Source: forbes.com The strongest leaders recognize that learning and skill development are not one-off initiatives, but ongoing practices built through experience, feedback and continuous adaptation. This growth can take many forms over the course of your career, whether through mentorship, stretch assignments or reflection. Organizations that prioritize this kind of continuous development are often better positioned to build stronger pipelines of future-ready talent. To help leaders continue sharpening their skills over time, 20 Forbes Human Resources Council members share the strategies they use to keep learning and evolving throughout their careers. 1. Adopt A Flexible Mindset To Stay Open To Growth In general, I believe that leaders should have a learner posture and mindset. The world is changing and evolving around us every day, so the only constant is change. Being able to be flexible and keep learning versus posturing as an expert will allow inputs from different people and perspectives, and keep leaders nimble and in tune with the latest ways of working and doing things. – Emily Venizelos, 72andSunny 2. Treat Leadership Development As A Lifelong Journey The most effective leaders treat learning as an ongoing journey. That includes investing in development, learning from peers and mentors and continually honing their skillset….
Source: rte.ie Analysis: Organisations must look past the most visible signals of leadership potential and focus on how bosses support and develop their teams Plenty of people have worked under a manager who appears confident, articulate and highly visible, yet they struggle to lead their team effectively. Team members can become disengaged, decision-making slows and performance declines. But despite this, the same people always seem to progress through the hierarchy.
Source: hrdigest.com Toxic leadership in the workplace may sound like a superficial problem, but such management can guarantee employee burnout. A recent study of employee dehumanization at work revealed the follies of allowing abusive supervision to reshape the organization.
Source: forbes.com As more organizations embrace the concept of a coaching culture, people development is not left to the C-suite alone. Beyond balancing employee workloads and cascading executive communications, today’s managers are more responsible for fostering both individual and collective goals, growth, ownership and independent thinking across their teams.
Source: fastcompany.com It starts by creating a work culture people can actually feel. Corporate culture isn’t built by policies. It’s built by moments—the unscripted experiences that catch us off guard, bring us closer, and quietly shape how we show up for one another. But many efforts labeled “culture-building,” including onboarding programs, leadership retreats, and all-hands meetings, still feel like productivity theater: tightly scheduled and heavy on performance. Today, it’s worth asking whether that model has simply run its course.
Source: forbes.com Leading an organization is rarely simple. Even seasoned CEOs and founders find their mental real estate consumed by profitability and competition. But the toughest, most persistent challenges come from people. Navigating that complexity takes more than technical skill—it demands executive presence. Executive presence isn’t just about what a leader says. It’s about how they enter a room, regulate tension, influence others, and project confidence before a single slide appears.
Source: psychologytoday.com How does your team measure up? Determining the recipe for successful work teams is big business, as a lot is at stake. Is the key having the right set of members based on their skills or personalities? Is the primary driver of team effectiveness the environment in which teams operate? Is the secret having a dynamic leader?
Source: inc.com Buffett’s leadership test is quite simple. And yet most bosses fail it. Here’s why. Warren Buffett is famous for many reasons, including his simple and timeless wisdom, and this quote is no exception. Often attributed to Buffett and quoted in Tom Rath’s Strengths-Based Leadership, Buffett said something that sounds obvious at first—and then gets uncomfortable the longer you sit with it.
Source: psychologytoday.com Three quiet leadership lessons on burnout, trust, and learning under pressure. Leadership rarely announces its lessons loudly. They tend to surface after the meeting ends; when a leader lingers on a comment they can’t shake, when a decision technically works but feels wrong, or when exhaustion becomes impossible to explain away.
Source: entrepreneur.com Burnout sneaks in quietly through late nights, missed family moments and the slow loss of joy in what once inspired us. Here’s how to find your purpose again. Success is both a privilege and a responsibility. For many ambitious leaders, it begins as a calling to build, innovate and make an impact. Over time, however, that sense of purpose can evolve into an unending pursuit of achievement. We start to judge our worth by the amount we produce, the meetings we attend, the projects we finish and the milestones we hit. Yet, the more we accomplish, the less fulfilled we often feel.
Source: forbes.com As we move into 2026, AI is no longer the next wave of technology, it is a strategic imperative with the power to reshape how companies compete, operate, and innovate. If 2025 was the year of AI experimentation, 2026 will be the year of AI transformation. The stakes are high: a 2025 Dataiku/Harris poll found that 74% of CEOs believe their jobs are on the line if they fail to deliver measurable business results from AI.
Source: entrepreneur.com Culture isn’t about perks or posters. It’s the decision-making system your company relies on when uncertainty hits and you’re not in the room. The past year has been relentless for founders and CEOs. Taxes shifted. Tariffs reappeared. Regulations tightened. Geopolitics escalated. And technology (especially AI) continued to rewrite how work gets done. For entrepreneurs, volatility is no longer an occasional disruption. It’s the environment you’re building inside.
Source: hcamag.com What are the top drivers? Study of 20 million employee responses shows belonging, feeling valued no longer biggest priorities For the first time in a decade, employees are prioritizing organizational stability over feeling valued at work, according to a recent study. The Perceptyx study analyzed more than 20 million global employee survey responses from 2016 to 2025 and found that the top driver of employee engagement in 2025 was effective change management, followed by confidence in senior leadership. These drivers displaced feelings of belonging and feeling valued which had ranked as the top two drivers from 2016 through 2024 but fell to fourth and fifth, respectively, in 2025.
Source: forbes.com Workplaces are changing quickly, shaped by advancing technology, evolving employee expectations and more fluid team structures. As these shifts redefine how work gets done, leaders are taking a closer look at which human strengths they most need to leverage to build effective teams—not just to keep up with change, but to progress meaningfully through it.
Source: forbes.com The holiday season is upon us, and for business leaders, it is the perfect time to consider how you can show appreciation for your employees and co-workers. It’s also the perfect time to evaluate why employee recognition, engagement and support are so critical to the success of your organization in the first place, along with how you can implement comprehensive, year-round practices that improve productivity and attract and retain top talent.
Source: hcamag.com HR leaders from Porter Airlines, TIFF, KPMG share insights at HRD Canada’s HR Leaders Summit The role of human resources is transforming from a reactive support function to a proactive, strategic partner. That was a key theme at a recent panel discussion at this week’s HR Leaders Summit in Toronto — a session attended by leaders from companies in many sectors looking at how HR can deepen their influence within their organizations.
Source: yourtango.com Great leaders don’t force influence; they inspire it. “I don’t read books, man, come on!” he snorted with dismissive pride. He was a friend of mine, and I’d made the mistake of bringing up in conversation the value I’d found in certain books and how a few of them had changed my entire life. I’d asked him if he had any books like that.