Building Resilience Through Everyday Development: How Small Wins Drive Organizational Growth

Forbes

31-03-2025

When organizations create conditions that enable people to experience daily progress and ... More development, they simultaneously enhance performance and build resilience.
Look at the top tiers of leadership teams, and you will find no shortage of talent and an abundance of skill that makes them effective at delivery. But to borrow an insight from Professor Herminia Ibarra, what we really need is leaders who can uncover what we don't know, instead of leaders who excel at implementing what we already know. It's harder to find great leaders who have the capability and the confidence to address uncertainty—who are agile and responsive when faced with disruption. According to research by the World Economic Forum, fewer than half of today's senior executives feel adequately prepared to confront emerging challenges. Only 46% demonstrate openness to different perspectives, 39% adapt quickly to new ways of working and 40% experiment with new solutions. This research underlines a critical vulnerability in our approach to leadership development. We cannot think about leadership development as if organizations work in a traditional hierarchical structure where decisions and strategies cascade for deployment through managerial layers. Today's world is complex and uncertain and organizations—and decision-making—are more networked than a generation ago. Yet there has been extensive investment over a long time in specialized technical knowledge but an underemphasis in the human skills that enable leaders to foster continuous learning, adaptation, and resilience in increasingly uncertain environments. The antidote is something I call Everyday Development.
Our bodies and minds are most resilient when they are actively developing; the same is true for our systems. So why think of development as an occasional assignment—outside the scope of normal operations—rather than an everyday practice to be woven into the fabric of work? The better approach is "micro-development"–reframing interactions that are happening in the normal flow of daily work to make them growth opportunities. That might just mean tweaking the way you approach an everyday conversation. These small developmental moments allow organizations to scale development from the C-suite to production lines without disrupting operations.
It's a reframing of what development is. Development isn't something incremental; it is the work itself. When organizations focus on development in day-to-day operations, all work flows from that foundation, creating a culture of continuous growth and adaptation.
This everyday development approach complements thinking by Harvard professor Teresa Amabile's groundbreaking work on "The Progress Principle" a decade ago. According to an article Professor Amabile wrote in Harvard Business Review, after analyzing nearly 12,000 diary entries from knowledge workers, Amabile found, 'Of all the things that can boost emotions, motivation, and perceptions during a workday, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work. And the more frequently people experience that sense of progress, the more likely they are to be creatively productive in the long run." The power of small wins every day makes a massive difference over time.
Both Everyday Development and the Progress Principle emphasize that growth that enhances performance doesn't require major breakthroughs; it comes through consistent, incremental steps forward that accumulate over time. When organizations create conditions that enable people to experience daily progress and development, they simultaneously enhance performance and build resilience.
For the iconic toy company LEGO, developmental leadership was a brick that built its business recovery from over-complexity and flat sales in the mid-2000s. Between 1999 and 2003, LEGO followed what seemed to be a textbook innovation strategy: expanding product lines, entering new markets, and creating multimedia experiences. But the growth-at-all-costs approach tripled the number of unique elements (combinations of brick shapes and colors) to more than 14,000 different components.
The turnaround strategy was a transformation in the company's approach to innovation and leadership development. The new management team, led by then 34-year-old Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, refocused the company on its core identity. They eliminated nearly half of their brick elements and returned to what made LEGO unique: the creativity that comes from building with a limited palette of versatile pieces. More importantly, they changed how they developed products, transforming their decision-making approach from top-down to development-centered. Rather than executives determining which products to pursue based on internal presentations, they put children at the center of their development process. By showing early concept art to seven-year-olds and carefully observing their reactions, LEGO learned to identify which ideas genuinely sparked imagination and excitement.
This created organizational resilience through:
The results speak to the power of this approach—and how they became more adaptable and responsive to changing economic and cultural conditions. After implementing these changes, LEGO achieved a five-year average annual growth rate of 24% in sales and an astonishing 40% in profits, emerging from its crisis to become one of the world's most valuable brands and demonstrating remarkable resilience during subsequent market disruptions.
The everyday development approach creates a powerful multiplier effect. Consider a large organization with 100,000 employees. If just half engage in one 10-minute developmental conversation daily, the organization effectively invests over 2.2 million hours in development annually—a scale impossible to achieve through traditional coaching or training programs.
This approach requires three components:
Teams need to adopt a mindset that values growth, embraces curiosity and treats challenges as learning opportunities. Successful leaders model this mindset by demonstrating their own commitment to continuous learning.
Building on this mindset, organizations must cultivate essential human skills:
When these elements become second nature, organizations:
This approach necessitates a fundamental shift in leadership conceptualization. Rather than viewing leaders primarily as decision-makers and direction-setters, organizations must recognize leaders as facilitators of growth and development.
It's a shift away from a model where work approaches are determined primarily by managers, team members await detailed instructions and high-performing teams produce predictable results. By contrast, under developmental leadership, team members determine the approach to work and feel empowered to self-direct their efforts. The highest-performing teams generate unexpected innovation.
The value of implementing everyday development extends beyond theoretical concepts to tangible business outcomes:.
Employee Satisfaction and Engagement: Teams who regularly engage in developmental conversations demonstrate significantly higher engagement levels. When employees experience growth, they report greater job satisfaction and stronger commitment to organizational goals.
Retention and Talent Development: Organizations that establish cultures of continuous development create stickier environments for talent. As employees recognize opportunities for ongoing growth, they're more likely to see long-term career paths within the organization rather than looking elsewhere.
Team Performance and Innovation: When teams operate in development mode, their capacity for adaptation and innovation increases substantially. The permission to learn, experiment and grow creates conditions where creativity flourishes and teams can respond more effectively to changing circumstances.
For organizations seeking to build resilience through everyday development, I recommend three practical steps:
By embedding continuous growth into daily work, organizations cultivate leaders who can navigate uncertainty with confidence rather than merely execute established playbooks. If fewer than half of today's senior executives feel prepared for tomorrow's challenges, it's not because they lack talent or dedication, it's because we've been developing the wrong capabilities. The path to organizational resilience lies beyond technical training or complex frameworks; it lies in our ability to transform everyday interactions into opportunities for growth and learning. When we do this consistently, we don't just build more capable leaders; we are building organizations that can thrive amid uncertainty.