Leading from the Center of the Web

A program for senior leaders


In this seminar, which can be delivered as a keynote or expanded into a workshop, Sally demonstrates why today’s VUCA environment– volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous– requires leaders who can leverage the power of inclusive webs.

Drawing on her influential research for The Web of Inclusion and Thriving in 24/7, as well as work in sectors ranging from security to energy, technology, financial services, health care and the law, Sally shows how three key trends are transforming organizations in the global marketplace, identifies the four essential skills that leaders must cultivate in order to fully engage talent in the new environment and shares actionable practices for developing these skills.

The three key trends shaking up organizations– and keeping them shook up– are:

  • The erosion of traditional barriers that defined the industrial workplace
  • The impact of highly targeted niches on how people live and work
  • The need to build sustainable cultures capable of adapting to endemic uncertainty and disruptive change and minimize the impact of talent burnout

Flourishing in this environment requires specific capabilities. These include:

  • Skill at aligning people with profoundly different values, perceptions, and life experience around the pursuit of a common goal
  • The capacity to draw strategic innovations from the broadest possible base
  • An aptitude for fostering engagement and communication across multiple levels and geographies
  • Prowess at building self-renewing cultures that enable individuals to self-renew

These skills can flourish at every level when leaders:

  • Recognize and support non-positional power
  • Hire for characteristics
  • Evaluate contribution in context
  • Create advance buy-in for crucial decisions
  • Assure congruence in the conversation about what matters
  • Create permeability at the edges
  • Enable tolerance at the margins

In the keynote, Sally provides real-world examples of how these capabilities work; in the workshop, she offers exercises, reflections and real-time case studies that enable participants to explore the specifics how of these practices would work for them.

Takeaways participants can expect:

  • Valuable insights into how diversity, complexity and speed impact their own experience and that of their workforce
  • A fresh template for identifying and evaluating non-traditional potential hires
  • Actionable ways to make more nuanced decisions, increase contribution, develop new skills, and maintain morale in a high pressure environment

Practices that foster a more intentional and productive working environment