Leadership development is the #1 HR priority for 2025 — and with good reason.
To keep pace with a rapidly evolving business environment, organizational leaders must have the capabilities needed to lead and manage change. However, traditional approaches to leadership development are failing to help leaders be effective in their current roles or prepare them for the future.
A new approach is needed to ensure leaders have the skills they need to solve today’s challenges, and are prepared to step into higher levels of responsibility. Read on to learn about ExecOnline’s Leadership Development Framework and how to build a resilient, capable talent pipeline at your organization.
The uphill battle of managing change
In the past five years, businesses have faced unprecedented challenges. Rapid shifts to virtual and hybrid work, the rise of AI, and ongoing economic uncertainty have created a volatile landscape. Accenture research reveals that the pace of change has skyrocketed by 183% since 2019.
Many leaders lack the skills and mindset to effectively navigate this rapid change. A Gartner study found that 74% of HR leaders believe their managers are ill-equipped to lead through these turbulent times. This constant change is taking a toll, with 73% of leaders experiencing significant change fatigue and burnout, according to the same study.
These dynamics are playing out among leaders at every level, from C-Suite executives struggling to make complex decisions amid ongoing uncertainty to frontline managers struggling to engage their teams and drive productivity.
Traditional development models leave leaders behind
Staid models of developing leaders at different levels of an organization have left critical capability gaps up and down the talent pyramid.
In the past, the prevailing approach to leadership development has been to prescribe capabilities based on leaders’ level within the organization. Typically, this meant that frontline managers’ would focus on developing capabilities related to people leadership, mid-level leaders would focus on developing capabilities related to operational leadership, and senior-level executives would focus on developing capabilities related to strategic leadership.
However, this stratified approach means that senior leaders do not stay current enough in the people and operational skills they need to effectively drive business transformation. At the same time, leaders at lower levels of the organization are not developing the skills that empower them to manage change and prepare them to capably lead in the future.
The ExecOnline Leadership Development Model
Enter a new approach to developing effective leaders.
In the context of accelerating change, leaders at every level must have the skills needed to drive business transformation. This requires leaders to continuously develop their capabilities across four critical dimensions of leadership impact: People, Operations, Strategy, and Self.
Let’s explore some of the capabilities that comprise each of these dimensions:
Strategic Leadership
- Leading innovation
- Competitive differentiation
- Driving customer value
- Setting organizational goals
Operational leadership
- Driving productivity
- Creating efficiency
- Driving results
People leadership
- Developing employees
- Motivating and retaining top talent
- Growing organizational capabilities
Self leadership
- Leading by example
- Resiliency
- Self-motivation
- Developing followership
When leadership development empowers leaders at every level to learn and apply new skills across each of these dimensions according to the demands of their role, they are more effective and better prepared.
Work gets done in the overlaps
In ExecOnline’s Leadership Development Framework, the “doing” happens at the intersections of each leadership dimension. This is where leaders encounter the day-to-day challenges in their increasingly complex roles. We define these intersections as Planning, Teaming, and Aligning.
Let’s explore some of the real-world challenges comprised in each of these intersections:
Planning
- Serving as a proactive guide: Setting clear goals, identifying necessary steps, allocating resources effectively, and creating a structured roadmap to
achieve desired outcomes
Teaming
- Enabling “teamwork on the fly”: Quickly and effectively coordinating and collaborating with a group of cross-functional colleagues, building working relationships rapidly to achieve a shared goal
Aligning
- Getting everyone on the same page: Ensuring all team members are working towards a shared strategy, with everyone knowing their role and creating a unified front to achieve a desired vision
Empowering continuous leadership development at every level
Empowering leaders with the capabilities they need to address the challenges they face requires flexible leadership development programs that allow for personalization and just-in-time learning opportunities. Here are some key points to remember when designing a leadership development program for your company’s leaders.
Ensure development efforts for all leaders are balanced across all dimensions of leadership
- Every leader needs support on all dimensions of leadership to drive business transformation
- A gap on any one dimension will hinder development of critical “overlap” skills – aligning, planning, and teaming – that enable effective change management
Incorporate multiple modalities in development programs to maximize impact
- Certain leadership dimensions – like operational and self leadership – may lend themselves to more effective delivery via coaching
- Being flexible with modalities can increase the likelihood of learning application in these areas
Gear creation of action plans towards the area of greatest leader need
- While programs all have a “major,” very few focus singularly on one leadership dimension. Thinking about action plan focus in the context of the “overlap” results (aligning, planning, and teaming) can accelerate leaders’ ability to drive effective change