Watch the entire Foundations of Leadership workshop series

One of the most consistent signals we hear from the InnovateUS community is that, as AI reshapes public-sector work, people are asking for something more foundational: leadership skills.

Across agencies and roles, public professionals are navigating technological change, organizational uncertainty, new expectations, and growing pressure to deliver. 

Yet amid all that change, the demand for strong leadership has only become more urgent. How do you build trust? How do you create teams where people speak honestly? How do you help people perform well under pressure and uncertainty?

That is why InnovateUS launched the  Foundations of Leadership workshop series earlier this year at the request of learners across the network. Over five workshops, we explored the practical work of leading teams through challenge, change, and public impact.

We opened the first session with a difficult but familiar workplace reality: what happens when people see serious problems unfolding inside an organization but do not feel safe speaking up?

Our aim was to draw on rigorous, research-driven insights to explore what leadership actually requires in practice, from creating a safe environment and building strong teams to giving honest feedback and enabling performance.

This piece reflects on that journey.

The Foundation Beneath Every Other Skill

We began with psychological safety because, without it, nothing else works. You can invest in the most sophisticated feedback frameworks and coaching models in the world, and they will produce almost nothing in a team where people do not feel safe to speak up.  

The first session drew on some sobering organizational history. The UK Post Office Horizon scandal. Air disasters. Kodak. Boeing. Peloton. In every case, people close to the problem could see what was happening. In every case, they said too little, too late, or nothing at all. The question the session pressed on was not why those organizations failed, but why, in the face of serious concerns, people stayed silent.

What we heard from the session’s learners was recognizable and uncomfortable: fear of retaliation, worry about being seen as a troublemaker, a sense that their concern would be dismissed, and the belief that someone more senior must already know and have decided it was fine. These are not personality flaws. They are rational responses to organizational climates that have implicitly or explicitly taught people that candor is costly.

The goal is not to require bravery. It is to build systems in which honest communication is routine.

The goal is not to require bravery. It is to build systems in which honest communication is routine.

What struck me most about the discussion that followed was how quickly participants moved from research findings and case studies to their own experiences.  We reflected on the email never sent, the meeting where a flawed assumption passed unchallenged, the concern raised once and then quietly abandoned when it was not well received, despite the potential for disastrous consequences.  It was personal experience with this that hit hardest.

Drawing on work by Amy Edmondson, Mike Roberto, and other scholars, we focused on four levers as practically actionable for creating psychological safety:

1. leader behavior, above all, modeling fallibility, openly admitting mistakes and inviting challenge
2. team practices, such as pre-mortems, multiple channels for raising concerns, advocating for divergent views rather than consensus
3. organizational structure, skip-level conversations, and decoupling evaluations from candor
4.  cultural norms of rewarding curiosity and normalizing disagreement

Each of these works as a one-time intervention, but they are more effective when used in tandem.  

Teams Are Not Groups: The Work of Building Belonging

The second session made a distinction that sounds simple but carries real weight: a team is not merely a group of capable people working in proximity. A team has to be built through intentional selection, thoughtful integration, explicit role clarity, and the continuous cultivation of trust.

Participants were candid about how rarely they have approached team creation with this level of intentionality. The pull toward technical competence is powerful and understandable. Skills are easier to identify and evaluate than attitude, coachability, or the capacity to challenge ideas respectfully. You can train skills. What is far harder to develop in someone, once they are on the team, is the fundamental disposition to grow.

Team onboarding processes built for this purpose are especially effective.  Without them, organizations lose good people not because those people lacked ability, but because those abilities aren’t understood and cultivated. Even more important, though, is the alignment of the team’s goal with each individual's goals.   Groups don’t become teams until they have a common goal.   

But it doesn’t work to expect individuals to set aside their own interests and needs in favor of the team goal.  At the same time, a team can’t function if everyone on it is out for themselves. Balancing team and individual goals is critical.   Keeping goals aligned is a central responsibility of a leader.

Building a great team is never a finished project. It requires ongoing attention, adaptation, and investment.

Building a great team is never a finished project. It requires ongoing attention, adaptation, and investment.

Starting with What People Do Well

Session three challenged something that most leadership cultures quietly assume: that development means fixing weaknesses. The Strengths Framework developed by Laura Morgan Roberts with her Michigan collaborators tells a different story. People who use their strengths every day are more engaged, more productive, and more satisfied at work. Investing heavily in areas of low natural talent tends to produce modest gains at high cost, while the things a person is genuinely wired to do brilliantly go underdeveloped and underutilized.

For many participants, this reframe was genuinely liberating. Several noted that they had spent years treating their most natural tendencies as liabilities — too analytical, too relational, too focused on the big picture, not focused enough. Seeing those tendencies named and validated as strengths, and exploring both their power and their potential shadow side when overused, shifted something.

The application to team leadership was equally illuminating. When a leader knows the strengths profiles of their people, delegation stops being about availability and becomes about alignment. When a team has a shared strengths vocabulary, conversations about who should take the lead on what — and why — become more honest and more effective. When tensions arise, a strengths lens often reveals them as collisions of different but equally valid ways of working rather than evidence that someone is wrong or self-dealing.

The session closed with a reminder that strengths-based leadership is not a program or an initiative. It is a mindset. The leaders who benefit most from this kind of thinking are those who make curiosity about their own and others’ strengths a daily habit, not a one-off discovery.

Feedback: The Language Most Leaders Haven’t Learned to Speak

In the fourth session, we addressed the challenge of giving and receiving feedback. Not the formal, annual, HR-mediated kind — but the real-time, specific, relational kind that actually changes behavior and builds capability.  

Early in the discussion, we addressed familiar obstacles for both managers and employees.  For managers, the challenges include uncertainty about how to frame a concern without it being perceived as an attack. 

For employees, there’s often a sense that raising a difficult issue will mark you as difficult yourself.  And then there’s the kindness trap, which happens when the manager withholds difficult feedback as an act of consideration.  In reality, this is a quiet form of abandonment. It leaves people without the information they need to grow.

A key conceptual distinction helped shift the frame. Feedback at its best is not criticism. Criticism renders a verdict on the past. Great feedback describes observable behavior, names its impact, and opens a conversation about what might be different. The distinction sounds modest on the page. In practice, it changes everything about how a message lands and whether it can be heard.

Great feedback is an act of belief in another person’s capacity to contribute. Withholding it, however comfortable in the moment, is ultimately a failure of that belief.

Great feedback is an act of belief in another person’s capacity to contribute. Withholding it, however comfortable in the moment, is ultimately a failure of that belief.

The session also addressed the challenge of receiving feedback, which is a skill that is often neglected. The employee’s natural inclination in those famous Dilbert-like sessions over a big oak desk is for defensiveness, minimization, and an urge to explain rather than listen.

The invitation at our workshop was to treat incoming feedback as data rather than an indictment, and to use the opportunity to talk with the boss as a chance to follow through on commitments to improve team structure.

Enabling Performance: The Real Job

The final session returned to a provocation that threads through the entire series.  The truth is that most leaders are promoted because of what they accomplished individually. And yet the moment they step into a leadership role, the job changes. The measure of success changes. But the habits that brought them here — the pull toward doing rather than enabling, toward personal output rather than others’ growth — do not change automatically.

How do you handle this when your inclination is that something is faster to do something yourself than to manage in the team? What we focused on in this session was the importance of creating a hierarchical ladder of understanding about the purpose of a project within the team; the purpose of the team within the broader organization; and the purpose of the broad organization in a framework of understanding about what constitutes value creation.  

 The team’s initial charge may be a mandate to accomplish something that seems well-defined within a narrow concept of purpose.  Yet we know that the team will hit roadblocks, distractions, and sometimes even brick walls.  We know that unintended consequences will demand attention.  And of course we know that everything takes longer than planned and often costs a lot more than initially envisioned.

How do you keep the team on track despite all these obstacles?  The leaders core responsibility is to maintain a focus on how the project’s purpose maps through the organization’s purpose to core value creation.  When things are really tough, the leader can climb this hierarchical ladder of purpose to motivate the team to reconstitute a project to reflect higher aims in which the original project was situated.  

You can’t implement a particular piece of software as originally planned?  Well, what was the purpose of that project?  How did the project advance the organization’s aims?   And how ultimately would the project have created value for key stakeholders?   If we’ve hit a full-stop roadblock, what are our options for creating that value some other way?  How do we fulfill the organization’s purpose even if the specific plan we had has to be reconstructed?

A complementary skill required of a leader is renewing, over time, the resources and capabilities the team has for making progress.    When is an injection of new talent and resources required to get over an obstacle?  How can the leader work with team members – sometimes one-on-one – to recover momentum and get the project back on track? 

When things are working well, the team leader’s job is to get out of the way of further progress by enabling, coaxing, and coaching team members as they do their work.  But when the team hits an obstacle, the leader may need to advocate for more resources and take charge by reframing goals and driving for more resources.

The session also addressed what happens when performance is absent. The diagnostic framework introduced — distinguishing between a lack of clarity, a lack of capability, and a lack of motivation — was perhaps the most immediately practical tool of the five sessions. Treating a clarity problem as a motivation problem is a common and costly error. Getting the diagnosis right before deciding on a response is not a small thing.

Leadership is not a destination. There is no point at which the work is complete, the skills fully developed, the challenges fully mastered.

Leadership is not a destination. There is no point at which the work is complete, the skills fully developed, the challenges fully mastered.

What Stays

Looking back across the five sessions, what strikes me most is not any single framework or model — though several have genuine practical value. It is the cumulative picture that emerged of what leadership actually demands.

It demands a willingness to create conditions rather than simply deliver results. It demands the courage to speak honestly — in feedback, in challenge, in admissions of uncertainty — and the discipline to invite others to do the same. It demands genuine curiosity about the people you lead: their strengths, their concerns, their growth edges, their reasons for showing up. And it demands the patience to understand that the impact of good leadership is often slow to materialize and rarely directly attributable to any single act.

None of this is technically complicated. All of it is hard. The gap between understanding these things intellectually and doing them consistently, under pressure and when they are inconvenient, is precisely where leadership development lives