Codifying culture and leadership readiness

As companies scale at speed, the gap between potential and performance keeps showing up in one overlooked place: leadership readiness.

Having a clear people strategy and a view on the culture you want to engineer is one thing. Making it happen takes a leadership structure capable of embodying and enforcing it, top to bottom. And the people function, everything sitting under the CPO, carries a disproportionate share of the responsibility for fixing it when that breaks down.

So we tackled it from the perspective of a typical CPO c-suite. Each table took a different seat: CPO, VP of Talent Acquisition, VP of HR, VP of Learning & Development. Same question at every table — what can this leader actually do to move the dial?

Across the four lenses, one picture emerged. Leadership readiness isn’t a training issue. It’s a system issue, touching how we hire, reward, develop and hold leaders to account.

Inside the report:

• The brilliant basics – what each seat in the Chief People Office needs to own, from culture definition to promotion philosophy to onboarding as leadership development
• Bold ideas – a Leadership Stock Exchange, hiring as a privilege rather than a right, leadership licences, simulated stress tests, crowdsourced curricula
• Choosing boldly, leading bravely – the four shifts the boldest thinking pointed to