When employees move into bigger roles, their job descriptions usually look familiar: goals to hit, responsibilities to own and metrics to watch. However, what’s rarely included in that list are the parts that can’t be delegated and are largely missed in training.
Excellence in Business Operations (XBO) 2026, held in Tempe, Ariz., from November 10 to 11, 2026, will help the industry’s rising stars identify these unwritten responsibilities and treat them as core elements to leadership roles.
What’s more, the content is shaped with input from NSCA’s Next-Gen Academy, made up of seasoned leaders who know exactly where new managers tend to struggle most.
Protecting Your Own Capacity
The busier you get, the more work you may be doing, but at what cost? Decision fatigue, short tempers and mental fog are real risks when you’re at maximum capacity — and they are big signals of burnout. When you become overwhelmed, it’s easy to stop thinking about how to improve the system.
To help you protect your capacity, XBO 2026 will dig into how to maintain energy, focus and decision‑making abilities when adding new responsibilities. The sessions will explore:
- Defining non‑negotiables
- Saying “no” to work that doesn’t fit
- Designing better handoffs
- Delegating escalations with clear guardrails
Confronting People Problems
As part of leadership, you have to deal with people who aren’t doing what they should. This can include:
- People who aren’t working fast enough
- High performers who ignore process and create their own rules
- Managers who blame the team instead of owning their actions and decisions
- Employees who do good work but create problems for everyone around them
- People who constantly miss commitments
Most leaders wait too long to deal with these kinds of issues and often, others have to work around this behavior or redo work. While they may not say anything, everyone notices the double standards and soon, they stop having faith.
To address this, XBO 2026 will focus on how to set boundaries, communicate those expectations and what to do when someone crosses that line. This is critical not only for the person creating the issue but also for those carrying the impact.
Ensuring that “Busy” Equals “Profitable”
While being busy looks good on paper, you’re expected to know whether it is actually contributing to the business. This often comes down to the choices made by leaders such as:
- Promising extra work without a change order
- Sending extra labor without checking the estimate
- Agreeing to customizations that add complexity but don’t add revenue
- Delaying conversations about scope, schedule or budget
You don’t need to be a financial analyst, but it’s your job to pay close attention to the right numbers and act on them — and to question them when they don’t match. When a report says things are on track and your gut says otherwise (or vice versa), that’s your cue to investigate.
To help build that discipline, XBO 2026 will highlight how leaders across the organization can assess the situation, ask better questions and make better decisions.
Providing the Keys to Success
You never know when the opportunity to step up and lead may present itself. Preparation matters when those moments do arrive.
While none of these responsibilities necessarily show up in a neat list of bullet points, they’re critical parts of the role. XBO 2026 will put language and structure around them so that rising leaders don’t have to figure it out alone.
Learn more about the XBO Experience 2026 at www.nsca.org/xbo.
Tom LeBlanc is executive director at NSCA.
