Leading with Purpose: Announcing The HOW Institute for Society’s 2026 Novie Award for Leadership Development Excellence

Key Takeaways:

• The HOW Institute for Society recently received a 2026 Novie Award, NovoEd’s proprietary recognition for organizations using innovative talent development to drive measurable business impact and meaningful learning experiences.
• The Leadership Development Excellence Award celebrates The HOW Institute’s NXT-GEN Fellowship for Moral Leadership, a 15-week cohort-based program that has connected approximately 1,000 fellows across six continents and 32 countries.
• The Fellowship’s success demonstrates that virtual, collaborative learning can deepen human connection rather than diminish it.
• NovoEd’s platform played a central role in helping The HOW Institute deliver a values-driven, human-centered learning experience at global scale.

What does it take to develop leaders who can navigate today’s most complex challenges with integrity and purpose? For The HOW Institute for Society, the answer lies in a simple but powerful idea: How leaders do anything matters just as much as what they do. That philosophy is at the heart of the NXT-GEN Fellowship for Moral Leadership, the program that recently earned The HOW Institute a 2026 Novie Award for Leadership Development Excellence.

We’re thrilled to celebrate this recognition and share the story behind it because it captures exactly what the Novie Awards are designed to honor: organizations that use innovative, collaborative learning to create measurable impact and meaningful transformation in the workforce.

What Is The HOW Institute for Society?

Founded on the principles outlined in Dov Seidman’s bestselling book How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything, The HOW Institute for Society is dedicated to building a culture of moral leadership, principled decision-making, and values-based behavior. The organization believes that as the world grows more interdependent and morally complex, leaders need more than formal authority to succeed. They need moral authority, the kind that is earned through character and demonstrated through action.

The HOW Institute brings together an impressive, influential community of leaders from business, government, academia, and civil society, all committed to advancing this vision. Its Board of Directors and Fellows network includes prominent voices from across sectors, and its programming spans research, live convenings, publications, and its flagship leadership development offering: the NXT-GEN Fellowship for Moral Leadership.

Inside the NXT-GEN Fellowship

The NXT-GEN Fellowship is designed for emerging managers and leaders who have already distinguished themselves through values-based behavior and principled decision-making. Over the course of 15 weeks, fellows engage deeply with the frameworks at the core of The HOW Institute’s philosophy, examining case studies drawn from history and current events, and wrestling with the kind of imperfect, gray-area decisions that real leaders face every day.

This is not a program built around lectures and one-way content delivery. It’s a highly interactive experience combining live virtual events, group discussions, readings, and video content, all designed to help fellows build the tools, language, and confidence they need to inspire values-based behavior within their own organizations. Each fellow also completes a practicum project, applying moral leadership principles directly to a current challenge in their own work.

The results speak for themselves. Nearly all program graduates report that the coaching they received was valuable, that the fellowship strengthened their leadership skills, and that the experience inspired them to take on greater responsibility for promoting moral leadership within their organizations.

A Global Community Built on Shared Purpose

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the NXT-GEN Fellowship is its reach. To date, the program has brought together roughly 1,000 fellows spanning six continents and 32 countries. Participants come from organizations across every industry, sector, level, and role imaginable, united by a shared commitment to leading with integrity.

In the customer story shared on NovoEd’s YouTube channel, Rosie Forrest, Director of The HOW Institute’s NXT-GEN Fellowship and Fellow Community, describes the initiative as an “anchor program” that takes participants through a rigorous exploration of what moral leadership means today. Fellows are high-potential leaders already showing the capacity for this kind of thoughtful, values-led thinking, and the program is specifically designed to prepare the next generation of C-suite leaders.

What makes this global cohort model so powerful is the cross-pollination of perspectives it enables. Fellows learn not only from The HOW Institute’s curriculum, but from each other, comparing notes across cultures, industries, and professional contexts in ways that would be far more difficult to orchestrate in a single-location, in-person setting.

Virtual Learning as a Catalyst, Not a Substitute

One of the most compelling insights from The HOW Institute’s Novie Award story is its perspective on virtual learning. Rather than treating the shift to virtual as a compromise or a stand-in for something better, The HOW Institute leadership frames it as a genuine catalyst for deeper engagement. The global reach the Fellowship enjoys today, connecting fellows across dozens of countries, simply wouldn’t be possible without a virtual, collaborative learning model.

This is a perspective that resonates deeply with our own philosophy at NovoEd. We’ve long believed that technology, when designed thoughtfully, doesn’t have to come at the expense of human connection. It can actively strengthen it. The HOW Institute’s experience validates this belief in a particularly meaningful context: leadership development rooted in values, trust, and authentic dialogue.

As Forrest noted, “The most important thing NovoEd provides is technology in service of a human-centered experience, technology that facilitates real human connection rather than replacing it.”

Why This Recognition Matters

The Novie Awards exist to celebrate exactly this kind of story: organizations that use innovative talent development strategies to create real, measurable transformation. The HOW Institute’s work with the NXT-GEN Fellowship exemplifies what’s possible when a values-driven curriculum meets a platform built for genuine collaboration.

Developing leaders who can navigate ambiguity with integrity isn’t a small task, and it certainly isn’t one that can be accomplished through passive content consumption alone. It requires dialogue. It requires reflection. It requires the ability to hear how leaders from a different industry, country, or generation are wrestling with similar questions. The NXT-GEN Fellowship succeeds because it was built from the ground up around these principles, and because it has a platform capable of bringing that vision to life at scale.

For learning and development leaders looking at their own talent development strategies, The HOW Institute’s story offers a valuable lesson. Purpose-driven programs that prioritize authentic connection and collaborative reflection, rather than one-directional content delivery, can produce leaders who are more prepared for the nuanced, high-stakes decisions that define modern leadership.

Congratulations to The HOW Institute for Society

We want to extend our congratulations to The HOW Institute for Society on this well-deserved 2026 Novie Award. The organization’s commitment to building a more values-driven generation of leaders, and its thoughtful use of collaborative learning to do it, exemplifies exactly the kind of innovation and impact the Novie Awards were created to recognize.

If you’d like to see the full customer story and hear directly from The HOW Institute leadership about their experience partnering with NovoEd, you can watch the video on our YouTube channel.

See What NovoEd Can Do for Your Organization

The HOW Institute’s success illustrates something we see across our customer community: The organizations achieving the most meaningful workforce transformation are the ones building learning experiences around genuine human connection, not just content delivery. Whether your goal is developing future leaders, scaling mentoring programs, or building a global community of practice, NovoEd’s platform is designed to help you create that kind of transformative, collaborative experience.

Want to learn how NovoEd can help your organization build its own award-winning talent development program? Request a demo today and discover how we can help you turn your learning strategy into measurable impact.