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AE Leadership Letter > Volume 13, Issue 1
AE Leadership Letter: Volume 13, Issue 1
Bringing you new ideas for impacting people performance including the latest on company culture, work-life balance, time management, developing next-generation leaders, and new management ideas being implemented in other industries
In This Issue
culture club
The Next You
Communications Corner
culture club | Thoughts on instilling company culture
How Companies Are Tying Compensation to Culture
Failure to launch
Corporate culture is far more than just perks and slogans. Real change requires more than a revised mission statement or new ping pong table in the break room. A study of global organizations by Henley Business School leadership professor Benjamin Laker and colleagues, which was published by Harvard Business Review in 2025, found that 72% of companies that recently launched formal culture initiatives “showed no meaningful improvement in employee trust, engagement, or retention one year later.” The reason? Too many companies treat cultural transformations as branding exercises, but true change demands structural adjustments, such as leveraging compensation to reinforce cultural priorities.
Putting your money where your culture is
To reinforce cultural priorities, some businesses align incentive-based compensation with corporate goals, moving beyond traditional metrics such as firm-wide revenues or profits. The study by Laker and his colleagues profiled one Latin American telecommunications company that tied 13% of senior leaders’ bonuses to leadership quality, team development, and feedback culture. Over the ensuing year, employee retention rose by 18% and internal promotion rates also grew.
Principles at play
A pair of organizations on the Wall Street Journal’s annual ranking of best-managed companies have also found success linking pay to cultural objectives. Autodesk, which has ranked fifth in employee engagement on the WSJ Management Top 250 the prior two years, ties bonuses and raises to performance reviews that evaluate how employees have met their business goals and lived Autodesk’s cultural principles of “being optimistic, relentless, brave, ingenious, and trusted.” “We’re not just putting them out there on a piece of paper,” Julie Ann Overcash, Autodesk’s vice president of performance and total rewards, told the Wall Street Journal. “We’re building them into the fabric of the company.”
Cultural change? Priceless
Another WSJ Management Top 250 company, Mastercard, aligns year-end compensation with behaviors that are core to its culture, including “prioritize what matters,” “move fast,” and “say what you mean.” Implementation required creation of a new rating system and mechanisms to harvest feedback from colleagues, which included employee experience surveys that allowed workers to assess leaders’ performances in nine behavioral areas.
The next you | The latest on developing next-generation leaders
Reimagining Leadership Development with AI
Time after time
Leadership development programs consistently encounter the same stubborn obstacle—time. The top two leadership development challenges identified by respondents to Harvard Business Impact’s 2025 Global Leadership Development Study were insufficient time for learners to complete training and difficulty assessing leadership skills gaps—both cited by 49% of the more than 1,000 human resources and learning and development professionals surveyed. Meanwhile, scalability is the most important priority in selecting leadership development programs, according to 55% of respondents. To address the dual pressures of time and scalability, companies are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence to more efficiently deliver leadership development initiatives.
You say you want a revolution
“AI has the potential to revolutionize how leadership learning is designed, delivered, and measured,” reported the Harvard Business Impact study. AI-driven assessments can identify strengths and weaknesses and then tailor learning to address specific individual leadership skills gaps. AI-based programs can provide coaching tips and simulate real-world scenarios, all while scaling consistent training across large organizations.
Uses of AI in leadership development
A majority of survey respondents were already leveraging AI in their leadership development programs. Fifty-eight percent of respondents were using AI to generate data-driven insights, such as 360-degree feedback analyses and predictive analytics for identifying future leaders. In addition, 53% were using AI to create personalized learning paths—from adaptive learning platforms to skill gap analyses—and 47% to facilitate scenario simulations such as AI-driven role-playing.
Putting smart to work
IBM is among the major corporations at the vanguard of incorporating AI into their leadership development programs, which has resulted in training time reductions and improved employee satisfaction and course completion rates. IBM uses its own AI platform, Watson, to analyze workforce roles, prior training, and job performance ratings and create leadership development programs tailored to employees’ specific needs and goals. After performing skills gap analyses, Watson then suggests courses and resources to achieve promotional targets or sharpen specific skills.
Communications Corner | Ideas on connecting with your workforce
The Power of Handwritten Notes in a Digital Age
The pen is mightier than the bot
Remember all the way back to the 2010s when handwriting was declared a dying art? The U.S. government had removed cursive from the required Common Core standards for K-12 education, and digital communications seemingly made pen and paper obsolete. But then came AI. With teachers and professors struggling to tell whether students or ChatGPT are completing assignments, old-school blue book exams are staging a comeback and the number of states requiring cursive instruction has nearly doubled in the last decade. The unexpected handwriting renaissance generated by an AI backlash could hold a lesson for the corporate world.
On script
Amid the daily blizzard of e-mails, texts, and social media posts, it’s easy for messages to get lost or buried under an avalanche of digital communications. And as electronic messages multiply, their impacts shrink. Handwritten notes of thanks or congratulations, by contrast, stand out from the crowd—offering a human touch in a screen-based world and reflecting an investment in time and depth of intention no dashed-off text can match. “Handwritten notes are a differentiator. They show the person you’re thanking that you made a sincere effort to acknowledge their act of kindness or generosity,” etiquette coach Maggie Oldham told the New York Times.
Ink that leaves a mark
While working at the Hard Rock Cafe decades ago, Chris Tomasso received a handwritten note from the CEO. That scribbled message had such an impact on the First Watch CEO that he handwrites congratulations to cooks and dishwashers celebrating major milestones with the breakfast and lunch chain. When he was Campbell Soup Company president and CEO, Douglas Conant penned up to 20 notes a day to employees to acknowledge their successes and contributions. As he traveled the globe, Conant saw his notes pinned up on employees’ bulletin boards—clear proof that staff valued handwritten messages in a way emails could never match.
Side effects
The benefits of written correspondence for firm leaders extend beyond goodwill. Research has found that the process of recording thoughts by hand sparks greater creativity, memory, and thinking than typing. AFLAC CEO Dan Amos, who pens handwritten notes to employees who retire or receive bonuses, told the Wall Street Journal that he’s found the low-intensity task offers a mental break and gives him space for creative thinking.
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