The challenge: Shifting mindsets from functional leadership to enterprise transformation

As Salesforce deepened its investment in an AI-powered future, it became clear that technical innovation alone wouldn’t be enough to achieve its vision – leadership was vital. Executive-level leaders across the business would need to shift their mindset from functional leadership to enterprise impact and lead in ways to accelerate the business transformation.

To support this, Salesforce needed a new kind of leadership development experience that would:

• Expand executive leaders’ capacity to navigate complexity and adapt to rapid change
• Stretch leaders’ thinking to anticipate future challenges
• Cultivate a culture of continuous learning and boundary-spanning collaboration
• Empower executives to lead, inspire, and enrol others in a shared future vision.

To bring this to life, Salesforce partnered with Adeption on the design and delivery of an innovative, future-focused leadership development experience.  

12-month immersive development experience

LFI+ was launched as a 12-month immersive development experience for Senior Vice President+ and Executive Vice President+ leaders across Salesforce. It aimed to ensure executive leaders were prepared not just to adapt to AI, but actively shape its future, while preparing for future succession opportunities.

The experience featured two in-person Summits with expert keynotes, assessments in leader mindset and style, connection events, social impact experiences, executive coaching, and integration of Adeption’s AI-powered platform for scaled wisdom sharing across the group.

A defining element was the introduction of strategic enterprise challenges. Developed in partnership with Salesforce’s Futures team, these challenges represented business-critical problems requiring cross-functional collaboration and enterprise-wide thinking. 

Integrating three core development approaches

Three distinct yet interconnected development approaches formed the backbone of the LFI+ design:

1. Mindset Development: Leaders completed Adeption’s Leadership Mindset Indicator (LMI) to understand their current mindset range – impacting how they make sense of complexity and approach challenges. The design also embedded the essential conditions of mindset development throughout: heat experiences, colliding perspectives, and elevated sensemaking (reflection).
   
2. Adaptive Leadership: Leaders learned how to distinguish between technical and adaptive challenges, and practiced adaptive leadership in navigating enterprise challenges – shifting from solutioning to inquiry, collaboration, systems thinking, and experimentation.
3. The B3 Learning Methodology: The program was grounded in Adeption’s structured approach to bringing action and learning into the flow of work.

Driving business impact

LFI+ had an exceptional impact for Salesforce and its executive participants:

• 92% of LFI+ participants said the experience helped them lead the future of Salesforce
• 87% reported increased engagement and connection to their career.
• 82% felt the experience accelerated their learning and impact as senior leaders.
• Participants have had a 1O% higher performance rate, 4% higher engagement, and 3% higher retention than peers.
• Participants directly contributed to Salesforce’s long-term enterprise strategy, shaping key initiatives to drive the company’s growth.
• The success of LFI+ sparked a company-wide rollout of adaptive leadership training – Salesforce is now making these concepts available to all employees.