Leading Insights

Influence is the most common piece of leadership feedback given and the least actionable, especially now that flat structures and dotted-line reporting mean the people who can block your initiative do not report to you. Influence is a set of practiced moves rather than a personality trait, and the best place to rehearse it is not a case study that looks like your company. Here is what changes when you take the corporate setting out of the room.

What if leaders could learn from failure before it happens? In this article, Matt Confer, Chief Strategy Officer at Abilitie and author of The Upside of Downside Thinking, explores how premortems can help teams surface risks, challenge assumptions, and make better decisions before the stakes are real.

Most cross-functional decisions do not fail in the meeting. They fail in the handoff, when a sound decision thins out on its way through the organization and each function starts executing its own reasonable interpretation. Here are the three ways that happens, and how leaders build the communication skill that closes the gap.

Ask a senior leader where their strategy broke down and you rarely hear that the plan was wrong. You hear that the organization could not act on it as one. Our new Cross-Functional Playbook draws on what we have learned from 100,000-plus leaders about why that happens, and this post covers three of the themes behind it.

L&D leaders are trading passive workshops for immersive business simulations. Find out in this blog what makes them more engaging, more memorable, and more human in an AI-driven world.

Business simulations close the gap between knowing and doing, giving new leaders a safe space to test approaches, make mistakes, and build confidence before the stakes are real. Here's how they accelerate leadership readiness.