Charlotte Sharpe
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As 2025 comes to a close, I’ve been reflecting on what it means to practice leadership while helping others develop it. I’m Charlotte Sharpe, Managing Director of Research and Innovation at Big Think+. My role is to drive alignment between our content and platform, ensuring that what we build, design, and deliver truly serves our clients—organizations that are bringing leadership development to life within their own cultures.
Across this year, our team’s work has revolved around three ideas: clarity, collaboration, and storytelling. Together, they’ve shaped how we scale leadership: both inside Big Think+ and across the organizations we partner with.
1. Clarity Scales
One of our most important realizations this year is that clarity is a form of leadership. The ability to define what we mean, decide what matters, and move forward even when information is incomplete has been essential to every major milestone we reached.
In her Big Think+ lesson “Systematic Strategies for Making Hard Calls,” Suzy Welch reminds us that decisiveness is not about being impulsive. It’s about using structure to make confident choices in complex contexts. That insight guided us as we developed the new BT+ Leadership Framework, a structured model built around five pillars of effective leadership: Character & Integrity, Customer & Results Orientation, Growth & Change, People & Culture, and Vision & Strategy. These pillars now serve as the backbone for how we organize content and design scalable leadership programs for our clients.
We also began to experiment with shorter courses anchored in real “moments of need.” These microlearning experiences are based on our research into the subtle, recurring situations that shape leaders in their day-to-day work—from giving feedback to navigating ambiguity.
Clarity turned out to be contagious. Once we defined what we meant by leadership and what types of learning moments we wanted to elevate, new ideas about product, curation, and measurement began to align naturally.
For example, our content and analytics teams quickly found shared language for identifying where leaders are most likely to need learning support and how to measure their growth over time.
2. Collaboration Compounds
Leadership development is a collective process, not a solo pursuit. John Amaechi captures this truth in “Building a Group of People to Go With You,” where he reminds us that no remarkable achievement happens alone.
That perspective resonated deeply with how our team evolved this year. As Big Think+ grew, so did the need for stronger systems to connect our expanding teams. We weren’t struggling with coordination, but with scale: the natural challenge of ensuring that collaboration stays fluid and intentional as more people and projects come into play.
In 2025, we welcomed Edie Villecco as Director of Partner Learning Programs, rounding out the expertise of our Partner Success function with deep consultative experience. Together, we designed curations, templates, and onboarding tools that help our partners activate leadership programs tailored to their workforce.
We also reimagined collaboration between our Platform, Product, and Content teams. By putting new processes in place for regular dialogue and shared planning, we strengthened the bridge between the technical infrastructure that powers BT+ and the learning design that defines its impact. Our mid-year innovation workshop brought this to life—bringing together colleagues from across disciplines to surface new ideas, test assumptions, and strengthen the connective tissue of our growing organization.
3. Story Sparks Action
Even the best frameworks and teams need stories to give their work meaning. As Atul Gawande shares in his upcoming Big Think+ lesson, storytelling is central to influence. It helps people make sense of complexity and see themselves as part of a shared purpose.
For our team, this meant making data and stories work together. We built new data and reporting infrastructure to help every team, from Partner Services to Sales, see how customers engage with Big Think+ and what drives their success. Yet the real transformation came when we translated those metrics into stories: how a mid-sized company built a learning culture; how a global client rallied senior leaders around their leadership values with BT+ courses; how a new manager found confidence after one short course.
We also developed enablement assets that help customers see their own story in the platform. Whether a company is new to leadership development or already running advanced programs, they can now access visual guides and resources that show exactly how to create value from Big Think+.
Data without narrative can inform, but it rarely inspires. This year, we worked to ensure that every dashboard, deck, and report tells a story about progress, potential, and purpose.
Looking Ahead
If 2025 was about scaling clarity, collaboration, and storytelling, 2026 will be about deepening them. We will continue refining our leadership framework, testing new learning formats, and strengthening the connections between teams. Most importantly, we’ll keep learning alongside our clients—because leadership development, like leadership itself, is never finished.
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