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ELE is a peer-powered community where people leaders don't just reframe challenges — they leave with decisions, next moves, and 30/60/90-day commitments to move real work forward.&nbsp;For 22 years, leaders from Fortune 1000 companies have brought their hardest problems here — and left sharper than they arrived.

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This is where people leaders get sharper — and their teams get smarter.ELE is a peer-powered network of people leaders who accelerate business results through shared intelligence and real-work collaboration. Learn more below about why ELE has been the trusted choice for leaders building high-performing teams for over 20 years.

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Bring a real talent challenge. Name what's at stake, what you've tried, and why it matters now.

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Find the peer conversation that moves your work forward.The right exchange builds better leaders, closes capability gaps, and cuts through what internal meetings can't.

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.

Get answers about how Executive Learning Exchange (ELE) works — peer-powered leadership development that fixes real work issues, reverses burnout, and accelerates business value. No programs. No vendors. In the flow of work.

Where people leaders share what's working, ask what's hard, and learn from peers navigating the same talent challenges right now. Search before you post. When referencing a resource, paste the key insight directly into your response with a link to the source.

Real conversations from people leaders tackling today's toughest talent challenges -- captured live, ready to apply with your teams when it fits your schedule, and connected to what's happening right now.

Insights on Talent Challenges | Captured Peer Conversations | ELE

Welcome

Pick your path — each plan reflects a different commitment to accelerating business value.

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Want ELE to come to you? Propose a local gathering — the community decides what gets scheduled.

Lake Forest Center for Leadership

The journey is never linear — we Bloom, we Burn, and we Breakthrough. In this keynote, Matt Sernaker will share the unique duality of his career and how his work in hospitality and entertainment has enabled him to craft impactful experiences for both audiences and employees.

From Balance to Breakthrough

Engagement &amp; Culture

Leadership

talent development

employee experience

well-being

CHIE2025

emotional intelligence

matt.sernaker

organizational culture

resilience

work-life balance

Personal Development

Leadership Journey

Leadership Insights

engagement strategy

breakthrough leadership

practical wisdom

culture design

In this highly-anticipated book, Harry Kraemer argues that today's business environment demands values-based leaders who, in "doing the right thing," deliver outstanding and lasting results. The journey to becoming a values-based leader starts with self-reflection. He asks, "If you are not self-reflective, how can you know yourself? If you do not know yourself, how can you lead yourself? If you cannot lead yourself, how can you lead others?" Kraemer identifies self-reflection as the first of four principles that guide leaders to make choices that honor their values and candidly recounts how these principles helped him navigate some of the toughest challenges he faced in his career.

From Values to Action: The Four Principles of Values-Based Leadership

leadership development

harry.kraemer

Personal Integrity

decision making

Leadership Training

"management strategy"

values-based leadership

leadership principles

self-reflection

balance

true self-confidence

genuine humility

ethical leadership

corporate ethics

<div style="font-family: 'Segoe UI', Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; color: #333; line-height: 1.8; max-width: 850px; margin: auto; text-align: justify; font-size: 18px;">
<h4 style="font-size: 1.75rem; color: #1a1a1a; margin-top: 2.5rem; margin-bottom: 1.2rem; border-left: 5px solid #cc0000; padding-left: 15px; text-align: left; line-height: 1.3;">Moving Past the Mirage of a Quick Turnaround</h4>
When an iconic brand faces a near-bankruptcy crisis, the corporate world routinely searches for a heroic savior—a single executive with a brilliant financial playbook or an aggressive cost-cutting strategy. This narrative makes for great headlines, but it misdiagnoses what actually keeps an organization alive over the long haul. Financial restructuring can buy an enterprise time, but it cannot buy deep engagement, sustainable innovation, or cultural resilience.
In More Than a Motorcycle: The Leadership Journey at Harley-Davidson, former CEO Rich Teerlink and organizational consultant Lee Ozley pull back the curtain on one of the most famous turnarounds in business history. They prove that Harley's survival didn't rest on mechanics or marketing alone. Instead, it required a profound, often painful, systemic overhaul of how the company led, developed, and respected its people. For senior talent architects, this book is an unvarnished masterclass in moving away from top-down command and toward a culture of shared responsibility.


<hr style="border: 0; border-top: 1px solid #eee; margin: 2.5rem 0;" />

<h4 style="font-size: 1.75rem; color: #1a1a1a; margin-top: 2.5rem; margin-bottom: 1.2rem; border-left: 5px solid #cc0000; padding-left: 15px; text-align: left; line-height: 1.3;">The Blueprint: The Mechanics of Shared Leadership</h4>
Teerlink and Ozley challenge leaders to stop viewing the workforce as a collection of human resources to be managed and start treating them as active business partners. To achieve true systemic alignment, organizations must design around three core imperatives:

<ul style="padding-left: 25px; margin-bottom: 2.5rem;">
 	<li style="margin-bottom: 1.2rem;">Dismantling the Command-and-Control Default: Legacy corporate hierarchies naturally breed a culture of passive compliance, where employees simply wait for orders from the top. Breaking this cycle requires executives to actively surrender control, push decision-making power to the front lines, and build explicit structures where every voice can challenge status-quo processes.</li>
 	<li style="margin-bottom: 1.2rem;">Establishing Joint Leadership Networks: True alignment is impossible when leadership and labor operate in adversarial silos. Harley-Davidson revolutionized its labor relations by establishing joint committees where union leaders and executives co-designed operational strategies, ensuring that the people closest to the product had a direct stake in corporate governance.</li>
 	<li style="margin-bottom: 1.2rem;">Aligning the Infrastructure with the Narrative: You cannot preach collaboration while maintaining a legacy performance review system that only rewards individual competitive achievement. Every policy, compensation framework, and training program must be ruthlessly audited and re-engineered to explicitly support and reinforce the cooperative behaviors you want to see in the workplace.</li>
</ul>

<hr style="border: 0; border-top: 1px solid #eee; margin: 2.5rem 0;" />

<h4 style="font-size: 1.75rem; color: #1a1a1a; margin-top: 2.5rem; margin-bottom: 1.2rem; border-left: 5px solid #cc0000; padding-left: 15px; text-align: left; line-height: 1.3;">Why It Matters for the ELE Community</h4>
For the senior HR, talent, and L&amp;D leaders in the ELE network who are actively managing large-scale organizational transformations and pivots, this journey offers essential strategic guardrails:

<ul style="padding-left: 25px; margin-bottom: 2.5rem;">
 	<li style="margin-bottom: 1.2rem;">Redefining the Role of L&amp;D in Change: Teerlink and Ozley highlight that training is not a localized event to fix a specific performance gap; it is a strategic lever to shift collective behavior. This book provides L&amp;D executives with a blueprint for designing long-term learning pathways that prepare managers to facilitate, rather than command, their teams.</li>
 	<li style="margin-bottom: 1.2rem;">Building Authentic Employee Agency: True transformation cannot be forced upon an organization via a polished slide deck from human resources. By implementing the book's collaborative frameworks, talent leaders can shift employee sentiment from "compliance" to genuine "ownership," turning front-line workers into the primary drivers of organizational change.</li>
 	<li style="margin-bottom: 1.2rem;">A Roadmap for Navigating Friction: Culture change is inherently messy and meets resistance at every layer of the enterprise. *More Than a Motorcycle* serves as a realistic guide for ELE members, offering honest, battle-tested strategies to manage internal friction, rebuild broken trust, and maintain strategic focus through protracted turnarounds.</li>
</ul>

<hr style="border: 0; border-top: 1px solid #eee; margin: 2.5rem 0;" />

<div style="font-style: italic; color: #444; background-color: #f4f4f4; padding: 30px; border-radius: 12px; border-right: 5px solid #cc0000;">Sustainable corporate performance isn't engineered by changing the assets on a balance sheet; it is cultivated by changing the way your people think, relate, and lead together. When we have the structural courage to tear down our legacy silos, distribute real authority, and invest in deep relational alignment, we unlock an unprecedented collective capacity for innovation and growth. Let's stop simply managing our organizations and start designing environments where shared leadership can thrive.</div>
</div>

More Than a Motorcycle: The Leadership Journey at Harley-Davidson

dirk.tussing

Change Management

continuous improvement

talent management

Strategic Leadership

Culture Transformation

capability building

L&amp;D strategy

performance architecture

organizational alignment

operational excellence

employee ownership

collaborative culture

joint leadership

legacy systems

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author, Pulitzer Prize winner, and leading historian Doris Kearns Goodwin comes a definitive middle-grade guide to Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson and how they became leaders.

Abraham Lincoln. Theodore Roosevelt. Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Lyndon B. Johnson. They grew up and lived in very different worlds—Lincoln was poor and uneducated, his frontier cabin home deep in the harsh wilderness; Theodore Roosevelt hailed from an elegant home in the heart of New York City and traveled the world with his family; Franklin Roosevelt loved the outdoors surrounding his family’s rural estate where he was the center of attention; and Lyndon Johnson’s modest childhood home had no electricity or running water but provided a window into Texas politics.

So how did each of them do it—rise to become President of the United States? What did these four kids have individually—and have in common—that made them the ones to lead the country through some of its most turbulent times?