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

But what do we mean by culture?

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

Why Is Culture Change Necessary for AI Integration

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

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

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

5 Principles for Shifting Culture to Effectively Integrate AI

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Senior leaders must do the change work first.

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

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

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

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

3. Developing vertical capability transforms your leadership culture.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Strategy to Action: Integrating AI for Organizational Impact

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

Ready to Take the Next Step?

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

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

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.

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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.

Frequently referred to as “building the plane while flying,” building a resilient organization requires collective teams of individuals who rally for a common goal, are open and responsive to the challenges placed before them, and work tirelessly through ambiguity and uncertainty.

What Defines a Resilient Organization?

Organizational resilience is built over time, and while actions and behaviors can be developed in anticipation of crises and disruption, some of the best development occurs during times of perpetual crisis and disruption.

At CCL, we consider organizational resilience to be the dynamic capacity of the people within an organization to:

• Be mindfully aware of the environment;
• Respond productively to continuous change, adversity, and disruption; and
• Positively adapt and learn from experience in order to drive higher levels of performance over the long term.

3 Steps to Building a Resilient Organization

In leading your organization to becoming more resilient, embed these 3 iterative steps as standard operating practice:

1. Anticipate — Discern what’s happening in the environment and prepare to act on challenges and opportunities.
2. Adapt — Mobilize and collectively implement actions by empowering the organization to work and collaborate in new and different ways.
3. Assess — Review and reflect on progress to collectively learn, evolve, and build capability and capacity.

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

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6 Key Capabilities of the Resilient Organization

These process steps are made more effective when carried out along with the following 6 key capabilities:

• Purpose & Meaning: “Sense-making” of current realities and inspiring renewed purpose. This is particularly important to the Anticipate step, in order to scan both what’s happening in real-time, as well as opportunities that are emerging.
• Empowerment: Distributing and establishing authority and accountability for decision making. Leadership is compelled to clearly articulate goals and roles, along with providing the necessary resources for teams to mobilize and implement (Adapt) the new direction.
• Social Connections: Building strong relationships and networks based on trust and mutual support. An essential capability to effectively Adapt, as well as necessary to collectively learn (Assess), these connections become the bedrock of the resilient organization as collaboration and sharing of information is heightened.
• Emotional Intelligence: Recognizing, managing, and expressing emotions in a constructive way. Typically considered an individual competency, an organization’s culture reflects its collective emotional intelligence, or lack thereof, through its leadership. The extent to which those leading the organization keep disruptive and destructive emotions under control, as well as display empathy for what their people are experiencing enables teams to better cope and Adapt.
• Learning Orientation: Reflecting on experiences and applying learning to new challenges. When leadership sets an example of routinely seeking constructive feedback for what’s working and what isn’t, and acting on this feedback, they enable the organization to collectively Assess and learn on an ongoing basis.
• Innovation: Generating and applying innovative solutions to address challenges. This capability, critical throughout every step of building organizational resilience, requires leadership to challenge, empower, and reward their teams to innovate and solve problems in novel ways.

When leaders strengthen resilience in these areas, the organization emerges stronger, more resourceful, and capable of meeting current and future challenges. This collective organizational resilience also strengthens individual resilience, signaling to each member of the organization the importance of incorporating practices that keep them engaged and motivated, and capable of giving their all to what they do — at work and beyond.

4 Best Practices From Our Research on Building Resilient Organizations

At CCL, we’re exploring the science and best practices of building organizational resilience through collective leadership. Below are suggested practices from some of our findings:

Best Practice #1: Take Stock of the Current State

Regularly engage your leadership team in collective sensemaking through taking stock of both threats and opportunities (sometimes 2 sides of the same situation).

Identify areas of strength to leverage in order to develop areas of weakness. The standard SWOT exercise can be amplified through a robust discussion answering the following questions:

• How are the challenges we’re encountering familiar?
• How are we challenged in ways for which we have no experience?
• How are these challenges reinforcing threats?
• How are these challenges presenting new opportunities?

Best Practice #2: Promote Direction, Alignment, and Commitment

Periodically consider the outcomes of leadership, Direction, Alignment, and Commitment (DAC), to net greater purpose and meaning, as well as contribute to a learning orientation.

Here are some example questions to use for group discussion:

• Direction: To what degree do we have group goals that guide our key decisions? What are they? How can we get clearer?
• Alignment: To what degree does our combined work fit together? Examples? How can we get better?
• Commitment: To what degree do we make the success of the whole a priority? To what extent are individuals willing to “take one for the team” if it benefits the broader organization?

Or, use our complimentary interactive tool to assess DAC levels.

Best Practice #3. Empower Decision-Making

Strategically push problem-solving and decision-making down to the lowest possible level.

Empower agile teams to focus on identified opportunities via “sprints,” or time-boxed periods of focused work. Unleashing the creativity of individuals and charging them with the task of generating new solutions to business challenges creates a culture of innovation, as well as enhances social connections.

A great way to get started is to engage cross-organizational teams in “Empathy Mapping,” a means to refresh an understanding of stakeholders’ explicit and implicit needs. Questions should be designed to be holistic in nature and challenge the team to adjust their perceptions about their stakeholders’ reality, and can be used for generating ideas to solve problems for customers, clients, internal partners, general employee population, etc.

A bonus to the process: by reframing problems from the stakeholders’ point of view, the team is collectively building awareness, which contributes to emotional intelligence.

Best Practice #4: Reinforce Reflection

Begin or increase efforts to routinely conduct reflection and learning exercises at critical milestones.

Institute “pauses” to explore the impact of decisions and actions, seek feedback on what is working and isn’t, and develop the insights into actions that ensure the learning is being carried forward. In short — create a culture of learning. Below is an example of a quick reflection activity to try with a team:

1. Have each person list 2 things that occurred that the collective should continue to do, 2 things that the collective should stop doing, and 2 things that the team needs to start doing in order to improve the collective work.
2. Discuss the responses, looking for themes and actions that can be carried forward from the reflection.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

Partner with our experts in organizational change and transformation to help you shape your culture and build a more resilient organization in the face of disruption and uncertainty.

The post Steps You Can Take to Build a Resilient Organization appeared first on CCL.

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

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

What Is a Learning Culture?

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

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

4 Steps to Cultivate a Learning Culture at Your Organization

1. Attract and develop agile learners.

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

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

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

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

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

2. Create a psychologically safe environment.

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

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

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

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

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

Key tips and takeaways: 

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

3. Encourage conversations and feedback throughout the organization.

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

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

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

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

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

Key tips and takeaways: 

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

4. Make learning an explicit organizational priority.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Key tips and takeaways: 

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

Build a Learning Culture That’s Tailored to Your Organization

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

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

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

Ready to Take the Next Step?

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

Frequently Asked Questions About a Learning Culture

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

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

This is session 1 in our series, Adapting How You Adapt to Disruption. Be sure to explore the other sessions as well:

• Session 2 — Expanding Individual Leadership Capacity Amid Disruption
• Session 3 — Building Collective Capabilities Through a Relational View of Leadership

In a world of relentless disruption that requires leading in perpetual crisis, organizations can no longer rely solely on past strategies. Culture — not just strategy — is emerging as the true differentiator in shaping organizational resilience and adaptability.

This session explores why culture is foundational to organizational resilience and how leaders can actively shape it — not just passively react to it. We’ll examine actionable ways to cultivate shared culture at the enterprise level, creating environments where people feel psychologically safe, aligned, and empowered to act.

You’ll learn what sensemaking is, why it’s important, and how developing it among your leaders enhances clarity, connection, and coordinated action, especially when facing ambiguity. We’ll also explore the link between individual agency and collective reality — how leaders at all levels can influence the culture around them.

Finally, we’ll emphasize the need for a continuous learning mindset to fuel adaptability and future readiness across the system. Join us to discover how shaping culture through sensemaking can move your organization from reactive to resilient.

What You’ll Learn

In this webinar, you’ll learn:

• Why organizational culture is foundational, especially during times of change and disruption
• Actionable approaches for senior leaders shaping organizational culture at the enterprise level
• The importance of a continuous learning mindset and high levels of adaptability and sensemaking skills
• Insights on the nexus between individual agency and collective realities

The post Shaping Organizational Culture Through Shared Sensemaking appeared first on CCL.