Leading at Scale: How to Bring Your Organization Into the Future of Work

Part 3 of 4 in the GBT Leadership Development Framework Series

By the time you reach Phase 3 of the GBT Leadership Development Framework, something meaningful has already happened. You understand yourself. Your team trusts you. They are doing their best work and they can co-create with you.

Now the question gets bigger: How do you use all of that to lead your organization through what is coming?

The Landscape Has Changed

The last five years have fundamentally shifted what employees want from work, how organizations operate, and what leadership is expected to look like. Add to that a new generation entering the workforce with different expectations, and a business environment where the pace of change is accelerating, not slowing down.

Leaders who resist this, who judge it or try to override it, put themselves at a disadvantage. Leaders who accept it are getting there. But the ones who actively embrace it as an asset are the ones who will bring their organizations forward.

Diversity Is Not Just the Right Thing to Do: It Is a Performance Strategy

The research on this is consistent. More diverse leadership teams and organizations produce better business outcomes. The McKinsey Diversity and Inclusion reports have documented this relationship for years across gender, ethnicity, and other dimensions.

But this has a practical implication beyond hiring. It means being intentional about whose perspectives are in the room when you are strategizing. Leaders naturally tend to recruit people similar to themselves. It takes deliberate effort to build a team where the strengths and viewpoints genuinely complement each other rather than cluster together.

If you are not in a position to add headcount, cast a wider net within your organization. Invite people from different departments or backgrounds into your planning conversations. The diversity of input you need does not always require a new hire.

From Reactive to Strategic

One of the clearest signs of Phase 3 leadership is the shift from putting out fires to planning for the future. When you have done the work of Phases 1 and 2, you are no longer the only person holding things together. Your team can hold things with you.

That frees you to look further out. What are the challenges coming in the next five to ten years for your organization? What capabilities will you need that you do not currently have? What does transformation readiness actually look like in your specific context?

These are not questions you have to answer alone. In fact, you should not. This is where co-creation becomes an organizational strategy, not just a team dynamic. Your people, if you have invested in them through the earlier phases, are your most valuable resource for thinking through what comes next.

Building a Resilient Organization

Resilience at the organizational level is not a fixed state. It is a capacity you build over time, through the same practices that develop it in individuals: awareness, honesty about what is uncertain, willingness to adapt, and a culture where people feel safe enough to raise problems early rather than hide them.

Organizations that are transformation-ready are not the ones with the most rigid plans. They are the ones with the most capable, connected, and trusted people.

“If you can see what is coming in the next five to ten years, and you have worked through your own leadership, and you have helped your team work through their dynamics, then you can move mountains.”

Part 4 of this series, the final post, pulls back to look at the thread that runs through all three phases: the practice of creating space. It is the one habit that makes everything else possible, and the one most leaders consistently skip.

Genevieve Retzlaff discusses Phase 3 and the full GBT framework on the Courage of a Leader podcast in the episode “A Proven Blueprint for Developing Yourself as a Leader”.

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This post is part of a four-part series on the GBT Leadership Development Framework.

Part 1: Why Leadership Development Has to Start With You

Part 2: How to Create Psychological Safety on Your Team (And Why Vulnerability is Not a Weakness)

Part 3: Leading at Scale: How to Bring Your Organization Into the Future of Work - this post

Part 4: The One Thing Every Leader Skips (That Changes Everything)

Ready to explore the full GBT Leadership Development Program?