What does it take to create a leadership development strategy that actually works?
As people leaders, you know your organization’s success depends on your people—and their ability to innovate, adapt, and grow. So, how do you equip them to meet the challenges ahead?
In 2025, the focus will be on supporting your people in ways that are not only impactful but also sustainable. We spoke to key leaders at Torch to get their take on the trends that will shape leadership development in the coming year.
1. Future-Proofing Leadership with Succession Planning
By 2030, 55% of Baby Boomers are predicted to leave the workforce, creating a wave of leadership exits.
Succession planning can no longer just be about filling gaps when someone exits—it’s about preparing your next generation of leaders to step up with confidence. By identifying future leaders and equipping them with the right development, you can build a resilient leadership pipeline. This approach doesn’t just protect your organization from unexpected exits; it helps create a diverse and dynamic leadership bench for long-term success.
2. Expanding Leadership Capacities
The workplace is changing fast, and traditional skill-building alone isn’t enough to keep up. In fact, nearly half of executives (49%) say the skills their teams rely on today won’t be relevant in two years.
To prepare leaders for what’s next, development has to go deeper. Beyond short-term skills, leaders need to build core capacities like emotional intelligence, adaptability, and critical thinking—qualities that grow with them and help them tackle new challenges head-on.
Effective leadership development, then, gives leaders the tools, feedback, and support they need to expand their capacity to lead and adapt no matter how fast the world around them changes.
According to McKinsey, leadership programs often fall short because they don’t take into account a leader’s unique strengths and growth areas, or the specific goals, culture, and expectations of their organization. Generic training simply doesn’t stick.
In 2025, organizations will need to focus on delivering development that’s personalized and relevant to the challenges leaders face in their unique environments. Contextual learning isn’t just nice to have—they’re what drive real impact where it matters most.
4. Focused L&D Programs for Broader Impact
Generic L&D programs might offer universal access, but they often fall short of driving the engagement and meaningful change they’re designed to create.
Real transformation happens when organizations focus on targeted development for key populations. In the case of coaching, it’s how organizations can start to see the benefits of coaching ripple beyond the individual participant and into the broader organization. The ripple is key to achieving larger priorities and ROI.
5. Prioritizing Manager Support
When you think about the linchpins who make things happen inside your organization–whether it’s performance management, building culture, or managing projects—managers are at the center. But they’re often overwhelmed and undersupported.
The best way to help them grow? Personalized development that happens in the flow of work. Strategies to deliver personalized support to managers—like coaching—will be prioritized.
Wrapping Up
As the workplace continues to evolve, the way we develop leaders must evolve with it. These trends highlight the importance of going beyond quick fixes to create meaningful, lasting growth.
Curious about how coaching can support your organization?
Whether you’re focused on developing managers, exploring executive coaching, or help your organization navigate change, Torch is here to partner with you.
Ready for Change: How to Build More Adaptable and Agile Teams
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Change is good, as the saying goes. And, for the most part, it’s true. But change can also be overwhelming, especially when it occurs in rapid succession.
This has been the reality for many organizations in recent years. From transitioning to remote work during the pandemic to grappling with a growing skills shortage, organizations have faced numerous disruptions, putting them in a position to react to change instead of initiating it.
As the pace of change continues to move at full speed, skills like adaptability and agility are more important than ever. They enable organizations and teams to better navigate uncertainty, pivot quickly, and act on new opportunities faster.
In this article, we’ll discuss five strategies for organizations to build adaptable and agile teams. By the way, this article is based on our recent webinar, Thriving in the New Normal: Essential Skills for Organizational Success. I highly recommend watching for a more in-depth exploration of building adaptable and agile organizations, teams, and individuals.
A quick refresher on adaptability and agility.
I use the terms “adaptability” and “agility” throughout this article, but they aren’t the same things. Let me explain:
Adaptability is the ability to adjust to new information and situations. This involves being open to changing your approach or mindset in response to new circumstances. For example, a company shows adaptability by shifting its business model in response to a market downturn. By pivoting its strategies and operations, the company can meet new realities.
Agility, on the other hand, is the ability to respond to change quickly. The key ingredient here is speed, an element that adaptability may lack. Think of a startup that quickly iterates on its product based on customer feedback. By executing changes swiftly, the startup can stay agile.
5 Strategies to Build More Adaptable and Agile Teams
1. Promote coaching over command and control
Helps with: Adaptability and Agility
Your teams can only be adaptable and agile if your culture supports it.
In command-and-control cultures, teams may feel micromanaged by rigid hierarchies and strict directives. This can stifle innovation and any autonomy to act quickly or creatively.
In a coaching culture, managers provide guidance and support rather than issuing directives. They set clear expectations and trust their team to meet specific outcomes. In practice, this might look like a team member who, pressed for time, decides to skip a meeting but watches the recording later, or reallocates their time from a less urgent task to a high-impact one.
This approach encourages teams to take ownership and accountability, empowering them to make decisions and manage their work in a way that makes sense to them.
2. Move away from “doing more with less”
Helps with: Adaptability and Agility
Facing tighter budgets and team restructurings, many organizations have embraced the mindset of “doing more with less.” While this philosophy sounds effective in theory, it often diminishes team effectiveness in the long run.
With no clear hierarchy of priorities, teams become swamped with competing demands and endless meetings, unable to focus on what truly matters. This lack of focus also reduces their ability to manage unexpected changes and react swiftly.
Instead, organizations should focus on a select few urgent and important tasks. This strategy, sometimes known as ruthless prioritization, reduces the noise of less critical activities, allowing teams to concentrate on what adds the most value and adapt quickly to changes.
3. Build out human-centric soft skills
Helps with: Adaptability and Agility
While equipping your team with in-demand technical skills is vital for maintaining adaptability and agility, human-centric skills are equally crucial. In fact, a study by Boston Consulting Group found that tech-centric jobs now demand a balance of hard and soft skills, including leadership and effective communication.
Even if jobs and industries change, skills like strategic thinking, communication, self-awareness, and the ability to develop others are infinitely transferable. When leaders have these skills, they are better at handling change and driving innovation, boosting their organization’s adaptability.
4. Make accountability easy
Helps with: Agility
Real agility thrives on accountability and well-defined responsibilities. This might seem counterintuitive at first — after all, isn’t agility about going where the needs are and stepping into different roles?
Yet, when teams are expected to do everything — or they’re unsure of who’s doing what — it creates ambiguity and hinders effectiveness. True agility emerges when each person understands their specific role and is empowered to deliver on their commitments.
5. Decentralize decision-making
Helps with: Adaptability and Agility
It’s hard for teams to stay agile if they need sign-off for every decision. This is especially common in hierarchical organizations where decision-making tends to be slower. Information is sent up the ladder, followed by a waiting period until a decision is passed down.
A good example is Microsoft. Historically, Microsoft was known for its command-and-control management style. This approach often stifled innovation and slowed down decision-making. In the early 2010s, CEO Satya Nadella introduced the concept of a “growth mindset.” His approach focused on empowering employees to make decisions and take ownership of their projects. Employees were encouraged to experiment, innovate, and learn from their failures.
This cultural shift boosted employee engagement, spurred innovation, and enhanced Microsoft’s ability to adapt to new market demands, playing a crucial role in the company’s resurgence as a leader in technology.
Back to You
Organizations play a critical role in empowering their teams to not only respond to change but thrive within it. Ultimately, it starts with your culture.
A coaching culture, in particular, provides the necessary conditions for teams to be both adaptable and agile. It empowers teams to make decisions, prioritize their work, and adapt swiftly to new challenges and opportunities.
To learn how to build a strong coaching culture, check out this helpful guide.
The New Currency of Work: Why Skills Are Crucial for Organizational Well-Being
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When we talk about the future of work, the discussion often dissolves into which jobs are coming, and which are going.
Jobs do come and go. But for most people, jobs change. So do the skills required to perform them, even if the job title remains the same.
Consider this: the number of skills needed for a single position is increasing by10% year over year. By 2025,over half of all employees will require significant re-skilling and upskilling.
This reality has led to a growing skills shortage — an urgent challenge where the gap between employee capabilities and future job requirements is widening. For forward-thinking organizations, filling these skill gaps is becoming a business necessity.
In this article, we’ll discuss why skill development is critical for organizational well-being and how to future-proof your workforce with the right skill development.
Leveraging Skill Development to Prepare Tomorrow’s Workforce
From the C-Suite down, the pressure to develop new skills is felt at every level. Yet, 59% of workers report having received little to no formal workplace training, with many of their skills being self-taught.
Organizations play a critical role in preparing their people for future roles, providing them with the right conditions to learn and the opportunities to develop. Those that prioritize skill development are better positioned to:
Attract and Retain Top Talent
Hungry for development opportunities, employees are increasingly drawn to organizations with strong learning cultures. According toa new report, 32% of employees who changed jobs within the past year did so to learn new skills, while another 26% did so for more or better training opportunities. The same study also found that employees in fields like IT and HR are more likely to leave their jobs out of a desire to learn new skills.
When organizations deliver opportunities for skill development, they can reduce unnecessary turnovers, further strengthening their talent pool.
Build a Well-Rounded Workforce
If you think the skills shortage is exclusive to technical skills, think again.
In one survey by McKinsey Global Institute, executives in Europe and the United States expressed a need not only for technological skills but also social and emotional ones like critical thinking and creativity. Anotherstudy by Boston Consulting Group found that tech-centric jobs now demand a balance of soft skills, including leadership, effective communication, and the ability to build relationships.
Developing strong soft skills is especially critical for leaders. After all, leaders are influential drivers for team success, and provide organizations with a strategic edge in the talent marketplace. For instance, when leaders possess strong soft skills, they can increase their team’s engagement and performance by up to 30%.
The Right Approach to Leadership Skill Development
Today’s leaders are working against a backdrop of constant change — from technological advances to volatile market shifts. It’s not enough for leaders to have business acumen; they also need critical relationship skills to support their teams through these changes.
Traditional skills training is one of the most widely used methods for leadership skill development. Yet, according to a Harvard Business Review report, it ranks at the bottom for effectiveness, with 55% of leaders calling it just “somewhat effective.”
Conversely, relationship-based leadership development – like coaching and mentoring — was found to be more effective. 87% of leaders ranked coaching, in particular, as “very to extremely effective.”
When managers engage with coaching, their direct reports also learn new skills. For instance, 67% of direct reports say they are more likely to seek out opportunities to develop new skills after their manager received coaching. On top of that, 47% experienced improvements in their communication skills, while 41% improved their strategic skills, like decision-making and innovative thinking.
On an organizational level, coaching is shown to have far-reaching effects on business outcomes like employee engagement and retention. In fact, 40% of organizations that use coaching or mentoring report better retention of desired talent, compared to 24% of those that do not.
Back to You
Investing in skill development is critical for organizations to remain competitive, innovative, and adaptable. While traditional training is often used to teach skills, coaching enables leaders to put those skills into practice.
We’ve found that coaching and mentoring are philosophically very similar. At the core of each practice is the relationship between two people. The methods might differ between coaching and mentoring, but both are about helping people get where they want to go by leveraging the experience of the coach or mentor.
In this article, we’ll explore what mentoring and coaching really are, the true differences between the two, how to know what your business needs, and how to get started with coaching, mentoring or both.
The definition of mentoring
We define mentoring as a development-focused relationship with a domain relevant mentor who passes on their skills and experience to a mentee.
Historically, a mentor is someone within the same company as the mentee, but in a more senior or tenured role. Nowadays, people often find mentors outside of their company through a professional network, and these people provide mentorship outside of their regular work duties.
The definition of coaching
We define coaching as a development-focused relationship with a specially trained coach who provides guidance to a client on their goals and helps them reach their full potential.
Typically a coach provides coaching as their full time job. They’ve often been trained by an organization like the International Coach Federation or Co-Active Training Institute. To create goals for the coaching relationship, they’ll often use an assessment, like a 360, to get a baseline for where to begin.
The (true) differences between coaching and mentoring
One of the reasons that the differences between coaching and mentoring are so often discussed is that there are no regulatory bodies for either that lay out these differentiators. Unlike say, getting a license to practice therapy, there is no governing body that decides who can be a coach or a mentor.
While we’re committed to the belief that coaching and mentoring are philosophically similar, what defines a coach and what defines a mentor can differ.
Below you’ll see categories that are typically used to differentiate coaches and mentors. For each, we’ve provided an explanation of how the team at Torch views these distinctions when it comes to our coaches and mentors.
Skills and training
Coaches: Generally receive special training to guide people in any field towards achieving their goals.
Mentors: Generally do not have formal training in mentorship. Their main focus is passing on specific skills and expertise to another person so they can be more successful.
Assessments and tools
Coaches: Often use formal assessments like a 360 review, StrengthsFinder or Enneagram.
Mentors: Less likely to use a formal assessment like a 360 review, but often utilize other assessments for understanding the goals of their mentees.
Conversational viewpoint
Coaches: Trained to help the individual find their own solution rather than offering their own advice or opinions
Mentors: Also are focused on helping an individual find their own solution, but become more direct when needed.
Domain expertise
While it can seem prudent to receive coaching or mentoring from someone who works in the same field, it’s not a necessity.
Short vs. long term focus
Both coaching and mentoring engagements can be short or long term.
We acknowledge that coaching has typically been seen as a short term engagement. In this engagement, a coach works with a client on specific goals, and when those goals have been achieved, the relationship is re-evaluated. However, there are many cases wherein a coach relationship does span the course of years, as people’s goals change over time.
We also acknowledge that mentoring has typically been seen as a longer term engagement. Mentors can work with a mentee over years, focusing on long term career development and goals. However, there are cases in which a mentor supports a mentee on a short term basis, for example, during their transition as a new manager.
Formality of engagement
We view coaching and mentoring as formal engagements between a coach/mentor and a client.
Most often the coaching relationship has been viewed as a more formal engagement. A specially trained coach has been sought to support a client. Mentoring, on the other hand, has often been viewed as informal. Mentors were found within a company, and the relationship would begin organically.
How to Build a Coaching Strategy: Chapter 1
Learn how to get the results you want from an investment in coaching.
Mentoring and coaching: What does my business need?
Now that we’ve explored how mentoring and coaching are similar, and how they differ, the next step is understanding when you’d utilize these services for your business. Here are a few common reasons you might consider coaching and mentoring. At the core of each of these is a focus on learning and development to increase retention and employee engagement.
You have high potential employees to develop and retain
Providing high potential employees with a dedicated coach or mentor gives them a resource devoted entirely to their development.
You have an existing development program that could be enhanced
Coaching and mentoring provide an important one-on-one component to any program focused on employee development.
You have new managers to train
If you’re planning to have a large cohort of new managers, bringing in new managers from a merger or acquisition, or perhaps just scaling rapidly, a coaching or mentoring program can help in different ways. If you have a strong group of leaders internally who can provide mentoring to new leaders, that’s a great start. If you need to provide more structure for a growing leadership team across the board, coaching is likely your next best step.
You are focused on succession planning
Providing a new leader with a coach or mentor during succession planning shows the employee that you are committed to their success.
You have a diversity and inclusion initiative you want to expand or begin
With coaches and mentors, you can focus on developing certain groups to create a more diverse and inclusive workplace. A coach or a mentor can often support the acquisition of strategic knowledge that is less accessible to historically underrepresented groups inside of organizations. Also, coaches and mentors often provide feedback that is harder for members of under-represented groups to obtain through standard feedback channels inside of organizations.
You want to increase employee engagement
Increasing opportunities for employee development through coaching and mentoring directly ties into how engaged employees feel at work. According to benchmarks from Culture Amp, learning and development is a consistent driver of employee engagement.
Getting started with coaching and mentoring
Starting a coaching program — and working to build a culture of coaching for your organization — ensures leadership development at scale. At Torch, we’re committed to providing organizations with the best coaching experience for their employees. We believe that focusing on individual growth not only empowers the individual, but also drives business growth.
Career Coaching 101: Your Guide to Getting Started with Coaching
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The results are in: employees are not satisfied at work. A 2022 report found that 60% of people felt emotionally detached at work. And 19% of those respondents went even further, reporting that they were “miserable” at their jobs. The same report also found that in the US, 50% of workers felt daily job-related stress.
In a candidate’s market, the solution feels easy—just find a new job. But the recent economic slowdown (and all the layoffs that have come along with it) has upended the power balance.
However, there’s one resource many dissatisfied employees haven’t explored: career coaching. If your career is making you feel trapped, disillusioned, or in a rut, career coaching is an effective way to figure out what’s next and land a job that feels aligned to your values.
In this guide, we’ll take you through the ins and outs of career coaching: when it’s most effective, how to get the most out of the experience, and what to look for in a career coach.
What good career coaching looks like
If you’ve never worked with a career coach before, it might be difficult to know what to expect. Will it be hours and hours of trying to describe the specific color of your parachute? Will it be like a therapy session, but without the recollection of childhood memories?
Every career coach — and thus, every career coaching experience — is different, but a good career coach can help you address a number of topics, such as:
1. Overcoming paralysis and envisioning a future you’re excited about
Often, dissatisfied employees develop a sort of near-sightedness that fixates on their present circumstances and prevents them from thinking about future possibilities. A career coach can help by bringing in a fresh perspective and a new point of view.
Leang Chung, Career First Coach and Founder of Pelora Stack, does exactly this with her clients. As she writes in Forbes, she helps clients “understand what is getting in the way of progress, what aspect of [their] current role is dissatisfying, what type of career change [they’re] looking for, or how to define what a fulfilling career looks like for [them].”
If your career coach can help you feel excited about the possibilities that lie ahead, your coaching is off to a great start.
2. Recognizing your values and how you want to embody them through your career
Many people feel at odds with their career because it doesn’t align with their values. A career coach can help you identify and clearly express your values, then be intentional about how to steer your career towards them.
Taking the time to deeply consider your values alongside your coach is essential. When left unexamined, it’s easier to fall back into the same career patterns and continue feeling dissatisfied.
3. Building a plan for the future you want
Envisioning your ideal career is one thing. Fulfilling that vision is another. A good career coach will help you break down the next steps in your career journey, from re-engineering your resumé, to sharpening your interview skills, to drawing a detailed map for how you’ll get to the career you want in five years’ time.
Remember, once coaching is over, you’ll be left to your own devices. Ultimately, it’s important that you leave your coaching relationship feeling like you have an actionable framework you can move forward with on your own.
When is the best time to hire a career coach?
While feeling job dissatisfaction is a clear sign you may benefit from hiring a career coach, it’s only one part of the equation. You can feel dissatisfaction for a number of reasons, some of which warrant a career coach, and some of which may signal a different problem.
Before we do anything else, let’s try to answer a fundamental question: “Do I actually need a career coach right now?”
If you’re ready to work with a career coach, you may be feeling any combination of the following:
You feel stuck, unmotivated, or confused about why your career isn’t progressing the way you want it to: Some have called it “job angst”—the feeling of being bored or frustrated with your job, but not sure of what to do with that feeling. If you’re at a loss for coming up with answers on your own, a coach can help you fill in the blanks.
You feel you’ve exercised all your options at your current job: Maybe you’re feeling like a promotion isn’t in the cards for you. Maybe it is, but the prospect of progressing to the next level doesn’t excite you. A coach can help you figure out why you may be stalling, and whether a new set of circumstances might make you feel differently about your future.
You’re dreaming of a different career but don’t know how to get there: It can be tough to know how to carry your current skills into a new career. Marlo Lyons, a certified career coach, touched on this in her Harvard Business Review article. She writes, “A career coach can help you position your skills in the context of a potential role — especially transferable ones that don’t match up exactly with what’s in the job description.”
You want to break into a new career, but you don’t feel ready yet: If you’re feeling overwhelmed at the idea of walking down an entirely new career path, know that a career coach can act as a trusted guide in helping you get to your destination. Whether it’s helping you figure out training and credentials, making new connections, or reshaping your resume, you won’t have to do it alone with the help of a coach.
Sometimes, job dissatisfaction can raise a false flag. It’s not your career you’re dissatisfied with, but your circumstances. Here are some signs it may not be the right time for a career coach, but instead, a different course of action.
You’re actually experiencing burnout: Career dissatisfaction and burnout can look very similar. There are clues that can help identify burnout as the culprit. Often, burnout accompanies the feeling of an unsustainable workload. Would you still be passionate about your work if your level of busyness was reduced? If so, maybe what you really need is an honest conversation with your boss.
Your environment doesn’t feel supportive: Often, a chaotic and unsupportive environment can make us feel like we’re in the wrong career. It’s important to take a step back and ask yourself, would I feel different under more effective management or a more supportive culture? If the answer is yes, it may be time to speak up. Pointing out what you need can be a great first step in changing your environment for the better.
You’re ready for more responsibility: Could it be that you’re bored? Maybe you’re feeling dissatisfied because you’ve outgrown your current role and you’re ready for more. Again, talking to your boss can be a great first step to finding a solution. You may want to suggest a different kind of coaching that can help you fulfill your potential and move to the next level.
If you’ve considered each of these scenarios and decided that career coaching is your next step, it’s time to start thinking about how to approach your experience.
How to get the most out of career coaching
At its best, coaching is a guided experience that requires reciprocity — your coach helps to guide you on your own way forward, rather than prescribing you a path. That’s why it’s important that you come into the experience ready to give it your all. Here are five ways to get the most out of career coaching:
1. Be an active participant
If you’re expecting someone else to give you the answers, you’ll be disappointed. If you’re serious about discovering a new chapter of your career, bring your whole self into the experience. Listen to the questions your coach asks you and be honest about your answers. After all, career coaching is about finding the best outcome for you. Your input isn’t just nice to have, it’s necessary.
2. Be a stickler for certification
Anyone can call themselves a coach, but few can coach effectively. Make sure you find a coach with the right accreditation—the International Coaching Federation (ICF) is internationally recognized, and its members have met the requirements to offer effective coaching. Here at Torch, all of our coaches are ICF-accredited and bring to the table diverse backgrounds and experiences.
3. Find a coach with a proven track record
Who has your coach coached? Don’t be afraid to get in touch with people your coach has worked with and ask them about their experience (a good coach will offer to connect you). What challenges did participants overcome with this coach? What are they doing now? How did the experience transform them?
4. Be ready to challenge your core beliefs
Most people need career coaching because they’re feeling stuck. Often, this is because of unhelpful patterns we can’t help repeating. A great coach will help you break out of harmful cycles by challenging the beliefs that got you there in the first place. If you’re open to change and ready for discomfort, you’ll be surprised and delighted with the outcome.
5. Find a coach that makes you feel excited about your future
A coach can help you build a detailed strategy for how you’ll move forward, but if you’re not excited about it, it’s next to useless. The right coach should make you feel inspired and excited—like your future-state is attainable.
Career coaching can give you the boost you need
Career dissatisfaction is rampant, but it doesn’t have to signal a dead end. If you feel unfulfilled in your current role, a career coach can give you the tools, perspective, and roadmap you need to advance to the next phase of your career—one that will hopefully bring you more joy, less stress, and a future you feel hopeful about.
If you’re ready to see how coaching can help everyone in your organization thrive, learn more about Torch’s coaching services and request a demo here.
