Today's leaders are under immense pressure.

The pandemic and other major global events have sparked radical changes in organisations, affecting market dynamics, employee expectations, and ways of working. The long-awaited ‘new normal’ is proving to be a fluid and ever-evolving environment – not the fixed one many of us hoped for.

Graham Winter, chief psychologist for three Australian Olympic teams and author of the business bestseller Think One Team, says: “Turbulence is here to stay and leaders need a new toolkit to navigate this new world.”

For most leaders, trust is on the line. The PwC 2024 Trust Survey from the US shows that business executives tend to overestimate the level of trust they receive from both customers and employees. They are starting to realise that change is here to stay, and building trust and developing high-performing teams requires a new approach.

According to leadership performance and coaching experts, as well as people and culture representatives from leading Australian and New Zealand organisations, these are the six key skills leaders need to develop to thrive.

1. Purpose-led leadership

A clear sense of purpose is climbing to the top of leaders’ priorities.

Dr Jemma King, a fellow at the University of Queensland, School of Psychology Faculty of Health and Behavioural Sciences, and an external adviser to McKinsey, says: “The younger generation coming through have very different motivators. They seek meaning and purpose in their vocation, within their personal and work lives. But purpose needs to be greater than just making money, and they insist leaders share their vision in this regard.”

A clear sense of meaning can also unite teams during times of uncertainty, challenge, and change.

Leadership and performance expert Leah Mether says: “In these times, employees tend to get distracted, insular and ‘them-focused’, obsessing over the ‘What does this mean for me?’. This is when safety can become an issue, as they might drop their attention levels. Conflict can also erupt, unless a leader is capable of uniting people behind a shared purpose. This is what holds people together and keeps them performing, even in hard times.”

 

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2. Transparency

Through working with organisations in different industries, Winter has witnessed how purpose and transparency are strictly intertwined.

“Leaders are becoming storytellers,” he says. “The ones who are seeing the best results have adopted a no-BS approach around the realities of the organisation, the market, and the world.”

He describes how SafetyCulture, a Sydney-based global technology company in the workplace operations industry, has faced the recent capital crunch.

“In a short amount of time, investors pressured the leadership team to pivot from a ‘grow, grow, grow’ to ‘profitability now’ in a very short period of time.”

Anna Wenngren, chief people officer at SafetyCulture, told the story of being crystal clear about their purpose and communicating it transparently – every week with individual teams and more open in Q&As. “This helped them boost their employee engagement through that period, which is extraordinary,” says Winter.

3. How emotional intelligence beats AI

King believes that emotional intelligence will be one of the biggest growth areas for professional development in the years to come.

“Everyone should be terrified of AI taking over because AI is coming for all of our jobs. But the good news is that we have emotional intelligence, an area where humans distinctly excel.”

Only humans can decipher complex emotions, navigate intricate social dynamics, and read non-verbal cues such as micro-expressions, intonation, sarcasm, pauses, intention, and cultural nuances.

“Humans can perceive very subtle chemosignals that our bodies give out. We have receptors on our skin and in our nose that pick up the emotional status of those around us. AI can’t do that.”

These are areas where leaders and their employees should focus – especially since AI is starting to free up their bandwidth by taking on mundane and time-consuming admin-based tasks.

4. Adaptive leadership

According to Winter, being a leader used to be similar to getting on the train and knowing what all the stops were going to be.

“Today, it’s like managing a fleet of yachts,” he says. “In the ocean, yachts can go anywhere, you don’t know what the weather is going to be like, you can’t control it and you have to keep communicating with your fleet at all times.

“There is a much larger number of variables to deal with. The issue is that many leaders keep using the old playbook trying to control the uncontrollable.”

5. Psychological safety

Brought into the global spotlight by Google and its Project Aristotle, psychological safety is a concept every leader should add to their toolkit.

6. Before anything else, lead yourself

All experts interviewed for this article unanimously agree that, now more than ever, leadership starts with you.

For Mether, it’s about modelling the behaviour you want to see in other people. “Leaders need to start with self-reflection and building their self-awareness – leadership is an inside-out process,” she says.