Culture
The authenticity revolution: Why showing the real you is now a superpower at work
Authentic leadership starts when people stop performing and begin leading as themselves. Claire Brumby argues that L&D must rethink how it develops leaders, creating safer spaces for real questions, unconventional thinking and human insight, while challenging the polished behaviours and careful positioning that can suppress trust, creativity and organisational impact. Think about the leaders who have made the biggest impact on you throughout your career. I’d be willing to bet they weren’t the ones who said and did what was…
When your boss is an AI bot
David Buchanan and Steve Macaulay explore how AI could reshape leadership, from augmenting decision-making to taking over selected management tasks. They examine the benefits, risks and human implications of bot bosses, and argue that L&D must prepare employees to challenge, collaborate with and, when necessary, override artificial leaders at work. Could artificially intelligent (AI) bots take over leadership roles? What are the implications for human resource management, and for learning and development? AI can display cognitive abilities that allow it…
Transfer by design: The next maturity level of learning design
Closing the transfer gap means designing for workplace application from the outset, not hoping learning will stick afterwards. Melanie Martinelli and Ger Driesen explain how the 12 Levers of Transfer Effectiveness can help L&D teams build stronger transfer conditions, establish shared standards and connect learning more clearly to organisational performance. Your learning program is well designed. The facilitators are strong. Participation is high and the feedback scores look reassuring. Then people return to work. Three months later, managers struggle to…
TJ podcast: L&D needs to stop talking about learning, with Cathy Hoy – episode 332
What does it take for L&D leaders to now think more commercially, connect learning to business outcomes and move way beyond delivery? Cathy Hoy talks strategic thinking, the limits of ROI, the importance of understanding the business, and how L&D can build greater influence, confidence and impact across the organisation. Key takeaways: Podcast summary: Should L&D leaders stop talking about learning? That’s one of the provocations in the latest TJ podcast, where Jo Cook speaks with Cathy Hoy about what it…
Beyond the management ladder: Why Gen Z is redefining career success
Rethink training, leadership and career progression to retain Gen Z talent. Tara Ceranic Salinas explains why younger workers value time, flexibility, mastery and meaningful impact over traditional management titles, and how organisations can create learning cultures that build skills, recognise strengths and support sustainable growth at work for everyone involved. Every generation has their own ideas about what work should look like. Climbing the corporate ladder and reaching the pinnacles of management used to be the aim, but Gen Z…
From mistakes to momentum: Building a company culture that learns
Organisations unlock innovation when they stop punishing mistakes and start learning from them, reasons Paul Sloane. From Post-it Notes to Slack and vacuum cleaners, failure can spark breakthroughs. Paul explores how psychological safety, intelligent experimentation and honest post-mortems help teams take smarter risks, adapt faster and build lasting competitive advantage. In a traditional corporate landscape, failure is disdained. However, forward-thinking organisations recognise that innovation is a numbers game. If you aren’t failing, you aren’t taking the risks necessary to stay…
How L&D can build the agility that AI adoption demands
As organisations race to adopt AI, Tristan Boutros argues that technology alone is not enough. Real progress depends on agile learning cultures, adaptive talent and psychological safety. For L&D leaders, the task is to build human capability that helps organisations experiment, learn quickly and turn AI into long lasting value. Artificial intelligence is advancing faster than most organisations can comfortably keep up with. New tools promise efficiency and scale, but many AI initiatives stall, underdeliver or even quietly disappear. For…
Designing resilience training that supports people, not broken systems
Resilience training needs better design if it’s to help rather than harm. Stephan Lendi writes that L&D teams should stop treating resilience as an add-on. Instead, Stephan promotes that we build programmes that strengthen individual capability, expose structural pressures and feed honest organisational insight back to decision-makers for meaningful change. In many organisations, resilience has become the default extra module in leadership and learning programmes. New conflict‑management course? “Let’s add a short resilience session.” Change workshop? “Can you teach people…
Good leaders don’t avoid office politics
Leaders who want to drive effective change cannot afford to ignore office politics, much as they might want to. Far from being manipulative, political skill helps people build trust, read situations, and influence organisational outcomes constructively. Steve Macaulay and David Buchanan explain why it should be a core leadership capability. For busy people, “office politics” can often feel like a barrier to skill and culture-building and just getting things done. However, developing political skill is not about encouraging scheming, it…
TJ interviews: Ravin Jesuthasan on actionable insights for building skills-first enterprises
Conor Gilligan speaks with Ravin Jesuthasan about why job-based models are failing, how skills-powered organisations unlock AI and productivity gains, and the practical steps HR and L&D leaders can take to redesign work, reskill talent and deploy skills faster for stronger business performance in volatile markets today and tomorrow alike. Ravin Jesuthasan, a recognised futurist and authority on the future of work, human capital, and automation is a Senior Partner and Global Leader for Transformation Services at Mercer, an Executive Fellow…
Want smart, useful L&D insight in your inbox (without the fluff)?
Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for Editor-only commentary, and exclusive insight that isn’t published anywhere else online.
If you want a quick roundup of what matters, fresh ideas you can use, and the best new reads from Training Journal, this is where it lands
It’s free, only takes a minute, and you can unsubscribe any time.
