Does your team have the skills and mindset to deliver on your strategy?

Business leaders today must come to grips with—almost above all else—unpredictability. Generationally high interest rates, significant elections around the globe, and artificial intelligence promise to impact pretty much everything we do. There is a tremendous sense of uncertainty in the air.

But once leaders accept the conditions on the ground—realizing there will always be challenges outside their control—most companies face the same question: Given the pace and rate of change, how can we respond successfully and execute our organization’s strategy?

I’m thinking about this because, on a recent road trip I took to meet with leaders, clients, and prospects, that’s what everyone mentioned was a top concern—whether the leaders in their organization have the mindsets and skills to deliver in ambiguous times.

Back home, I hosted our FranklinCovey board meeting and held a whiteboard session to capture ideas. In this meeting, our discussion focused on three topics: first, do we have the leadership, talent, and capabilities we need? Second, do we have the people, capabilities, and culture for the next phase of our climb? And finally, how might we address any gaps?

These are normal topics for a board meeting, but as I thought about the conversation as well as the discussions I had on my trip, I reflected on the universal nature of these topics. These are the perennial performance questions that either keep CEOs up at night or help them sleep peacefully knowing that they have the capabilities to succeed.

Another challenge I’ve noticed in my conversations with other organizations is that CEOs and their senior talent leaders (CHROs/CPOs and senior learning leaders) often do not operate as true partners when addressing these important needs. Whereas business leaders may focus on growth and operating strategies, financial results, and share price, talent leaders may talk about policy, compliance, total rewards, and learning platforms. It’s almost as if they were playing different sports—golf and baseball—you play both games by hitting a ball with a stick, but they are very different sports.

In an upcoming FranklinCovey Institute Report—The Leadership Imperative: A Research-Backed Guidebook for Creating Strategic Leadership at Scale—we share a solid framework to help business and talent leaders work together better to orient their efforts around the strategic needs of the business and structure a systematic approach to developing the leadership and cultural capability their organizations need to win.

We believe this framework (see the diagram below) and the alignment processes around it can help CEOs and talent leaders start playing the same game, co-owning the work of driving the performance that yields results.

The report highlights two executive roles in creating this aligned capability development. First, CEOs and Chief Human Resource Officers must partner together to create a Leadership Model that is tightly linked to the company’s strategic priorities, particularly over the next three to five years. Second, CHROs and their teams must continue to develop the needed leadership capabilities throughout the organization in a systemic way, so that the strategy can be executed successfully. When CEOs and senior talent leaders work with a shared vision of the game they are playing, they can dramatically increase the organization’s ability to win.

It is often said that success depends on, in the words of Jim Collins, “getting the right people on the bus.” While this is true generally and especially for key leadership positions, it is impossible to hire your way to broad-based leadership capability. Even if CEOs could theoretically replace all their leaders today (not a good idea) with exactly the mindsets and skills required for today’s challenges, the nature of the challenge will change tomorrow. Instead of replacing, organizations must get good—really good—at developing their leaders and arming them with the mindsets and skillsets needed in a rapidly changing world.

Our Leadership Imperative research suggests that when approximately three-quarters (73%) of a firm’s leadership is on the same page, it has reached the tipping point necessary for the entire culture to change. That’s a high degree of alignment, but it’s critical: Only when a CEO is confident that the right team is in place, and that they are united by a common vision, will they feel the sense of confidence to set and achieve ambitious strategic goals.

In the words of Stephen R. Covey, who helped create FranklinCovey, “When you have a new challenge, the old successful patterns, processes, and practices no longer work…What’s the nature of the new challenge today?”

In external conditions characterized by high amounts of uncertainty, one of the things CEOs can be certain of is the quality of their leaders to meet those challenges. Building widespread leadership capability is something senior leaders can both control and have confidence in as they confront the emerging challenges of today… and tomorrow.