From Insight to Impact: Why Leaders Need Practice, Not Just Advice
Summary
Where do you see the limit on the legacy model of leadership development?
Monique contrasts her experience in Microsoft’s high‑potential leadership cohorts—complete with global peer programs, assessments, and one‑on‑one coaching—with the reality that only a small, hand‑picked group received that level of investment. The limiting factor in the legacy model is human capacity: a finite number of facilitators and coaches constrains how many people can access deep, personalized development, even when the impact is clear. She notes that just one or two layers below senior leadership, there is significant untapped potential, yet those leaders typically receive only occasional workshops, if anything at all. The result is a narrow band of people developing core leadership skills while the broader organization, where much of the day‑to‑day execution and decision‑making happens, remains under‑supported.
What role does practice play in helping leaders actually develop new skills?
Monique underscores that “practice makes perfect” applies as much to communication and leadership as it does to sports or music. It is not enough to attend a session, absorb insights, or intellectually understand a framework; real skill development comes from repeatedly applying techniques, receiving feedback, integrating it, and practicing again. She argues that leaders must move beyond reflective learning (“let me think about what I heard”) to demonstrable behavior change that can be measured over time. Tools like Virtual Sapiens allow leaders to rehearse specific scenarios—difficult conversations, board presentations, or communication with differently‑wired team members—while receiving consistent, impartial feedback on verbal and non‑verbal cues, tone, and empathy. This impartial measurement makes progress visible, and it also enables human coaching sessions to go much deeper, because coaches can focus on nuance, emotional intelligence, and strategic framing rather than spending precious time on basic delivery mechanics.
With AI taking on more tasks, which human skills will be most critical for teams to succeed?
Monique points to discernment and judgment as the most critical human skills in an AI‑enabled world. Leaders must learn to assess where AI can and should be applied, how to measure its impact, and when it is essential to preserve direct human interaction instead of automating a touchpoint. Traditional reliance on “this is how we’ve always done it” is no longer sufficient; leaders now need informed judgment about intelligent systems, their limits, and their potential to transform work. At the same time, as organizations adopt more agentic AI and automate workflows, the ability to connect with teams and build trust becomes even more important. Genuine human leadership—creating a clear vision, communicating persuasively, aligning cross‑functional groups, and fostering a sense of “we’re in this together”—is increasingly the glue that makes AI adoption successful. In this context, Daymar Group focuses on helping leaders build those higher‑order skills, while Virtual Sapiens provides scalable practice so those behaviors can be reinforced across the organization.
Looking ahead five years, what could leadership development look like if this all comes together?
Monique envisions a future in which development—whether labeled “leadership,” “learning,” or “talent” development—extends to every level of the organization, not just top executives and flagged high‑potentials. As organizations become flatter and decisions are made closer to the front lines, accelerated learning and broader access to development become non‑negotiable. She expects strategic, human‑led coaching at the senior level to remain vital for navigating complex dynamics, but sees AI‑enabled practice and feedback opening up rich development experiences for a far larger population. This combination, she believes, will drive stronger performance, greater engagement, and higher retention, as more employees feel seen, valued, and tangibly supported through real tools and real feedback. AI’s role in this vision is to make high‑quality practice and measurement scalable, creating a clearer link between investment in development and business outcomes—and thereby justifying continued expansion of these programs.
What could prevent this vision from becoming reality?
Monique highlights three main impediments. First, internal resource constraints: many learning and development teams lack the bandwidth and expertise to design and implement AI‑integrated programs on their own, which is why partnerships with specialized firms become so important. Second, privacy and psychological safety: leaders and employees are sharing sensitive performance data, communication behaviors, and personal development struggles, so organizations must choose solutions and architectures that protect data and build trust. Third, culture: even the best technology will fail in environments that do not support vulnerability, feedback, and growth. Because leadership development is always a cultural intervention, she emphasizes the need for robust change management—clear goals, visible sponsorship, realistic readiness assessments, and a commitment to long‑term iteration. Without these elements, AI tools risk becoming underused, “check‑the‑box” investments rather than catalysts for meaningful, sustained change.
Transcript
Here it is with the timestamps removed, keeping everything else the same:
Rachel Cossar
Hello everyone and welcome to Conversations in the Future of Work. I am your host, Rachel Cossar, and we’re really excited for this eighth season because we have a number of amazing guests, both partners and community members, clients and users of Virtual Sapiens technology. And today we have a very special guest, a new partner of ours, Monique Gibelli. So Monique, welcome to the show.
Monique Gibelli
Hello, thank you.
Rachel Cossar
We’re so glad to have you. If you wouldn’t mind, just for our viewers, introducing yourself and sharing whatever is most relevant about your background.
Monique Gibelli
Sure. I’m thrilled to be here, so thank you for the invitation. I work with Daymark Group. We’re a leadership consulting company. We’ve been around for 24 years, and I’ve recently joined them because I am launching the new AI practice within leadership consulting. We are now bringing in AI technology like Virtual Sapiens and other AI technology to help leaders transform their organizations from both a leadership and development perspective, but also from a transformation-of-their-entire-organization perspective. So that’s why I’m excited to join you and talk about our partnership with Virtual Sapiens.
Rachel Cossar
Yeah, there’s so much that’s changing and there’s so much in even just what you’ve shared of the evolution of Daymark Group over the years. I’d love to start with some context-setting when it comes to this leadership development space. Leadership development, as many people know, has been very information-, content-, insight-, and advice-heavy. But you yourself have said that’s not really cutting it anymore. Where do you think the limit is on the legacy model of leadership development?
Monique Gibelli
Yeah, it’s funny. I was thinking a lot about that. I did spend 11 years of my career with Microsoft—fantastic company—and I was very fortunate to participate in leadership development work that Daymark Group did with Microsoft when I was there. I started reflecting about who received access to that. I was fortunate to be part of the high-potential leaders who were identified by existing leaders as people they thought were going to be the future leaders of Microsoft. Being part of that identified group enabled me to participate in leadership development in teams across the globe with others they thought were high potential. It enabled me to have dedicated one-on-one coaching, so I was able to focus on specific areas. I would do an assessment and then focus on that with the one-on-one coaching.
But what’s changing—and why I think it was a fantastic opportunity for me but also limited—is the scale. It’s limited by the humans that are there doing the coaching, the humans leading the sessions and engagement. A coach can only support X number of people. I really believe that the impact of a program like that can be so much deeper across the organization when we blend human coaching and AI practice. Also, with Daymark Group, whenever we work with senior executives and high-potential leaders across any organization, we can see firsthand how much untapped potential exists one or two layers down, and they’re not really getting that same level of support, development, learning, and growth. So that’s a real opportunity to get deeper into these organizations, have more impact, and drive further accelerated performance by the entire organization.
Rachel Cossar
Right. You bring up a good point. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all have access to human coaches on demand anytime we need them? Of course that would be the ideal. Maybe some executives or very established leaders do get that, and that’s great. But again, to your point, what about everyone else? Especially what about people who are in leadership positions at more mid-level roles within the organization? They’re typically maybe served by a workshop here and there, maybe. But when we’re talking about behavior change, which is the ultimate goal of any training, what role do you see practice actually playing when it comes to helping leaders develop new skills—whether those new skills are communication, general leadership, or influence?
Monique Gibelli
Practice makes perfect, right? Everybody says practice makes perfect. Whether you’re talking about sports, music, or public speaking, the more you practice, the more comfortable you get and the more you can stretch yourself and learn and grow. I think everybody can study technique. You can go to a session, you can get insights, but your skill is only going to see real improvement by practicing, listening to the feedback, incorporating the feedback, and practicing again—then measuring that you’re truly making that change.
How are you truly measuring that? Having an impartial solution like Virtual Sapiens to measure the quality of that communication—the verbal cues, nonverbal cues, the tones that you’re using. All of that is done by Virtual Sapiens. It’s giving you feedback and telling you, each time you practice, how you are improving and developing that skill of communicating more effectively with others.
Maybe you have an area of development in a specific communication style. Maybe you have people on your team who communicate differently from you, and you want to learn a new ability to communicate more effectively with those team members. Maybe you have a difficult conversation coming up and you’re a little bit nervous about having that conversation. How do you practice it so you feel more comfortable with the message and also ensure that the message is landing empathetically? You want to make sure you’re having it with empathy and that the tone is right for that message and that communication.
So practice is critical. Having a leader go to a session and say, “Okay, I’m good, I’ve learned,” is not enough. You cannot just go to a session. You have to commit to practice between sessions—not just saying, “Let me reflect on those learnings,” but actually showing that you’ve incorporated the learnings and improved based on the feedback you were given.
Rachel Cossar
Right, absolutely. I mean, what is it that they say—you can’t manage what you don’t measure, right?
Monique Gibelli
Absolutely. You have to measure it. And this is where it’s consistent, right? Coaches can be different on different days, whereas if you use this tool, it’s consistent every time you do it. I think measuring that performance is really important.
The other part that’s beautiful in this marriage between us is that when a leader has already practiced or rehearsed a difficult conversation, a board presentation, or whatever they’re trying to deal with, the coaching session can then go deeper. Now that they’ve had some practice, we can look at the nuance of the communication, the emotional intelligence of the communication, or the strategic framing of it rather than focusing on the basic stuff. That AI-assisted practice frees up our coaches to go and do what they do best—the higher-end value work—and not just the delivery of how to communicate.
Rachel Cossar
I think that’s such an important distinction, because it’s true that some people can still sometimes feel threatened by these technologies. To your point, when used well and when used within human-centered training or human coaching, to the extent that you’re able to, the AI becomes that baseline level-up area you can go to for consequence-free, very high-repetition practice if you want. It’s always fascinating for us to see some of the usage metrics on the back end, because some people really go to town on the number of practice reps they do. Coaches are amazing, but coaches also have a limit on how many times they’re going to sit with you and practice something. Maybe if they’re getting paid a lot of money, they’re like, “Sure, do it a hundred times.”
We’ve literally seen some people do like 140 practices of their 30-second opener, you know? It really fills a very interesting gap within that behavior change cycle. So it’s really interesting to hear you say that.
You’ve mentioned some specific skills that are critical to leadership. But specifically from the perspective of AI coming on the scene and really being able to take over some tasks and functions, which human skills do you feel are going to become the most critical for teams to succeed?
Monique Gibelli
I think this is where people are freaking out and worried, right? “What’s going to keep my job? What do I need to do?” The most critical skill is discernment—judgment—and being able to rationalize, “Does this make sense or not?” As leaders bring AI into different facets of their organizations, they need to develop new capabilities: knowing how to assess the organizational opportunities for AI implementation, how to measure the impact of it, and when to leverage AI versus when not to leverage AI and maintain the human relationship.
In the past, leaders always relied on, “I’ve got these relationships,” or “I’ve had this experience; this is what we’ve always done.” They can’t rely on that anymore. Things are changing too quickly. They need judgment about intelligent systems and their potential to transform their organization, and that’s something new that’s really pushing the edge and boundary for these leaders.
Even when we think about agentic AI and organizations moving workflows into something more automated, the ability to connect with teams and build trust as leaders is actually becoming more important. Those moments of genuine human leadership are much more differentiating now and critical for leaders. That is what’s going to make the glue and the impact of AI stick. The adoption of it will be successful if the leader is connecting with people and everyone is in it together—everybody’s got their sleeves rolled up and they’re all working together.
So I think it’s the alignment across complex organizations. The leader has to bring that together because you’re bringing lots of teams together now as they adopt these new agentic AI solutions, including people who may not have talked before. The skills required here are the skills that Daymark Group helps develop: creating the vision, persuasive communication, and the ability to create alignment across complex organizations. Then Virtual Sapiens helps leaders practice that at scale. Together, we really help bridge a depth of engagement and commitment to learning and adoption across the organization.
Rachel Cossar
Yeah, I think what you’ve said and highlighted about the adoption of new AI tools and how that is actually going to bring the demand for new skills to the forefront—especially when it comes to cross-department collaboration and being able to really understand impact and where it’s coming from—is interesting in light of how Daymark has also thought about enhancing programs with AI. We feel like the balance really has to be struck between where our AI platform integrates and where the rest of the programming and curriculum continues to do its work.
It’s very easy across the AI spectrum for teams to say, “Great, we’re going to use this new tool. Hey guys, it’s available to you, go ahead and use it.” There’s such a lack of design or really intentional integration of the AI tool and processes to support its adoption in that journey. It’s so easy for tools to totally flop in that regard. If it’s not going to be used, it’s certainly not going to contribute to impact, right?
Monique Gibelli
Exactly—wasted investment. Measuring impact of any investment is critical. Right now, when people think about adopting AI, a lot of early adopters were just measuring usage: How many licenses have been deployed? Have people done the training? Have they signed on? Have they done anything? Check the box. But that’s not really organizational change.
The question is: What are they doing differently? Has their process changed? Has the role of the team changed in a way that accelerates or amplifies something and offloads work to have greater business impact or performance? Measurement and ROI are very challenging today with AI investments. How do you link a direct investment in AI with a direct business outcome?
If you’re just doing training, you have to ask: What’s the impact of that training? What were you expecting it to do, and did it do it? The beautiful thing is the behavioral analytics coming out of the Virtual Sapiens solution, because that enables you to track performance of communication style. You know that authentic communication and genuine connection have a direct correlation with employee engagement, employees’ feelings of commitment, and employee loyalty. When managers are in it with them and communicating clearly, you can show that.
If you’re able to show that a leader who maybe had challenges with a team in the past—maybe communication challenges—now, through behavioral analytics, demonstrates improvement, you can potentially also show that retention in the team is much better. You can demonstrate different KPIs. ROI is something everybody needs to connect to: if you’re going to invest money, what is that ROI?
Having a clear framework of what you expect, how you’re going to collect data to measure what you expect, then carrying it through and validating it. Because if it is working, you ask: Where else should you be investing, doubling down, and expanding? That demonstrates it’s a good thing to do and that we should continue moving in that direction.
Rachel Cossar
Right, absolutely. So being very clear about the ideal behaviors you’re trying to change, the KPIs, the objectives, and then having a series of well-designed tests with well-measured outcomes—and then doubling down from there—would be a good strategy, you think, for trying out some of these new systems?
Monique Gibelli
Yeah, absolutely.
Rachel Cossar
So, taking a step up and looking ahead maybe five years—although who honestly knows where we’ll be then—but let’s assume this all really comes together in a wonderful way. What do you think leadership development could look like if organizations are really able to partner with Daymark Group and bring these different facets of training together—practice, coaching, and AI all working together?
Monique Gibelli
I truly believe that in five years, leadership development is going to reach every level. It doesn’t have to be called leadership development; it can be called learning and development—whatever is required. Any kind of development is going to reach every level, not just the top level, the top floor.
Our organizations have changed so much in the last ten years. They’re much flatter than they used to be. Decisions are happening so much faster. It used to be that you went up to the top to get a decision and waited. Not anymore. It’s distributed, and people are making decisions quickly. Because of that, the need for accelerated learning is so much more critical than in the past, where they would train just a select group of senior leaders and then have it trickle down through the organization. No, we’ve got to move much faster and include many more people now.
I see there always being a need for strategic, senior-led human coaching. That’s never going to go away because the human aspect is absolutely critical: the judgment, discernment, and experience of “Hey, should I be doing it this way?” You always need to understand personalities, opportunities, and threats, and that’s not always going to be provided by an AI solution. Navigating those dynamics requires human wisdom and experience, and that is not going away.
But if we can integrate and blend the human with the AI, it’s going to open up so much more for many more people in the organization. The broader impact will be the ability to have stronger organizational performance. The engagement of employees participating in learning and development will be higher. When I went through this in my own experience, it created a sense of belonging and loyalty. I felt they were giving me a genuine opportunity for learning and investing in me with real support, real feedback, and real tools. I felt very valued. I felt seen. That sense of belonging helps drive engagement, performance, retention, and a culture of everybody working together.
By extending this throughout the organization, AI makes that possible at scale. It wasn’t achievable before; we couldn’t do that, which is why we just limited it to the select few. But now we can extend and scale it out. The ability to prove that ROI from the leadership side is going to be easier with the metrics and KPIs these tools provide. We’re going to be able to link performance with that investment, and that’s really going to be the driving impact to continue to double down and invest more.
Rachel Cossar
Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s such a great point and vision—and a very exciting one. You’ve talked about some of the things we have to pay attention to in terms of having these new systems integrate in a way that’s actually impactful. But when it comes to this vision you just outlined, is there anything else that you think leaders or agents of change within organizations really need to be aware of in terms of possible impediments or barriers—things that would really stop this from happening?
Monique Gibelli
I think the biggest challenge is internal resource constraints, because companies are under-resourced in leadership development, truly. Designing and implementing an AI-integrated program requires expertise that many learning and development teams just don’t have in-house. That’s why a partnership model or bringing in somebody so you’re not building it from scratch, but leveraging deep expertise from your partner, is so important. Internal resource constraint is one area that hinders implementation.
Another I see sometimes is concern with privacy and psychological safety. Leaders and people—anyone participating in this training—are sharing genuine performance data: communication behaviors and personal development struggles. That’s very sensitive information, and people can be worried: “Where is that going? Do I want to be that vulnerable or share that much?” We want to make sure the tools we use at Daymark Group are very deliberate in protecting the data. That’s one of the reasons we selected Virtual Sapiens: you process the video on device, you’re not doing it in some external way, and your technology is SOC 2 Type II and GDPR compliant—which for us is fantastic. You’re top of the line. The answer to privacy isn’t to avoid AI technology; it’s to deploy it with integrity and make sure you’ve got your bases covered.
The other impediment is culture, often the invisible impediment. You can deploy the best technology in the world and watch it fail because the culture of the organization doesn’t support vulnerability, growth, or feedback. If you don’t have that in the culture enabling you to learn and grow, it fails. Leadership development is ultimately always a cultural intervention. There’s massive change. That’s why Daymark Group’s role is never just program design; we’re doing organizational change management. We’re understanding the people, the process, and the culture—how it all works together and how we can uplift and interlink everything together. Leaders implementing AI have to treat it like any change management initiative: provide clear goals, strong sponsorship, assess organizational readiness, and commit to long-term iteration.
Rachel Cossar
Very articulate, I must say. You’ve clearly spent a good number of years in this space thinking through this. Honestly, what an exciting time to be in. To your point, some of these were just issues we had to accept as “no way around them” before, especially when it came to scaling access to feedback and practice. Exciting times for sure.
As we wrap up, is there anything you’d like to share with the audience—in terms of how they can follow your journey, get more access to your thought leadership, or anything you’re particularly excited about on the horizon that you want to share?
Monique Gibelli
As I said in the beginning, we’re at the very beginning of building out our practice and incorporating AI. I’ve just joined the firm recently, but I’ve been familiar with Daymark Group for 16 years, so I’m excited to help take us to the next level. We have our website, daymargroup.com, which I welcome you to peruse and take a look at. We’re also on LinkedIn as Daymark Group Consulting—you can take a look there and follow us. Any time you follow us, you’ll get notified of new partnerships we’re making, new commitments we’re undertaking—anything and everything in leadership development with AI, executive coaching, you name it, we’re doing it.
Rachel Cossar
Awesome. I love it. We at Virtual Sapiens are very excited to be launching this new partnership. Given your strong focus on design, integration, and implementation of programs, I think we’ll see some really awesome success with this for a much larger group of leaders, which is obviously what we’re here for. We’re here for it, and I think it’s a bright future. Monique, thank you so much for joining. This was an amazing conversation, and thanks as always to our audience for tuning in. We’ll see you next time.
Monique Gibelli
Thank you.