Why leadership needs to be a team sport

I live in Minnesota where we have some beautiful old trees across the state. I’m always left in awe when one of these magnificent trees is uprooted – revealing huge roots grown over a century or more.

Trees can be remarkably resilient in a single storm event, thanks to strong trunks, deep roots and flexible branches. It’s when you combine multiple events such as heavy rain and strong wind that even the strongest trees can come down. Forests, on the other hand, endure. Even when faced with multiple events – storms, drought, and fire – the forest system adapts and new growth emerges.

Over the past few years, our team at Adeption has seen a significant shift in thinking around executive development that reminds me of this analogy. Not long ago we were often asked by L&D teams, “How do we equip our executives to lead through this period of disruption?”. Today that question has become: “How do we help executives build an organization that thrives in continuous disruption?”.

The pace of change and disruption today is moving faster than any single leader can sprint, and complexity is pushing right down through organizational hierarchies. The idea that a standalone leadership development program can help executives and senior leaders keep up with change is a myth. 

Instead, for organizations to thrive in ongoing disruption, leadership needs to become a team sport. This shifts the goal of development from focusing on a few leaders at the top to building systemic capacity across the organization. Our current work with a global FMCG company on a multi-level Leadership Academy is a great example. 

In this article I unpack these changing dynamics and the innovative design of the Leadership Academy, then outline four fundamental shifts Adeption and our clients are making in designing leadership development experiences, including:

1. Using real business challenges as the development engine 
2. Personalizing development at scale with responsible use of AI
3. Continuous development instead of time-bound ‘leadership programs’
4. Building adaptive capacity to help solve complex, evolving challenges. 

Organizations are navigating disruption on multiple fronts

The operating environment in 2O26 is defined by continuous and multi-layered disruption. Executive teams are navigating AI transformation, economic volatility and geopolitical shifts; they’re balancing the polarities of short term performance and long-term transformation; and through all of this they’re trying to maintain internal trust, alignment and culture.

The underlying shift is that executives are being called on to lead very differently. The traditional leadership model that worked in a more predictable environment – shaped by expertise, control, planning, and individual decision making – is no longer fit for today’s context. Complexity is pushing downwards, and people at all levels are being asked to solve challenges and make decisions that were once the responsibility of executives and senior leaders. 

The message we’re hearing time and again is that new mindsets, behaviors, and systems are needed to meet the moment.

Change is moving faster than individuals can keep up with

A mindset that continues to endure is that leadership development is about helping a select few senior leaders keep up with change. This is no longer possible. As individual leaders, no matter how fast we learn and adapt, change moves faster than we can keep up. Organizations are far better equipped to keep pace with change – and lead the way – when leadership is a team sport. 

For executive development, the focus needs to shift from individual development in isolation, to helping executives create the internal capacity for their organization as a whole to thrive in continuous disruption.

Executive teams achieve this by:

• actively developing leadership capacity and mindsets throughout their organization
• creating clarity without having all the answers,
• empowering teams to make decisions in uncertainty,
• championing collaboration across boundaries,
• role-modelling practices that support personal and team resilience.

In their article “Become an Octopus Organization” (HBR, November 2O25), Jana Werner and Phil Le-Brun suggest that for organizations to thrive in an unpredictable world, they need to evolve from rigid control to distributed authority and intelligence – much like an octopus’s arms act both independently and collectively to navigate the changing ocean environment. 

In an Octopus Organization, executive leaders act as system architects – developing and empowering employees at all levels to adapt, make decisions, and show leadership. We’re seeing more of the clients we partner with embrace this collective approach to leadership, enabled through leadership development. 

Building a leadership development system

Going back to the Leadership Academy example, the design of this initiative integrates three simultaneous development experiences for leaders at different levels of the organization.

At the center of the design is a Visionary Leaders experience for executive leaders, which focuses on how these top leaders create the conditions for teams to solve problems collaboratively. 

The experience kicked off earlier this year, launching with a workshop where executives considered potential future scenarios – such as major regulatory changes and rapid acceleration of AI. Working in groups, the leaders reflected on the question ‘What kind of leadership would be required in this scenario?’. Across the various scenarios, leaders aligned on a clear set of leadership shifts – giving them greater clarity on the leadership required for the future.

These same scenarios were tested with mid-level leaders, leading to similar conclusions and ultimately shaping the design of all three experiences within the Leadership Academy.

Our partnership with a global technology company is another good example. Two years ago, we co-designed an award-winning executive development experience to support the organization’s transformation into an agentic enterprise. It was so impactful that participants championed cascading elements of the experience – first to their teams, then ultimately across the entire enterprise with an open-enrollment Adaptive Leadership experience. 

Start with a high functioning executive team

To build a truly agile organization, the health of the C-Suite and senior leadership teams is critical. In reality, we’re seeing many senior teams grappling with tensions right now – stemming from push and pull between factors like functional vs enterprise focus, and responding to today’s demands vs future thinking.

Many of the challenges these teams are grappling with are adaptive challenges, with no clear existing solutions to lean on – requiring new ways of thinking.

Adeption’s Team Mindset Explorer experience has helped numerous executive and senior leadership teams shift their shared mindsets and ways of working. This powerful team development experience uses the Leadership Mindset Indicator to map individual mindset ranges, then brings the team together for two workshops. The team aligns on its shared purpose, strengths, strategic priorities and top challenges, before exploring the mindsets needed to navigate these challenges – highlighting the way forward. 

The team sets collective and individual actions – including experiments to try – and later regroups to discuss insights and next steps. A simple but powerful action we frequently see is teams changing their meeting agendas from information updates to collaborative problem solving.

Next, participants create the permission space for their own teams to experiment with new approaches, unlocking the culture needed to navigate through continuous disruption.

Designing leadership development for the future

At the heart of these approaches is a set of fundamental shifts in how we design leadership development – not only for executive and senior leaders but for employees across the organizational hierarchy:

1. Using business challenges as the development engine 

Experiences we’re co-designing with clients are increasingly integrating work on strategic business priorities. Rather than asking busy senior leaders to step away from the business to ‘develop’, these experiences wrap around real organizational challenges – and the bi-product is that leaders develop in the flow of work.

A change leadership experience we’re partnering on with a client recently won multiple awards for its design and impact. The experience uses strategic business challenges as the core curriculum; everything participants do during the experience is in service of making progress on these challenges – leading to exceptional business outcomes and leadership growth.

2. Personalized, data-driven development supported by responsible AI

Instead of every leader going through the same curriculum, Adeption’s experiences are personalized to individuals through our pull-based methodology. This has always been our approach, however with advances in AI, we’re now able to personalize development in more meaningful and impactful ways. 

For example, leaders are receiving customized development based on:

• leadership baseline surveys 
• mindset assessments they’ve completed
• their network patterns
• specific context and challenges they are facing.

While AI can’t and shouldn’t replace the role of humans in leadership development, it’s creating exciting possibilities to accelerate personalization of development journeys. Examples include real-time AI coaching and connecting leaders to the approaches other leaders in their organization have tried when facing similar challenges.

3. Continuous development instead of ‘the leadership program’

A major shift we’re championing – alongside our client-partners – is moving away from the idea that development happens during a three-day event or a six-month program. 

Instead, many of the innovative L&D teams we partner with are:

• Creating ecosystems that combine short learning moments, peer coaching, development conversations with one-up managers, 1-1 coaching, reflection practices, leadership experiments, and application in real work. 
• Empowering participants to design their own continuous development journeys as part of a formal facilitated experience.

The goal is to instil a habit and culture of leadership growth rather than a one-time intervention.

4. Building adaptive capacity (the ability to solve adaptive problems)

We’re also increasingly partnering with organizations that want to develop leaders not just for today’s challenges, but for challenges they can’t yet predict. 

This means focusing less on fixed competencies and more on capabilities such as learning agility, systems thinking, curiosity, experimentation, resilience, navigating uncertainty, and leading through polarities.

In all three client examples I’ve referenced, the experiences introduced leaders to key Adaptive Leadership principles and supported them to put these principles into action. Leaders actively collaborated across functions, ran real experiments in their work, and shared their insights with peers to build collective adaptive capacity.

Conclusion

We’re seeing an exciting evolution in leadership development, where L&D teams are shifting away from developing executive and senior leadership teams in isolation. Instead, they’re seeking to build organizations that operate more like nature; harnessing the power of the collective to create resilience in ongoing disruption.

None of us can predict what the future will bring. Adaptive leadership and expanding our mindsets gives us the capacity we need to meet unknown challenges. This doesn’t just apply to the C-Suite; organizations that thrive in the future will be those that take a collective approach to leadership – empowering people at all levels to continuously experiment, learn, collaborate, and evolve together.

If this article sparks your interest, I’d love to chat with you in more depth about your goals for leadership development and how Adeption can help. Contact me directly at coreyc@adeption.io