Desarrollo ejecutivo speakers
Coaches, estrategas y profesionales que perfeccionan cómo piensan, deciden y actúan los líderes senior
Speakers Associates represents 291 speakers on Desarrollo ejecutivo, including Joy Poole, Steven D'Souza, Mark Ritson, Olivier Sibony, Andy Bass, Marina Ibrahim, Sarah Furness, Jennifer Willey, Jeremy Blain y Ruth Gotian.
Large organizations are built to optimize what works, not to dismantle it. Most boards are structured to hold management accountable for past results; few are designed to govern where the business must go next. When digital disruption and decarbonization mandates arrive simultaneously, the gap between boardroom oversight and strategic foresight becomes the defining organizational risk.
Executive teams keep producing strategies their organisations cannot execute. The decisions that move the system are left to individual leaders to make alone: committing under incomplete information, holding a line through restructure. Strategy gets the development budget; the behaviour that has to carry it does not.
Most organisations say they want inclusive, high-performing cultures – and most are not building one. The gap is rarely a question of strategic intent. It is a question of leadership behaviour: what leaders actually do, daily, when nobody is formally watching. A distracted conversation, an unacknowledged mistake, the pattern of who gets heard in meetings – these determine the culture a leadership team actually has.
Most leadership development programmes improve what leaders do without changing who they are. The result is executives who perform well under normal conditions but become brittle when conditions change. Organisations invest significantly in skills and competencies, then watch those investments fail at precisely the moments that matter most.
Senior teams rehearse for stable conditions and then meet a different operating environment. Pressure exposes the gap between the leadership behaviours an organisation espouses and the ones it actually defaults to when decisions carry real cost. The work is to close that gap before the test arrives, not after.
Most senior leaders accept that culture eats strategy, then act as if the two are unrelated. They commission values exercises, engagement surveys, and town halls while the behaviours that actually set the tone, what people do when no one is checking, drift in another direction. The gap between the culture leaders describe and the culture their teams experience is where serious strategy quietly fails.
International leaders are routinely promoted on the strength of domestic performance, then asked to influence teams, clients, and partners across half a dozen cultures with no playbook. The result is well-intentioned communication that lands as confusing, transactional, or tone-deaf in the rooms that matter most. Boards keep losing deals and senior talent to a problem they can name but rarely solve.
Leaders promoted for their expertise are often underprepared for the experience of leading under sustained pressure. When the situation is uncertain, the decision picture is incomplete, and the team is watching, personal composure becomes a strategic variable, not a soft skill. Most organisations invest heavily in external change capability while leaving the internal mechanics of leadership under pressure almost entirely unaddressed.
Most leadership teams handle the easy 92 percent of any difficult conversation, then stop short of what actually matters. Feedback gets softened, decisions get postponed, and risks the gut already flagged go untaken. The cost shows up later as stalled change programmes, weak accountability, and capable people who quietly disengage.
Senior leaders, particularly women, are running their organisations on depleted reserves. The grind that built the career is now the obstacle to leading well in it. Restoring clarity of purpose and the capacity to make sharp decisions is a leadership problem, not a wellness one.
Senior leaders are paid to influence people they do not control, often in rooms where the stakes are uneven and the information is incomplete. Most leadership training teaches communication frameworks; very few teach how trust, recruitment and elicitation actually work when the other side has reason to withhold. The gap shows up in board negotiations, in stakeholder management across borders, and in the quiet failure to build alliances that hold under pressure.
Leadership standards rarely fail in the meeting room. They fail when information is incomplete, timescales compress, and the cost of a wrong call is real. That gap – between intended behaviour and actual behaviour under pressure – is almost always a systems problem, not a skills problem.