Make Room for a New Seat at the Boardroom Table
- Lisa. W. Haydon
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
The Case for the Chief Leadership & Growth Officer
Every year around this time, boardrooms hum with planning energy. Calendars and to-do lists are full of future-focused effort. What does 2026 and beyond hold for sales strategies, product roadmaps and expansion forecasts?
When the conversation turns to execution, one strategy rarely earns its place on the strategy agenda: leadership. Do you know your leadership capacity and leader’s abilities to perform?
Leadership gets rolled into a slide under People and Culture, or a metric in a talent review. It’s rarely thought of as a system - as the actual infrastructure that determines whether growth plans will hold under pressure.
That gap matters because every strategy, no matter how data-rich or market-ready, depends on how leadership performs when complexity hits.
Why is leadership not getting the same attention as capital, markets and technology? I started this business with the belief that leadership is the driver of growth. Experience and our research make that even more evident. Executives need to unlock leadership as a competitive advantage and do so systemically.
Your Leadership is Predicted to Fail Your Talent Pipeline
In the last three years, our firm has been studying the future of leadership across industries. The signs are consistent.
Growth ambition is high, but leadership capacity is stretched.
Execution plans are detailed, but adaptability is lagging.
Goals are bigger, and the macro and technological changes are adding noise to execution efforts.
Leadership development programs were built for another era, so modernization is needed.
Leadership doesn’t collapse in crisis. It leaks under pressure when rhythm, recovery, and relational energy aren’t built into how an organization operates. The modern workforce doesn’t just want connection; it performs through it. Millennial leaders are hardwired to drive results through relationships, and until that truth is designed into leadership systems, performance will keep leaking through the cracks.
This is a point that some of my networks don’t agree with. They say the workforce needs to change, and that the current leadership playbook still works. But by 2028, the boomer and Gen X voice will be out numbered*. The majority of VPs will be millennials and they will be changing the conversation at the leadership table.
We now need a modern architecture for our multi-generational workforce and a tech-enabled way of work.
Why This Gap Exists
Leadership is still treated as an HR initiative, including its programs, pipelines and feedback tools. That’s maintenance, not performance design.
The future needs something different: a leadership operating system built on four elements.
Identity – who leads and how (the leader persona)
Impact – what leadership must deliver to advance enterprise goals
System – the rhythms and data that sustain performance under pressure
Accountability – the executive sponsor that makes it real over the long term
Without that design, leadership supports performance instead of driving it.
Gallup’s data shows that 70% of engagement variance ties back to the leader.
The Future of Leadership Systems
My firm, Pivotal Growth, has been researching how leadership actually performs in today’s environment. We’re examining how AI, hybrid work, and generational change are rewriting what “high performance” looks like.
Between 2023 and 2025, our multi-phase Future of Leadership Project* analyzed how modern leaders adapt, engage and deliver results.
We built Pivotal Leadership™ Intelligence System. It’s a data-designed, AI-enabled, and leader-validated engine that integrates strategy, diagnostics and enablement to measure, develop and scale leadership performance as a system of enterprise growth. We get you the leadership intelligence you need to measure, design, and modernize leadership as infrastructure, not initiative.
The research confirmed what many executives’ sense but haven’t been able to quantify.
Modern performance is driven by adaptability, engagement and tech agility, not just effort.
Millennials and Gen X executives are reshaping leadership through connection and data, not control.
Most existing systems were built for hierarchy, not relationships.
The result is predictable: performance drag, retention risk, and stalled execution. It’s not from weak talent, but from outdated architecture that doesn’t represent today’s workforce.
This isn’t about better leaders. It’s about building leadership systems that stabilize performance and make leadership the enabler of culture, not its constraint.
The Bridge Between Inner and Outer Work
Leadership systems don’t evolve just because organizations redesign them. They evolve when executives redesign themselves.
Every enterprise architecture relies on the inner systems of the leaders running it — the rhythms, habits, and emotional capacity that sustain focus and engagement under pressure. When those personal systems are out of sync, even the most intelligent design will underperform.
70% of change and transformation objective fail for human reasons. - McKinsey*
There’s a bridge that’s needed to connect systems, culture and performance. It’s a shift from outer work to inner work. It involves your personal leadership systems. Executives who understand their own learning agility, wellness plan, relational intelligence, and vibrant feedback loops are better equipped to lead the structural changes their organizations need.
As we see in our research and across client work, modern performance flows through relationships, not hierarchy. Before leaders can build systems that enable connection, they need to operate from it.That’s the evolution: leadership that scales because it’s designed — both personally and organizationally — to perform under complexity.
The future of leadership work isn’t more frameworks. It’s about having leadership system intelligence, both organizationally and your own.
The Executive Action Plan
It’s time to stop treating leadership as a dependency and start designing it as an enterprise system.
If leadership doesn’t have a strategy, your business strategy is running on aging legacies and assumptions.
Every executive team is managing two strategies:
The one the board approves.
The one they are working on for themselves.
The second determines whether the first survives.
The next era of advantage won’t belong to the company with the boldest ideas. It will belong to the one that values leadership, figures out the leadership culture and has the systems to scale it.
Leadership strategy is now business strategy. And the organizations that master it will outperform those that still rely on personality and luck.
Closing Reflection
Leadership isn’t broken. It’s under-systemized.
As organizations redefine growth in a complex, connected world, the differentiator won’t be who inspires best. It will be who builds leadership strong enough to sustain the world we’re working in.
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