53: Leadership Skills in Demand for 2024

What leadership skills will make you stand out in 2024? Laura Powers and Evan Leybourn of the Business Agility Institute discuss their recent research findings about the skills necessary for success in today's workforce. 

Transcript

Leadership Skills in Demand for 2024

Pete Behrens:
What are the skills required for tomorrow's workforce? Welcome to another episode of (Re)Learning Leadership, where we explore a specific leadership challenge and break it down to help improve your leadership, your organization, and, just possibly, your personal life. Today, I'm lucky to be joined by two friends and colleagues from the Business Agility Institute, Laura Powers and Evan Leybourne. Laura is the CEO, based in San Francisco, California, and Evan is the Head of Advocacy and Thought Leadership based in Melbourne, Australia. And today we're going to focus on the research they conducted that was sponsored by the Scrum Alliance about skills for today's workforce, and I think the results might surprise you, as they did me. Enjoy the dialogue!

Well, thanks for joining me today!

Laura Powers:
Oh, thank you for having me!

Evan Leybourne:
Looking forward to it.

Pete Behrens:
So, we're going to be pointing our listeners and watchers to some of the research links of the skills assessment that you did. I'm a little bit more interested in the why behind this research. Was there a hypothesis you were hoping to find or was driving some of this research you guys did?

Evan Leybourne:
So, let me take this one, Laura, for a sec. When we study organizations and we study what's going on there, the—what we're trying to understand are industry trends. What exactly is it that is going to help people in our industry? What is going to help people who have invested their careers and their businesses in business agility or Agile, as the case may be. And so, really, for the skills report, the work that we did with the Scrum Alliance, what we were really trying to understand was what, exactly, are companies looking for. What are they hiring for? What kind of skills? What kind of expectations are there, out there, in the marketplace today? And it was—it sounds like a fairly simple question. [Laughs] But, as we've spoken about before, it uncovered quite a few hidden assumptions that may not have always been true.

Pete Behrens:
Hm, interesting. Laura, anything you want to add to that?

Laura Powers:
Yeah. I was going to say—I remember, at one point, as we were setting this up, Evan was like, “This is really, really simple. And I just don't see, you know, what's going to come out of this that's going to be, like, you know, a new major Aha! or whatever.” And then—

Evan Leybourne:
—I believe the word I used was boring! [Laughs]

Laura Powers:
Okay, boring! So we, you know, gather the data and have everything come together. And Evan starts to dive into it. And it was really funny, because he would flip-flop back and forth between, “Yep, this is boring.” and “Oh, my God!” And then the next one would be, “Yeah, everybody knows this already.” So, it was quite a wild ride to see how this all came together.

Pete Behrens:
I would just love to be a fly in that room. That sounds like—some of the best research is when things are thrown at us that we do not expect. So, maybe, let's start there, with some of those findings. What were, maybe, one or two of the key surprises that jumped out to your team?

Evan Leybourne:
Well, let me start with what was the most boring. [Laughs}

Pete Behrens:
Okay! We’re going to go the other way. Just take over the interview! That’s totally fine, you know? [Laughs]

Evan Leybourne:
Look, but this is where we started! So, we started with the, like—what were the skills. And we're doing the analysis; we're mapping responses, because it's all qualitative. We're looking at survey responses as well as job descriptions. So, publish job descriptions on LinkedIn and so forth. And, like, surprise, surprise—communication is number one. And every single skill study from the World Economic Forum, from wherever, always says communication's number one, or at least in the top three. It's, like—that's not interesting. In the Agile space, communication being an important skill is not particularly groundbreaking. So, that was definitely the part where I'm going to Laura. It's like, how do we make this interesting? [Laughs]

But as we, sort of, dug deeper into the data, I think, really, the—two of the biggest findings which were, just, both gratifying and, I think, a little bit disruptive. The first being that agility—or what we're calling Agile Acumen, the ability to work in an agile way—is incredibly high-demand. So, whether we're talking—it doesn't matter the role. It doesn't matter whether you're a Scrum Master, a product owner, a developer, a manager, or an accountant. The expectation of organizations is that you are working in an agile way, or that you can work in an agile way. Doesn't have to be scrum; doesn't have to be a traditional agile framework. But they're expecting that acumen, that ability to exist within people. That was, I think, a bit of a surprise to see how strongly that came out. But, in contrast—

Pete Behrens:
—So, if I could—can I pause you there for a second to zoom in on that one before you jump to another point there, Evan? And maybe Laura can come in on this as well. What I found interesting about that point when I was reading that part of the research was—it's much less about a role. Like, you need acumen in a specific role or specific team player. You're really looking at the concept of the skill, regardless of position or role or responsibility, right? It's this co-creative nature. That agile acumen extends beyond even, kind of, that traditional Agile team. Am I reading that properly?

Laura Powers:
Yeah, yeah. And I—and when Evan started to tell me about this, I was like, “Yay, this is really awesome!” Because it tells us that we're making progress, in terms of bringing agility to the world of work. It's no longer this special thing that some people in the corner are doing or that this team is bringing to us. But now it's becoming—it has infiltrated how we work, to the point that we expect that people have these skills. And to me, it's a sign of progress. And I just thought it was awesome because I don't think we expected, like Evan said, to see that strong of a signal for that in the survey.

Pete Behrens:
Yeah, yeah. And it goes to the ubiquity, I think, of agility. I think you were kind of saying—you think, even at the outset of that report, like, “Okay, Agile's everywhere, in a sense. And that's good and bad.” But Evan, you're going to counter that point. Maybe I'll let you continue. [Laughs]

Evan Leybourne:
Well, what—actually, I'll build—before I counter, I'll actually build on that. Because one of the things that was really interesting when we were looking at the job descriptions, in terms of this agile acumen, is—because it—it gave us this sense that Agile has won. You see all of these blog posts and LinkedIn articles and so forth. It's like, “Agile is dead!” And that is—it's a frustrating—it's a very negative attitude. And some of the points are valid, that these articles raise. But when we look at it, it's like, “No, no, Agile is doing very well, thank you very much.” It has almost been commoditized. It's become a standard. It's what people and organizations are expecting. Now, Agile as an industry—that one may not be what it was ten years ago. I'm not saying it's dead, but it is certainly pivoting and evolving. The business model that worked ten years ago? That's dead. And I think that's where a lot of the tension has come out, because there has been tension since the publishing of this report.

Pete Behrens:
I think what I'm hearing from that is—Agile is very much alive as a concept, as a value system, as even processes and frameworks inside organizations. And the skills and the agile acumen those people need that are involved in any way with those teams, is critical.

Evan Leybourne:
Yes. And—which is actually one of the other findings—is that agile acumen—so, we were talking about the evolution from T-shaped skills to Pi-shaped skills. And one of the things that really emerged very strongly is that organizations wanted Agile Acumen and. And didn't really matter what the and was, right? And technical skills. And management skills. But when we, again, dug deeper, what emerged was this idea of these multidisciplinary people. This was true no matter what. So, it was Agile Acumen and, but it was also tech and. It was management and. Coaching and. It didn't matter what the skill sets were. Companies were hiring or preferencing the hiring of multi-disciplinary—people who had more than one functional area of expertise.

And it was completely—it was all over the place, in terms of what the combinations were. But what was common was that there was always this combination. And so, we talk about T-shaped skills in terms of people having that crossbar at the top of the T, which is those, the thin, broad skills across numerous areas, and then that one, deep subject matter expertise. But that's not what companies are hiring for anymore. They're wanting—and we're calling them Pi-shaped. If you think about the letter for pi, 3.1415, rather than, like, eating pie, which—it’s about Thanksgiving!

Pete Behrens:
You know, I was just going to say! We’re coming up on our US holiday of Thanksgiving here. You got me hungry!

Evan Leybourne:
Indeed, indeed! But, we think about that symbol. We got those multiple depths, multiple areas of functional expertise.

Laura Powers:
There's other people who are talking about comb-shaped skills. You know, the ability to comb. So, even more ways to go deep than just Pi. Now, on a related note, one of the other fascinating outcomes of the report is that hiring managers are not always articulating what it is that they're looking for. So, there's places where, like, communication comes out as really important. And, in addition, there's an unspoken amount of screening for that, that makes it even bigger. And a lot of the skills, including Agile Acumen, are like that. And I'm guessing that there are people who are trying to figure out, “Well, what does it take to get a job in the current economy?” And some of it is thinking about those skills, and how do I demonstrate it, even if it's not front-and-center in the job description for what I'm applying for?

Pete Behrens:
Hm, interesting. It's relating to—I was listening to another podcast—and I'm going to forget the name here. They were talking about the corporate ladder, right? Thinking about your career as going up a ladder, which is very linear. And this particular author was talking about—change that to a pyramid, right? Go horizontal first; build a stronger base and give you more resiliency as you climb, in terms of leadership. I thought that was really interesting. I think it relates to what you're saying, right? Having a breadth. Going sideways creates more flexibility. It creates more resiliency. It creates more ability to work in complex systems. Is that an accurate connection?

Laura Powers:
And actually, we talk about people having a career mosaic, not a career ladder. So, if you think about a mosaic with little tiles that fit together to create a picture. Some of them are on top of each other, and some of them go side-to-side. And I think one of the things that leaders need to consider, you know, moving forward into whatever our future is, is—how do you help people redefine what success looks like? Because it's not your Dad's old, you know, organization, or your Mom's, you know, org chart. This is a new look. And what—I saw some study that said that 30% of—I want to say it was millennials—have no interest in a management job. So, what's successful, and what does that look like? It's the Wild Wild West again!

Pete Behrens:
Hm. Well, speaking of leaders then—so, if we're looking at—alright, the employee is being, kind of, more Agile Acumen. And I would assume that applies to leaders. And this multidisciplinary Pi, comb, whatever we might call it. I assume that could apply to leaders as well. Extend this out to leaders a little bit more for me. What is it that, maybe, you're finding, could relate to more of that leader role and how they're behaving in organizations? Or the place that they play, I guess, in these organizations?

Evan Leybourne:
But that's exactly what we found! So, management skills—I use the word management rather than leadership. Management skills, in combination, multidisciplinary, with—whether it's coaching skills or technical skills, whether it was management. So, obviously communicate—like, the human skills, the communication, the influence that was always there. I'm talking about, like, the functional skills here. But the expectation was that management, leaders in organizations, themselves carried multiple areas of expertise. A very common one, that we saw across multiple organizations who were hiring managers, was management skills with product, management skills with technical, and management skills with coaching. Those were sort of the three combinations with that management leadership skills that were most common. So, those that were looking were management and product skills, were people who—product owners. But a product owner who knows how to lead, who knows how to manage, right? Rather than just a dedicated product owner.

But the contrast was true. A manager who knew how to design or to prioritize and plan for product road maps and product strategy. Management, and coaching: the need for those enterprise level coaches seems to be drastically reducing. And we won't go into that, but the expectation—but the demand for coaching skill was still relatively high. But it's just that role—sorry—that skill was now being put onto the responsibility of a leader, rather than as a dedicated specialist skill set or—sorry—dedicated specialist role. And similar with the technology stack or the technology skill sets. The expectation is that managers of, in particular, tech teams, and in a technology environment, had deep technical expertise. That one, interestingly, was actually the least common. There were, certainly, areas where tech skills was a very common mapping, but that was like Scrum Masters with tech skills or delivery leads with Scrum Master skills, and so forth.

But there was, after coaching—sorry—after product, after coaching, the third most common combination with leaders was leaders who had technical skills, who knew what these concepts meant. When their technologists, when their dev teams, when their product teams were describing problems or opportunities, the managers go, “Yep. I know what that means.” And that was something that I think a lot of organizations had been struggling with, because they had a lot of dedicated managers, people who had management skills and leadership skills but were lacking the cross skill. But, interestingly, almost as many organizations had the exact opposite problem, where they had people in leadership and management roles who were good technologists, good product people, or good coaches, but didn't have the management skill. Because—and the contradiction is—organizations weren't developing them, weren't paying for them to develop their management skills. But that's an entirely different conversation. But having that multiple set of skills—incredibly important.

Laura Powers:
I was going to say—what I'm hoping is—maybe we will see a return to something that was more prevalent in the early days of my career. This is way before the, you know, Agile Manifesto. But you, as a leader or a manager—you could only get to a certain level in the company before you needed to do some number of lateral positions. So it wasn't a promotion, but let's say you were in business operations. That's, you know—you came in, and that's where you had been working, and you needed to go do a lateral position for some amount of time in product development, where you were part of the team that had to ship product and make that happen and vice versa.

And when we talk about, “What does it take to develop these Pi-shaped skills?”, it's not just, “Go take a two-day course on something!” Some of it is getting real hands-on experience, doing something else—something new to you and then adding that to the portfolio of skills that you have. The issue is—in the last 30 years, companies have become increasingly focused on: “We've got to do what it takes to hit the numbers this quarter or to ship this product to whatever.” And they're looking to find the perfect person who already comes with all of these skills and all of this experience. And they're not creating the space for people to move into something that gives—has the head space for them to grow and then adds to the richness of their experience and their skill set for the future for the company. So, I think that's a call to action to some of the executives who might be listening to this podcast. And to the leaders who might be looking at, you know, “What can I do to really help our organization have the resilience and the longevity to thrive, beyond just what we're going to do for next quarter?”

Pete Behrens:
Let me, maybe, touch on a couple of points. First on the Evan point. You mentioned two problems, right? One is the technologist or expert in some field having trouble shifting into coordination and people roles—right?—into that leadership sense. And then the other side of that is the leader who does it, and then—we call it getting hollowed out. You kind of let go, or completely delegate everything. And all of the sudden, you're kind of aloof, right? You're not connected to the work. You're not close enough to the work to understand the work. And all of the sudden, you become a little bit, you know, un-valuable, in that sense. And it sounds like you're seeing both sides of that pendulum swing. And we see those people in our classes all the time. And it’s just—sounds like it's coming out. So, that balance—it sounds like it's really critical. We can't let go, but we also need to develop those leadership skills.

Evan Leybourne:
So, I really love the phrase you use of hollowed out. I've not heard that before, and I think that's absolutely brilliant. It's exactly what's happening. Early in my career, I was a public servant for the Australian federal government. And anyone who's been a public servant—and I think America's got a very similar kind of approach. It's a very linear career path. And one of the big problems in the public service, especially when you're talking with, say, technology—is that the public service has crossbands. You get paid in a certain band. But the bands are based on your hierarchical level in the organization, your management level. When we're talking about—let's say—technology and technology teams, the market rate for a technologist is higher than an administrative clerk, but they are hierarchically equivalent.

Like, so, what would happen all the time in the public service was—in order to pay anything like a market rate, people were put into much more senior roles, into management-level roles, when, really, all they needed was a really good software developer. And—but the minute you got into those roles, you were expected to lead teams and all this kind of stuff. And so, what you had were a lot of very inappropriate people in roles, and they just didn't have—they didn't want to be managers; they didn't have the expertise. A couple of years later—I used to work for IBM. And there's issues—don't get me wrong. But one of the good things that IBM does is—they have a dual band promotion. You can actually be promoted as a technologist multiple times, basically your entire career—right?—and never once lead people. And it's that distinguished engineer track—is what they call it. And they've got the management track—right?—which obviously—it's like management sales, account management, all that kind of stuff.

But this idea of having—and Laura mentioned, in terms of that—this is not your parents’ business.There's no more corner office. But having this idea of dual track, having this idea of—you can be promoted with the pay and the authority, without necessarily becoming a manager. And so, part of the issue here is that those people who are strong in one area, but not management, probably should never have been managers in the first place. But they just got promoted into those roles because that's what—that was the career path. That's the only linear path that was available to them in the organization. Or, in fact, culturally, the expectation of where they go. Whereas that, this—there's a systemic, cultural change that has to happen in all organizations, around, just, what you're worth, the value that you provide to an organization, and the expectation of management and leadership skills, which are not necessarily linked. Or they're not the same thing.

Pete Behrens:
I want to connect that to what Laura said, also, because I think what you're talking about is—leaders are basically created by the cultural ecosystem they're in, right? And, Laura, you mentioned the pressure of time, right? We don't have time for this! Evan, you're talking about pay, right? That's a huge metric, in terms of what people do, right? I remember at Google—you know, leaders stayed very tactical because they were measured on their technical expertise. So, even as a leader, you were expected to do design; you were expected to do coding, because that's what you're measured on. I want, maybe, to comment on how that may have shown up in some of this research, like, the culture and the systems you're describing that shape these expectations, shape these people to do what they do.

Laura Powers:
If I were a middle manager reading this report, I would have some degree of frustration. Because for the last three, four, five, seven, ten years, my organization's been telling me that I need to empower my teams. They need to be autonomous; they need to own their own thing. And now you're telling me I should be Pi-shaped! And one of the ways that I could be Pi-shaped is to be more technical. [Laughs] And I would like to probably tell somebody somewhere, you know, pick a lane! What do you want? And that was what I was thinking, and then you said the key, I think, to that whole line of thinking isn’t about balance. It's about being able to balance the technical with the empowering teams and helping them be, you know, self-organizing and autonomous and holding them to account. And, you know—so, it's that balancing thing.

Pete Behrens:
Well—and I think it also just gets to the concept that leadership is less a role than a responsibility. And I think that showed up throughout your report about—it's less about jobs and roles, and it's more about skills and everybody owning and having. And, you know, it's the act of leading, not the leader. And I think that's what you're getting at here, is—everybody demonstrates and can demonstrate leadership.

Laura Powers:
Yes. And it's become a bit of a cliche, hasn't it? That we say “Everybody's a leader.” But the reality of the matter is—everybody is a leader in certain situations. And part of the beauty of an accomplished leader is to know when to step into an active aspect of that skill set and when to say, “Hey, Evan's got this covered. Pete's doing really great here. I can just kind of be a happy participant.” And that's an art form.

Evan Leybourne:
And that's also—like, you got to address the human element there, as well. The ego, the arrogance, the feeling that I've got to be—if I'm not at the center of attention, then who am I? And I'm not talking about the toxic manager. It's—we all know the ones who are, like, really problematic. I'm just talking about your average person who is trying to be a good—trying to do the best that they can. But also recognizing that their promotion, their salary bump, their KPIs, their status in the organization is based on the political shenanigans and goings-on. It's based on who sees what you do. And so, for me to step back and let someone else lead in a situation means I've got to be really feeling really secure that I'm not going to be disempowered as a leader. I'm not going to be overlooked for those promotions once I step back. So, everything you're describing has got to happen, but, quite often, the political systems in these organizations—that's what's holding people back. It’s—this is the politics! This is how organizations, sadly, often work.

Pete Behrens:
And what you're describing is the difference between what we consider conventional leadership and postconventional leadership. And conventional leadership is that hero, right? It's that in charge. It's the importance. It serves the ego, and it takes a strength to let go of that. I just want to maybe poke one more question on this particular skills research and then talk about, maybe, where you're going or what's next from this. But the question is—we have a love/hate relationship with certification. And I saw that show up in your research here, and I'm just curious about a—touch on how certification showed up in this, in these results, and what did you learn? Anything new that you learned from that?

Evan Leybourne:
So, this was a bit interesting. So, like you say, there is a love/hate relationship with certification out there. But what we found was that 1) certifications were important, right? Well, actually, no. Let me take a step back. Education was always seen as important, and certifications as evidence of education was seen as important. But what the surprise was—was that managers saw certifications as more important than the individuals who had them. So when we ask questions like, “How important was your certification to getting your job?” Right? Individuals, like, a lot of people, said “Not at all. Only a little bit.” Whereas, when we ask managers how important are certifications when you're hiring, they would say very important or highly important, kind of thing. So, it wasn't huge. It was like 30%—I forget the exact number number; I’d have to go back to the report—there's like a 30% difference between individuals and managers, between their perception of value of that certification.

Now, what was then interesting is—we also then asked the individuals. So, we said, “Okay, so how important was it to get the job?” “Not very.” “Once you've got the job, how important is the education that—so, from that certification, you had some education. How important was that education to the day-to-day work of your job?” And that's where they said “Very important!” They were—they didn't see the certification as the important thing. But they saw that—the true value in, “I can do more things because I've learned to do more things.” So, it's almost like individuals, kind of, undervalue that evidence of the education, but still see value in the education. Whereas, managers value the evidence, because that's how they recruit people. They can't—they don't know you’re good until you've started. And to get you started, they need some kind of proof that you can do the job. And that's where the certifications come in.

Pete Behrens:
I want to, yeah, maybe, put a—raise a glass to education. So, I'm on that side of the fence. And you're surprising me, because I always envision people on the employee side gravitating to the certification to get the job. But I'm hearing it from the other side. And that's surprising to me. But not—now that I'm hearing it, not—maybe I shouldn't be. [Laughs]

Laura Powers:
There was another piece of the research that I thought was rather interesting. Evan, was it about 30% of the people in the survey—said that their company would pay for their professional development for their education? So, and there's some regional differences in this, but if you think about it, only a third of folks are getting the support from their organizations to develop these new skills so that they can continue to contribute and grow for the organization. It's an ongoing concern of mine, that individuals don't always own their skill set and their professional development. To the point of—if I work at a place that has a kind of a crappy professional development program, or maybe even a non-existent one—that I'm going to take personal responsibility for creating that and saying, “Hey, we're on the doorstep of the last month of 2023. What is it that I want to learn and to grow and to practice and to experience coming into 2024 that will help me be able to bring more value to my organization, be more employable?” You know, all of that sort of a thing. And, you know, if I were to plant a seed for folks who are listening to this podcast, that would be one of them—would just be to say, “Do you own it? And what are you doing to grow in the way that you need to grow, regardless of where you're planted right now?” Because the guarantee is that you probably won't be planted there forever. You're going to move. Things are going to change, whatever. So, be ready for it.

Pete Behrens:
Yeah. Nobody can take care of brand you, except for you. Yeah. So invest in yourself. And connecting, Laura, to your stat of 30%, it matches the data we've seen from the Ken Blanchard Institute, who says about 30% of leaders also get formal education, mentoring, or coaching. So, it sounds like it's no different than other types of leadership or employee development going on.

Well, this has been fascinating. I'm curious, maybe, where you're headed with some of this. I know you've got your—also, your Business Agility Institute Report coming out again for 2023. Looking forward to seeing that. Any other, kind of, interesting research you have on the horizon that we should be looking for?

Laura Powers:
Oh, great head of research? [Laughs] I’ll let you answer.

Evan Leybourne:
Alright, so let me give you a bit of a preview for the Business Agility Report. Because it links in—there's some insights that link to what we found with the skills report. So, two key insights. Number one: every index, every measure on collaboration is down, and down drastically. 8% year-on-year, which, from a statistical standpoint—that's actually a huge drop. So, what does this mean? I'm sort of, like, talking about this fear-based leadership that seems to be emerging in companies. The economic crisis. We've just come out of a pandemic into an economic crisis. Leaders are—they're seeing cuts. They're afraid that their teams and they are going to be the next ones. And so, they're building walls. And so, they're, like—companies are—they're not innovating as much, not seeking out new customers. They're just trying to hunker down and protect the customer base that they already have. And inside the organizations, leaders are doing exactly the same thing. So, every index on collaboration, every index on those intra-company relationships are all down. That's obviously not what we want to see, but that is what we're seeing around the world right now.

But the good news is that the organizations and the leaders who are not succumbing to that fear-based leadership, right? Who are keeping their eye on that, sort of, being customer-centric. Keeping their eye on business agility, responsive customer-centricity and flexible operations, value-based delivery—are outperforming those that are not. And so, the number one success measure—or, the number one measure of success this year is in business impact, financial returns, and business benefits. And so, those leaders who are actually being responsive and not reactive to the economic situations are outperforming those who are not. And this is, I think, both highly positive for us as an organization, understanding what's going on, but also very gratifying to see for those organizations who have continued to invest, even though things are tense, things are tight. They're continuing to focus on educating leaders on how to be better leaders, how to manage, how to be responsive, how to listen to the market. They're the ones who are actually growing in this difficult economic situation.

Pete Behrens:
Well, I think, to the astute leader—right?—opportunity bounds there, right? If most are hunkering down, time to shine. So, Laura, I'm going to give you the last word. Close us out here! What would you like to say as our parting thoughts?

Laura Powers:
So, I would say that the call to action for the leaders who are listening to your podcast is two-part. And it's—you need strategies to combat two things. Because if you can get through these two things, there's great opportunity on the other side. And Evan hit one of those, which is the fear. There's a lot of fear in the marketplace, on your teams, in your business. And you need to find a way to paint a realistic and optimistic picture of what the future looks like.

The other f-word that you need to think about is fatigue. Resiliency—I accidentally posted something about resiliency some months back, and out of everything that I have accidentally posted to LinkedIn, the response to that was just off the charts. Our people are fatigued. This is—what?—year number three, coming out of, you know, the pandemic, and then all of the aftermath of the pandemic. And so, people are tired. And when you add the fear and the fatigue together, it can be a really tough cocktail to deal with. And so, as leaders, I think we need to figure out how to help rebuild resiliency and inspire our folks so that they can see the opportunity. Because there's so much work to be done in the world of agility and so much goodness that we can create. And, you know, we just—this is one of the speed bumps in the road.

And I think one of the things that we're looking to do is—this is the first time we've done this skills research in this format. And we're looking forward to doing a follow-on to this in 2024, because we will start then with two data points to be able to see how much of this is a snapshot of this current moment in time and how much of this is a trend. So, stay tuned! You need to make sure that you listen to Pete and his podcast, because you never know what goodness will come next. [Laughs] I love you, Pete!

Pete Behrens:
Alright, check’s in the mail there, Laura. Thank you! [Laughs]

Well, Evan and Laura, I just want to say thank you so much for spending some time with us today and sharing your results. And, even, just the effort you put into the research. Our community is better for it. So, thank you!

Laura Powers:
Oh, thank you! Thank you.

Evan Leybourne:
Thank you.

Pete Behrens:
(Re)Learning Leadership is the official podcast of the Agile Leadership Journey. Together, we build better leaders. It’s hosted by me, Pete Behrens, with contributions from our global Guide community. It’s produced by Ryan Dugan. With music by Joy Zimmerman. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, leave us a review, or share a comment. And visit our website, agileleadershipjourney.com/podcast, for guest profiles, episode references, transcripts, and to explore more about your own leadership journey.