2025 Priority: The Leadership Team
It’s time to plan for the year ahead, leadership and L&D teams are outlining their plans against business priorities and focus. Since we work across a broad spectrum of clients, we can be an indicator of trends that are beginning to emerge and how other companies are prioritizing them. And we’re often asked: “what do you see as the priority?”
The group that’s emerging as a priority for development focus in many companies is the leadership team itself. And it’s not surprising when you consider the pace of work and expected acceleration in results, the change in work with transformative capabilities like AI and the ever-evolving way of working across the workforce. Add to that, almost half of the leaders sitting in the top seats are new to those seats based on acquisitions, early retirements and C-Suite movement.
Individually, top leaders have always been a priority in terms of upleveling communication skills, approaching new settings and new audiences, and driving impact with messaging and storytelling. But this focus isn’t on the individuals as much as the team.
Over the last year, we’ve been asked to help the senior team:
- Carry a message across a company
- Collaborate more effectively for faster decisioning
- Balance likeability and accountability with employee base
- Strengthen their visibility and authenticity in video communication
Essentially, it’s working better as a team to manage communication going up to their Board and key stakeholders to gain support, across to their peers and business partners to balance different perspectives, and down to employees to keep engagement high with their employees.
As we worked across different teams, here’s what we learned beneath each of those requests.
Leadership Brands:
Leaders have to stay visible within companies and industries to have impact. They have to position a point of view and reinforce it almost as a campaign to be sure it takes hold within their organizations. It’s gotten harder to do that as new ways of working settle in. And they’ve had to rethink how they communicate in terms of format to be sure their communication has reach and impact.
We’ve helped leaders think about where authenticity shows up best, how messaging is best reinforced, and the intention communication takes to add flexibility to how everyone else consumes it. One area we’ve focused on a lot is the use of video. And while a lot of this coaching happens individually, we’ve worked with entire teams recently to consider their reach collectively and to streamline formats for consistency across the company.
The Enterprise Voice:
This is one of the hardest areas to align a leadership team. Most have had distinct voices as leaders, and as senior leaders, they recognize the need to align as one voice. It makes sense conceptually, but it’s hard to get a group of leaders to follow it. It takes a process and an understanding of how to balance their voice and the company’s voice on key topics. And they can get lost in understanding it takes all of them to carry a message forward.
In most cases, we aren’t producing the messaging for clients. We’re coaching this team to work with the messaging they’re given by internal teams to find ways to align to the enterprise voice while still staying authentic to their individual ones. Leaders often feel they lose their own voice to the company voice, and we coach teams how to effectively balance the two and distinguish between them.
Peer Decisioning & Alignment
One sound bite we heard throughout the last year was “we have division leaders, not enterprise leaders.” And what they mean is that their leaders are very skilled at leading their functional areas. But they often get stuck gaining alignment across their peer group because they don’t take the time to balance perspectives.
Our coaching has focused on finding common ground and aligning to another leader’s value. Peers aren’t always quick to say yes, and they say it’s because they don’t see value for their own organization or the full enterprise. It’s one of the most critical communication skills needed on top teams because it’s the only way they can move quickly.
The Employee Base
Bench strength got thin following the pandemic as seasoned leaders took early retirement and allowed some to catapult quickly to top roles. In many cases, they haven’t learned how to manage communication with large groups of employees. It isn’t a new skill need, but it’s become a more apparent one. Companies are just busy and they’re moving fast. The catalyst of that movement is top down, but communicating what’s happening and why it’s happening isn’t always met with the same priority and focus.
Leaders miss an important opportunity and sometimes even set themselves up for risks when they aren’t well prepared. We help teams build the rigor of preparation and the skills of storytelling to make sure they gain repeatability and impact with one of their most important audiences.
The leadership team isn’t the only priority we’ve experienced.
Middle managers are still a focus as companies see increased visibility as a benefit and a liability. Expectations haven’t changed around how managers communicate with leaders, both in terms of the ability to structure a storyline and to lead a conversation with confidence. We continue to tailor the format and focus of our Leading Executive Conversation programs, and it remains one of the most popular ways to combine content development with executive presence.
We have lots of new topics on our mind and enjoy learning ourselves as companies plan for the year ahead. And we hope there’s a conversation ahead with you about leadership and communication as a part of your planning.
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