nonprofit professional development program will better equip leaders to evaluate and improve their work and ultimately deliver on their missions,” said Joe Pyle, President of the Scattergood Foundation.

Early program participants are reporting increased confidence in leading teams, evaluating programs, and communicating their missions effectively.

The Amplify program may be offered as part of a larger leadership journey or as a custom program for social sector organizations. Learn more about our nonprofit leadership development expertise or the Amplify nonprofit leadership online course.

The post CCL Launches Online Professional Development for Nonprofits — Amplify: Heighten Your Impact™ appeared first on CCL.