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Figure out if ELE is for you. Straight answers on what ELE is, who it’s built for, and how contributing members actually work together. Still have a question? Contact us.

LAK Group

An organization’s culture will either accelerate its strategy or quietly erode it. Too often, executive teams believe they know the culture—but their perception doesn’t match the day-to-day reality experienced by employees. That disconnect creates risk, stalls momentum, and undermines credibility.

This breakout session tackles the challenge head-on. Together, we’ll explore what happens when the executive team is out of sync with the current state culture and how to align them to confidently shape the future state. The session will emphasize both courage and accountability—helping leaders validate today’s reality, unify around tomorrow’s vision, and activate new cultural beliefs and behaviors across the enterprise.

By the end of this session, participants will:
<ol>
 	<li>Validate and Verify Reality – Learn approaches to help executive teams see the true current state of the culture through evidence, feedback, and honest dialogue.</li>
 	<li>Unify Around the Future State – Discover methods to bring leaders together around a compelling cultural vision and the specific behaviors required to achieve it.</li>
 	<li>Activate Across the Organization – Gain tools to cascade and reinforce new cultural beliefs and behaviors, ensuring they are embedded at every level of the business.</li>
</ol>
This session focuses on guiding leaders from assumptions to clarity, from division to alignment, and from intent to bold, cultural action.

Bridging the Culture Gap

Engagement &amp; Culture

Strategy

michael.grubich

suzanne.sherry

Change Management

employee experience

CHIE2025

organizational culture

Strategic HR

Culture Transformation

strategy execution

culture gap

executive alignment

culture strategy

leadership accountability

cultural beliefs

unified vision

cascading change

future state culture

Zurich North America

Are talent practitioners focused on the right things for executive development? At a time when we are keenly focused on AI and digital transformation, consider if we have appropriately reduced focus on human capabilities or "soft skills." Join us for a discussion of how we can shape experiences that ensure leaders gain both the requisite technical skills and the capabilities that drive success through others.

For too long, executive development has been characterized by expensive, offsite, monolithic programs that are slow to launch and instantly out-of-date. In a world demanding executive agility and continuous transformation, this outdated model is actively creating a leadership capability gap.

This session delivers the blueprint for building a modern, agile executive development architecture that keeps pace with market and technological speed. It’s a crucial shift from merely training leaders to making them catalysts for organizational momentum.

Senior leaders will gain specific, actionable insights into how to:
<ul>
 	<li>Move from Content Consumption to Capability Creation: Shift your focus from delivering static content to enabling leaders to generate and apply dynamic, curated learning within their flow of work.</li>
 	<li>Decentralize for Velocity: Learn how to move accountability from a centralized function to a distributed model , ensuring development is deeply embedded within business units and directly tied to strategic outcomes.</li>
 	<li>Build the "Ecosystem of Practice": Explore the essential components of modern development, including the move from static teams to dynamic networks and the integration of business impact as the core metric.</li>
 	<li>Escape the "Lag Trap": Understand why the old ways of executive development are fundamentally incompatible with the speed of modern business and how to design programs that deliver relevance and impact at speed.</li>
</ul>
This is a forward-thinking guide to replacing slow, high-cost programs with a high-speed, high-impact development ecosystem that powers true business agility.

Agile Executive Development

Leadership

flow of work

Talent Strategy

soft-skills

executive development

business impact

leadership agility

brittain.bandura

noelle.awwad

capability creation

decentralized learning

technical skills

leadership capability gap

organizational momentum

ecosystem of practice

L&amp;D architecture

continuous transformation

Ziel Leadership

Goodwill NYNJ

As organizations expand beyond traditional recruiting, apprenticeships and alternative talent pipelines are redefining how we attract, develop, and retain the next generation of workers.

In this 45-minute interactive discussion, we’ll explore how a culture of belonging can turn these programs into true engines of growth—where diverse talent feels seen, supported, and set up to succeed. Participants will co-create strategies for inclusive onboarding, mentorship, and career progression that help new talent thrive from day one.

Walk away with practical ideas for embedding belonging into every stage of the talent journey—so your apprenticeship and early-career programs don’t just fill roles but fuel the future.

Apprenticeships: Building Belonging into the NextGen Talent Pipeline | Inclusion as the Foundation for Future Growth

Integrated Talent Management

kyle.swanson

inclusion

talent pipeline

belonging

mentorship

DEIB

ashanti.morgan

Talent Retention

apprenticeship programs

L&amp;D strategy

dan.kwong

zachary.glaser

francheska.feliciano

susan.meehan

integrated talent

DEIB strategy

early career programs

nextgen talent

diverse talent

career progression

Skillsoft

EmpathAI Learning Solutions

The modern corporate reality is simple: your employees are drowning in a sea of training options, yet starving for clarity and direction. The sheer volume of content, much of it irrelevant, actively slows down enterprise agility and wastes talent investment.

In this highly interactive session, leaders from Skillsoft and Empath.AI Learning Solutions tackled the chaos head-on, sharing a practical framework for designing smarter, simplified learning ecosystems that accelerate workforce readiness. The core challenge is clarifying what's "must-have" vs. "build-your-skillset" to create clear career momentum.
<h3>Key Takeaways for Talent Leaders:</h3>
<ul>
 	<li>The Clarity Framework: Attendees rolled up their sleeves to co-create practical career and skill maps for key enterprise roles. The key learning was how to ruthlessly filter content to define the essential path (mandatory knowledge) and separate it from the growth path (optional, personalized skill-building).</li>
 	<li>AI as the Simplicity Engine: The session explored how adaptive learning and AI-driven personalization are the primary tools for simplification. Instead of managing a large course catalog, L&amp;D can leverage AI to instantly curate content that is relevant at the moment of need, ensuring employees get guidance, not just more options.</li>
 	<li>The Plug-and-Play Template: Participants walked away with a tangible, plug-and-play template to immediately streamline development paths in their organizations. This template is the blueprint for moving away from generic content assignments toward a skills-based ecosystem designed to scale and evolve with emerging business needs.</li>
</ul>
This session proved that effective, modern L&amp;D is defined not by how much content you have, but by how skillfully you simplify the path for your people, directly fueling enterprise agility.

Simplifying Training | Designing Smarter Learning Ecosystems for Enterprise Agility

Digital &amp; AI

performance improvement

talent development

workforce readiness

future of learning

adaptive learning

yolanda.mangram

skills-based learning

HR Technology

Learning Ecosystems

heber.sambucetti

enterprise agility

AI personalization

skill maps

plug and play template

career momentum

talent investment

clarity framework

content curation

operational simplicity

Alter Domus

insightsoftware

Upsurge Advisors

Journyz

Goal: In this 45-minute breakout session, participants will utilize The L&amp;D Detective Kit as their primary source of truth for frameworks and tools, exploring how AI-enabled methods can help talent leaders become detectives of impact rather than order-takers for training. Together, we’ll apply the Detective questions to real business scenarios, draft a Performance Impact Blueprint, and reflect on how AI and human insight combine to measure what matters most.

🔁 <a href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1qFs__kIJsCLH6ynAeNopOsz6PHEpub9ntpAmvuJt588/edit?mc_cid=e7686c688f&amp;mc_eid=621cbc8540&amp;slide=id.p1#slide=id.p1" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">ELE Executive Innovation Sprints Proposal</a>

🔄 ELE Executive Innovation Sprint: L&D Detective Kit | For Measuring Real Impact

Analytics

laura.jones

anton.maletich

Performance Improvement

performance impact

Data-Driven L&amp;D

nicole.defalco

Strategic L&amp;D

deepa.kartha

practical frameworks

L&amp;D impact

measuring performance

AI enabled methods

business scenarios

L&amp;D analytics

human insight

performance measurement

Every senior leader knows the truth: your culture and performance rise and fall on your managers. They are the critical link between strategy and execution—and often the silent bottleneck preventing a truly high-performing culture from taking root.

This focused discussion moved beyond the limitations of generic leadership training to deliver a crucial blueprint for senior HR and Talent leaders: how to build a powerful, consistent "manager core" that actively drives cultural and performance outcomes, rather than just sustaining the status quo.
<h3>Key Strategic Takeaways for Manager Enablement:</h3>
<ul>
 	<li>Align Capability to Enterprise Strategy: The essential first step is to end the separation between training and business goals. Leaders learned how to intentionally align manager capability building with enterprise strategy to ensure cultural goals and performance standards are embedded in daily execution, not merely theoretical concepts.</li>
 	<li>Build the Consistent Development Roadmap: To achieve consistency at scale, organizations must move away from ad-hoc interventions. The session provided a framework for building a consistent development roadmap that clarifies expectations and equips managers with enabling skills across all organizational levels.</li>
 	<li>Redefining Accountability for Outcomes: Attendees explored how to redefine manager accountability, shifting the focus from completing training modules to taking ownership of tangible culture and performance outcomes, driving measurable business impact.</li>
 	<li>The New "Must-Have" Capabilities: The session identified the critical leadership capabilities for the future of work, emphasizing the move beyond compliance and traditional coaching toward adaptive leadership—enabling managers to lead with clarity and consistency amid volatility.</li>
</ul>
This session armed HR and Talent leaders with the actionable insights necessary to transform rigid management structures into adaptive, empowered networks that finally deliver measurable returns on manager enablement strategy.

Building Capability to Support a High Performing Culture | Moving Beyond Generic Leadership Training to Build a Manager Core

future of work

mike.kester

leadership development

melissa.versino

strategic alignment

accountability

spencer.macdonald

adaptive leadership

manager capability

high performing culture

manager core

performance outcomes

talent enablement

CCA Inc.

Burnout is at an all-time high—and it’s not just an individual problem. This interactive session explores the issue from three levels: the employee experience, the leader’s role, and the organizational culture that shapes it. Together we’ll examine how stigma around mental health, fears of AI and job insecurity, and identity-based differences amplify burnout in the workplace. Participants will leave with practical strategies to reduce stigma, lead with empathy while maintaining high performance, and reimagine cultures that support sustainable success.

🏡 How to Apply This Back at Work
Don’t let this stay a roundtable insight—make it a real-world shift. Here’s how to bring these burnout-busting, data-informed strategies home:

Individual Level:
Take one daily “micro-reset” to check in with your energy—pause, breathe, and adjust your pace before burnout builds.

Leader Level:
Begin every 1:1 by asking how your team member is really doing—then listen without jumping straight to solutions.

Organizational Level:
Redesign workflows and meeting norms to support recovery time, focus, and psychological safety across teams.

Learning &amp; Development:
Embed energy management and well-being practices into all leadership and onboarding programs, not just wellness initiatives.

Talent Management:
Use engagement and pulse data to spot early signs of burnout—and intervene with workload, clarity, or connection support.

These aren’t just ideas—they’re upgrades to your people strategy. Start small, test fast, and share what works.

Everyone Is Burnt Out | Recharging Your People Strategy

people strategy

talent management

employee engagement

psychological safety

employee well-being

Burnout Prevention

Sustainable Success

manendra.bhugra

ali.glaser

mental health stigma

leadership empathy

workforce recovery

L&amp;D programs

data informed strategy

Human Synergistics

Get a quick taste of Human Synergistics’ Subarctic Survival Simulation—then step back to reflect with peers on why immersive experiences like this are so powerful for leadership development and change readiness. In just 45 minutes, you’ll see how decision-making under pressure connects directly to strategy, collaboration, and preparing leaders for what’s next.

Survive to Lead | What a Survival Simulation Reveals About Leading Through Uncertainty

experiential learning

decision making

Change Readiness

Leadership Training

High Performing Teams

michael.kern

practical insights

human synergistics

immersive learning

survival simulation

leading through uncertainty

collaboration skills

American Medical Association

GenAI isn’t just another tool—it’s a way to rethink how your team designs, delivers, and measures talent development at scale. In this interactive lab, we’ll cut through the noise and spotlight how GenAI tools can accelerate key L&amp;D workflows. You’ll map a real-world use case, experiment with prompting, and walk away with a 30-day starter plan for applying AI inside your team. Expect practical insights, real-time demos, and a collaborative challenge that shows how GenAI can simplify and supercharge your L&amp;D work.

This is a deep-dive, hands-on laboratory designed for senior L&amp;D leaders ready to move past theory and integrate Generative AI directly into their core talent workflows. This session focuses on turning whiteboards and rough ideas into polished, personalized learning programs with unprecedented speed and efficiency.

We will focus on the single biggest challenge for GenAI in L&amp;D: creating rapid output without sacrificing critical human expertise and strategic alignment.

You will walk away with immediately applicable playbooks to:
<ul>
 	<li>Implement the "Whiteboard to Workflow" Model: Learn a precise, scalable process for using GenAI to accelerate your development cycle—from identifying a capability gap to launching high-quality content—cutting weeks out of your standard design process.</li>
 	<li>Master Advanced Prompt Engineering for L&amp;D: Go beyond basic prompts to engineer workflows that embed your organizational voice, validate against internal subject matter expertise, and generate content aligned with your specific business context.</li>
 	<li>Balance Speed with Control: Discover practical methods for maintaining quality control and ethical oversight when leveraging AI for content creation, personalized learning pathways, and performance support.</li>
 	<li>Move to a Data-Driven Design: See how integrating GenAI into talent mapping allows you to instantly pivot and personalize learning offerings based on real-time data and emerging organizational needs.</li>
</ul>
This is not a demonstration; it’s an implementation session. Bring your curiosity and be ready to build a new operating model for your talent development function.

AI Practical Lab: Using GenAI to Supercharge Talent Development Without Losing the Human Touch

kate.haney

julia.meyer

rebecca.benson

personalized learning

operational efficiency

AI Implementation

Ethical AI

prompt engineering

GenAI in L&amp;D

high quality content

data driven design

talent workflows

L&amp;D operating model

Froedtert ThedaCare Health

Goal: In this 45-minute breakout, participants will experience a taste of the ELE Work/Life Blueprint and reflect on how design thinking can make reskilling personal, scalable, and business-aligned.

Every HR leader knows reskilling at scale is an enterprise priority—but traditional, one-size-fits-all approaches rarely deliver impact. The Work/Life Exchange Blueprint introduces a five-step, design-thinking framework that makes reskilling personal, practical, and scalable:

1️⃣ Discover — map where energy, skills, and growth opportunities intersect.

2️⃣ Design — generate multiple “what’s next” scenarios, short- and long-term.

3️⃣ Prototype — test small, low-risk skill applications that generate real data.

4️⃣ Exchange — share insights, borrow ideas, and refine through peer feedback.

5️⃣ Blueprint — tell your story, build your support team, and co-create a living plan (not a static PDP).

Grounded in design-thinking principles from Designing Your Work Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, this ELE-built model simplifies reskilling at scale by moving from HR-led programs to frontline-owned growth — turning learning into impact.

📚 Related Reading: <a href="https://www.ele.llc/members/bookshelf/designing-your-work-life" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Designing Your Work Life on ELE’s Bookshelf</a>

🔁 <a href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1qFs__kIJsCLH6ynAeNopOsz6PHEpub9ntpAmvuJt588/edit?mc_cid=e7686c688f&amp;mc_eid=621cbc8540&amp;slide=id.p1#slide=id.p1" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">ELE Executive Innovation Sprints Proposal</a>

What’s Next: Following this initial ideation, on <a href="https://www.ele.llc/events/reskilling-128" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">November 14th we’ll host a virtual exchange to refine business requirements</a> before recruiting 4–6 members for our first Solution Sprint.

🔄 ELE Executive Innovation Sprint: Simplifying Reskilling/Upskilling to Scale | Turning Upskilling into Impact

ELE Talent Development Conference 2025: Culture Driving Performance in the AI Era

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