25 Insights from the 2019 Leadership Development Conference

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25 Insights from the 2019 Leadership Development Conference

May 14, 2019 | Article

“Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.”

John F. Kennedy, former U.S. president

Leadership, Culture, and Context Matter: Building Capability Throughout the Pipeline

Most organizations are going through what feels like endless transformation to keep up with the rapid pace of innovation, digital transformation, and disruption. They are also striving to have more gender and racial equality on their senior leadership teams and to create more inclusive cultures. Doing these requires new organizational strategies, corporate cultures, ways of working, skills, habits, mindsets, and leadership methods. To make such changes, companies need to become more agile, redefine the role of leaders, and get current and future managers to adopt and model new behaviors so the entire workforce can do the same.

When 118 practitioners and experts met to discuss leadership development, we took notes. Here are the highlights:

Agility matters because it predicts financial success. But how do you become agile?

Companies say they need more agility, but many aren’t really sure what that means. One researcher thinks that instead, companies need a combination of these three traits: “absorbing and reacting to change (adaptability), recovering and bouncing back from jolts (resilience), and proactively charting a competitive path (agility),”—also known as being more ARA.
Organizations that want to become more ARA need to focus on these factors: 1) a strategy, mission, and vision that engages people; 2) leaders who create a strong values-based climate; 3) a stable foundation with the workforce having enough resources to deliver on the strategy; 4) engaged workforces that serve as brand ambassadors; 5) work that is interconnected across functions rather than parsed out in isolation among silos; and 6) performance drivers that include adjusting expectations and goal