SAP is navigating a profound shift in its business: cloud transformation, Business AI, changing customer expectations and the need to execute across an increasingly interdependent global enterprise. MJA’s continuing work with the Leadership and Succession team has focused on a connected question: how can SAP identify, grow and support the leaders it needs while strengthening the teams and systems through which strategy is delivered?
An early strand of the work supported the evolution of SAP’s Talent Engine. Rather than treating succession planning, high-potential identification and development as separate processes, the Talent Engine connects critical roles, leadership transitions, readiness pools and targeted development. Feeder roles, rotations, flagship programmes, mentoring, coaching and other experiences become purposeful ways of accelerating readiness for more complex enterprise roles.
MJA then helped shape a levelled Leadership Development Framework as the organising logic for the wider system. The framework distinguishes the shifts involved in becoming a first-time leader, leading teams and other leaders, leading the business and ultimately leading the enterprise. It anchors development in SAP’s Leadership Promises — Develop People, Deliver Results and Drive Transformation — while combining the skills and knowledge leaders need with the deeper mindset shifts required as complexity, ambiguity and interdependence increase.
The framework also connects development to the moments that matter: entering a new role, taking on broader scope, working across boundaries or being asked to lead transformation. Flagship programmes, Leadership in Action challenges, rotations and individualised experiences can therefore be designed as parts of one journey rather than as unrelated opportunities.
Team Effectiveness extends the same thinking from individual leadership to collective performance. MJA has helped develop a scalable service linking multi-perspective diagnosis to a levelled model of team maturity, SAP’s Growth Culture behaviours and targeted Team Boosters. A Field Guide and AI-enabled companion are intended to help team leaders translate insight into practical action in the flow of work, supported where needed by SAP’s internal coaching capability.
The Leading the AI Business programme brings the system to life at executive level. Built around live SAP challenges, cross-functional cohorts and the realities of AI-era leadership, it asks leaders to make sense of incomplete evidence, work across dependencies, hold competing perspectives, make difficult trade-offs and run disciplined experiments. The aim is not simply to understand SAP’s strategy, but to practise making it executable for teams and customers while retaining human judgement where it matters most.
Alongside this, MJA has contributed to the conceptual development of the SAP Leadership Institute: not simply a portfolio of programmes, but a cultural heartland, developmental system and succession engine. The emerging Campus and personal Console concepts connect pathways, practice, relationships, insight and renewal, helping leaders see where they are, what transition they are navigating and what experience or support would be most useful next.
Across the engagement, MJA’s role has been to act as a thinking and design partner: connecting workstreams, challenging assumptions, bringing outside perspectives and helping the team maintain one coherent developmental narrative. The work continues to evolve with SAP. What is emerging is less a leadership curriculum than an enterprise system connecting talent, succession, leader development, team effectiveness and the capabilities required to lead an AI-enabled business.