Andy Demir | Leadership | Future of Leadership | 10–12 minute read
Executive Summary
Leadership development often begins with models, competencies and weaknesses. My experience suggests it should begin earlier, with self-knowledge: understanding how we lead, where we create unusual value, how others experience us and which limitations genuinely need attention. In the age of AI and increasingly multigenerational workplaces, enduring principles such as character, trust and accountability still matter, but the way those principles are communicated must become more adaptive. The challenge is not to invent a new leadership style for every generation. It is to know what should remain stable and what must evolve.
In This Article
- Why leadership development should begin with self-knowledge
- Why strengths deserve more deliberate investment
- Where strengths-based development reaches its limits
- What older leadership principles still teach us
- How AI changes the leadership context
- Why generational labels can mislead
- What younger employees may be signalling about leadership
- How leaders can remain consistent while becoming more adaptive
- Generation Alpha requires humility more than prediction
- What senior leaders should consider
- Questions for the boardroom
- What leadership should preserve and what it must learn
Leadership Development Should Begin Before Leadership Models
We have accumulated an extraordinary quantity of leadership advice. There are models for communication, motivation, emotional intelligence, decision-making, change, culture, coaching and almost every other dimension of organisational life. Much of it is useful. Yet I have increasingly come to believe that leadership development often begins one stage too late.
Before asking someone what kind of leader they should become, we should first ask how well they understand the leader they already are.
That question goes deeper than completing a personality assessment or identifying a preferred style. Leaders need to understand what happens to their judgement under pressure, how naturally they build trust, how they behave when challenged, where they create clarity and where they create confusion. They need to understand not only what they intend, but how other people actually experience them.
That difference between intention and impact is one of the most important gaps in leadership.
A person may consider themselves decisive while colleagues experience impatience. Another may believe they are giving people autonomy while the team experiences absence. Someone who thinks carefully before speaking may regard that as discipline, while others read it as hesitation. Leadership always involves two realities: the leader's understanding of themselves and the experiences of those being led.
Research on self-awareness reinforces this distinction. Tasha Eurich, for example, distinguishes internal self-awareness from external self-awareness: understanding ourselves and understanding how others see us are related but not the same. The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 likewise continues to identify motivation and self-awareness among important workforce capabilities alongside leadership and social influence.
For me, however, self-awareness matters primarily because of what should follow it.
Developing Strengths Instead of Manufacturing the Same Leader
Many organisations still treat development as a process of finding what someone is not good at and trying to improve it. Development plans become inventories of deficits: communicate better, delegate more, become more strategic, improve presentation skills, pay greater attention to detail.
Some of this is necessary. A serious weakness that affects judgement, trust or execution cannot simply be ignored. Yet I question whether leadership development should spend so much of its energy attempting to make people reasonably competent at everything.
In practice, the most effective leaders are rarely strong because they have eliminated every weakness. More often, they understand where they have an unusual capability and develop it further.
One person may have particularly strong commercial judgement. Another may be unusually good at creating trust across functions. Someone else may be able to simplify complexity and turn it into direction. Another leader may remain calm in uncertainty and give people confidence precisely when the organisation is under pressure.
These are not decorative qualities. They can become part of a leader's distinctive contribution.
My own view is that people should understand which leadership qualities they are genuinely capable of developing to a high level and invest disproportionately in those areas. Leadership development should help people become more conscious and more deliberate about what they already do well rather than constantly pushing them towards an abstract image of the complete leader.
This does not mean telling people to remain inside their comfort zone. A strength that is never challenged can easily become complacency. But development should recognise the difference between expanding capability and manufacturing uniformity.
The objective should not be to create leaders who resemble one another.
It should be to develop leaders whose strengths are clear, useful and mature.
When Strengths Become Weaknesses
There is an obvious counterargument to this view. If leaders focus mainly on what they are already good at, they may simply become more comfortable versions of themselves.
That criticism deserves to be taken seriously.
Every leadership strength has a boundary. Decisiveness can become impatience. Confidence can become intellectual closure. Empathy can delay a difficult decision. Analytical ability can become paralysis. High standards can create fear. Commercial aggression can damage relationships that matter over the longer term.
The purpose of self-awareness is therefore not self-congratulation. It is to understand both the productive expression of a strength and the point at which that same quality begins to create a cost.
Weaknesses also need to be treated differently depending on their consequences. A leader may never become an outstanding presenter, and perhaps does not need to. But if people routinely leave meetings without understanding what has been decided, communication is no longer a personal preference. It has become an operational weakness.
A leader may dislike conflict. That does not automatically make them ineffective. But if avoiding conflict allows poor performance or destructive behaviour to continue, the weakness begins affecting the organisation.
This is where I would qualify the popular advice to “focus on strengths”. I believe strengths deserve disproportionate development, but weaknesses should be addressed selectively where they affect trust, judgement, execution, or others' ability to perform.
The test is consequence.
Recent research into strengths-based performance conversations in the UK Civil Service is useful here. It found improvements in how employees perceived the developmental value of those conversations, although the evidence for direct performance improvement was more limited. The distinction is important. Identifying a strength does not automatically produce better performance. A strength becomes valuable when someone understands it, applies it intelligently, and knows its limits.
That is a more mature form of strengths-based development.
What Older Leadership Thinking Still Gets Right
This is one reason I continue to find value in some older leadership literature.
Steve Shallenberger's Becoming Your Best: The 12 Principles of Highly Successful Leaders, first published by McGraw-Hill in 2014, emphasises character, vision, prioritisation, imagination, accountability, and communication. I would not treat the book as a complete leadership model for today's environment, nor should any leadership book be treated as one. Yet several of its principles have aged well because they address problems that technology has not removed.
Character is one.
Trust is another.
Accountability remains another.
These ideas continue to matter because organisations are still human systems. People continue to make decisions with incomplete information. Incentives still conflict. Trust can still be damaged. Executives still face decisions in which the commercially attractive option, the politically convenient option and the responsible option are not necessarily the same.
Character becomes visible precisely in those moments.
The same is true of trust. We often discuss trust as though it were a cultural quality, but its commercial consequences are far more concrete. In low-trust environments, information travels more slowly. People protect themselves. Decisions require additional checking. Bad news is softened before reaching senior management. Collaboration becomes more transactional.
The organisation begins paying an invisible tax on almost every interaction.
That cost may never appear explicitly in the accounts, but it appears in slower execution, duplicated work, missed information and weakened confidence.
The enduring value of older leadership principles lies here. They remind us that management fashion changes much faster than human behaviour.
AI Changes the Context, Not the Human Requirement
Artificial intelligence does, however, change the environment in which these enduring principles are exercised.
Much of the leadership discussion around AI understandably focuses on capability. Executives need to understand where AI can improve productivity, how it changes customer expectations, what risks it creates and how organisations should govern its use. These are legitimate questions.
But they are only part of the leadership challenge.
As AI becomes better at producing information, summarising documents, generating analysis and completing routine cognitive work, leadership value may move increasingly towards areas where responsibility cannot simply be outsourced.
The harder questions concern interpretation. Which information matters? What should we believe? When does an efficient decision create an unacceptable organisational consequence? Who remains accountable when an algorithm has influenced the recommendation?
These are questions of judgement rather than processing power.
The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 captures this combination quite well. AI and big data are among the fastest-growing skills, but employers also continue to emphasise leadership, social influence, resilience, flexibility, curiosity and lifelong learning.
Human capability is therefore not disappearing because technical capability is becoming more important. The two are becoming more interdependent.
This has an important consequence for leadership development. As AI becomes more capable, leaders may need to be more deliberate about the responsibilities that remain human: contextual judgement, ethical responsibility, trust, interpretation, and the ability to understand how decisions are experienced by others.
Technology can assist leadership.
It does not remove accountability.
The Generational Question Is More Complicated Than It Looks
The same discipline is necessary when we talk about generations.
It is tempting to say that Generation Z requires one style of leadership, Millennials another, Generation X another, and Generation Alpha will eventually require yet another. This language is attractive because it appears to offer leaders a simple map.
It can also become a shortcut for avoiding the harder work of understanding people.
Generational research is less clear-cut than much popular management discussion suggests. Age, career stage and wider economic or social circumstances can easily be mistaken for permanent generational characteristics.
A 24-year-old employee who wants frequent feedback may not be demonstrating a uniquely Gen Z preference. They may simply be early in their career. Someone with twenty-five years of experience will naturally expect a different relationship with authority, autonomy and development.
That distinction matters.
It does not mean generational change should be dismissed. Younger people have grown up under different technological, economic, and social conditions, and these conditions influence their expectations. But generation is one lens among several.
Culture matters.
Career stage matters.
Professional background matters.
Individual personality matters.
The organisational environment itself matters.
Good leadership therefore requires curiosity rather than categorisation.
What Younger Employees May Be Signalling
Even with that caution, some patterns in younger employees are worth examining.
Deloitte's 2025 global research on Gen Z and Millennials, covering more than 23,000 respondents across 44 countries, points to strong interest in learning, meaningful work, financial security and well-being. Many respondents also want greater teaching and mentoring from managers than they feel they are receiving.
One finding is particularly interesting: only a relatively small proportion of Gen Z respondents identified reaching senior leadership as their primary career goal.
This should not immediately be interpreted as a lack of ambition.
It may reveal something more uncomfortable about how senior leadership is currently perceived.
If younger professionals look at senior roles and see greater pressure, permanent availability, organisational politics and responsibility without sufficient autonomy or meaning, they may reasonably question whether the title itself is worth pursuing.
That would make the problem larger than generational preference.
It becomes an organisational design question.
For decades, many businesses have assumed that capable people will naturally want to climb the hierarchy. That assumption may become less reliable if the experience of leadership becomes increasingly unattractive.
Organisations therefore need to think not only about how to lead younger employees, but also about whether the leadership roles they are asking people to aspire to are designed in a sustainable way.
Adapt the Method Without Abandoning the Principle
This brings the discussion back to communication.
Different employees can interpret hierarchy, accessibility, feedback and authority in very different ways. International experience further complicates the picture because cultural expectations around directness, disagreement, relationship-building, and status can matter just as much as generation.
A leader who has spent much of their career in an environment where hierarchy naturally created distance may find themselves working with employees who expect direct access to decision-makers. A manager accustomed to annual development conversations may consider them sufficient, while another employee may interpret the lack of more frequent feedback as indifference.
Neither interpretation is automatically correct.
The leadership task is to understand what the situation requires.
I do not believe leaders should change their principles every time expectations change. Character, accountability, judgement and standards should remain relatively stable. What should become more flexible is the way those principles are expressed.
Communication can change.
Feedback can become more frequent.
Coaching can become more individual.
Technology can reshape how teams interact.
Authority can be expressed with less unnecessary distance.
None of these requires standards to become weaker.
This is where authenticity is sometimes misunderstood. Some leaders believe that being authentic means behaving in essentially the same way with everybody. I see it differently. A leader can remain consistent in values while being highly adaptive in behaviour.
We already accept this elsewhere in executive life. A good negotiator does not communicate the same way with every customer. An international executive does not assume that trust develops in exactly the same way in every culture. A commercial leader changes the conversation without changing the objective.
Leadership should be capable of the same sophistication.
Generation Alpha Requires Humility More Than Prediction
Generation Alpha makes this issue even more interesting, but we should be cautious.
Most members of Generation Alpha are not yet in the workforce. That means confident claims about how they will behave as employees remain speculative.
They are growing up with AI, algorithmic personalisation and educational experiences that differ significantly from those of earlier generations. It is reasonable to expect these conditions to influence future expectations around learning, technology and authority.
But we do not yet know exactly how.
That uncertainty should influence how leaders prepare.
The question is not whether we can predict the perfect leadership style for Generation Alpha today. We cannot.
The better question is whether today's leaders are developing enough adaptability to learn when those differences become visible.
That capability may matter more than any generational framework.
What Senior Leaders Should Consider
Leadership development systems should begin by examining how well people understand themselves. Personality tools and assessments can help, but they should not become labels. The more important questions concern behaviour: where does this person consistently create value, how do others experience them, and where does their behaviour repeatedly create cost?
Organisations should also distinguish more clearly between strength amplification and weakness repair. High-potential leaders need to know which capabilities could become genuinely distinctive and which weaknesses simply need to reach an acceptable threshold.
Multigenerational leadership should be approached with greater precision. Training leaders to “manage Gen Z” risks replacing understanding with stereotype. Leaders should instead learn how to diagnose differences in communication needs, authority expectations, career stage and individual motivation.
AI education should also move beyond productivity. Leaders need to understand what automation does to learning, capability formation and professional judgement.
This is particularly important at junior levels. Many tasks now considered candidates for automation have historically served as learning mechanisms. They exposed younger employees to customer problems, internal decisions, errors and practical judgement.
If those tasks disappear, organisations will need to redesign how that learning occurs.
An efficiency gain today could otherwise become a capability deficit several years later.
That is the kind of consequence senior leaders should examine before assuming that every activity capable of automation should be removed immediately.
Questions for the Boardroom
- Does our leadership-development system spend more energy repairing weaknesses than identifying where leaders could become genuinely distinctive?
- Which weaknesses are we currently tolerating even though they are creating measurable consequences for trust, execution or talent?
- Are we adapting how leadership is communicated while preserving clear standards for accountability and performance?
- As AI takes over more junior tasks, where will future leaders acquire the practical experience from which judgement has historically developed?
- Are we genuinely understanding younger employees, or using generational labels as a substitute for understanding individuals?
What Leadership Should Preserve — and What It Must Learn
Reading leadership ideas written before the current wave of generative AI is useful precisely because it reveals something that technological enthusiasm can obscure. Some principles survive because the human problems beneath them survive.
Character still matters because power and incentives continue to create difficult choices. Trust matters because organisations depend on people sharing information, accepting commitments and taking risks with one another. Accountability matters because decisions still have consequences, regardless of whether those decisions were supported by an algorithm, a consultant or an executive committee.
But enduring principles do not justify frozen leadership behaviour.
My own view is that leadership development should help people understand themselves much more deeply, identify the qualities through which they can make their strongest contribution and develop those qualities deliberately. It should also help them recognise where a weakness has become consequential and where a strength is beginning to work against them.
From there, leaders need a second capability: adaptation.
AI will continue changing work. Generation Z is already challenging some assumptions about careers, development and authority. Generation Alpha will eventually bring experiences we cannot responsibly predict in detail today. International and cultural differences will continue to complicate any attempt to reduce leadership to a single model.
The challenge, therefore, is not choosing between traditional leadership and modern leadership. It is learning to distinguish between the principles that deserve continuity and the practices that require renewal.
A leader who changes everything with the environment has no centre. A leader who changes nothing eventually loses relevance.
Leadership maturity lies somewhere between those two failures: knowing yourself well enough to understand what you should strengthen, being honest enough to recognise what you must correct, and remaining sufficiently curious to adapt when the people, technology and organisation around you have changed.
The principles may endure. Their expression cannot remain static.
References
- Deloitte. 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey.
- Eurich, T. “What Self-Awareness Really Is (and How to Cultivate It).” Harvard Business Review, 2018.
- Gifford, J., Urwin, P., McCracken, M., Cerqua, A. and Gould, M. “Strengths-based performance conversations: a randomized trial in the UK civil service.” Journal of Organisational Effectiveness: People and Performance, 2026.
- Shallenberger, Steve. Becoming Your Best: The 12 Principles of Highly Successful Leaders. McGraw-Hill Education, 2014.
- World Economic Forum. Future of Jobs Report 2025.
About the Author
Andy Demir is an international commercial and business leader with more than two decades of experience across complex B2B and industrial markets. He writes about executive leadership, strategy, organisational transformation, commercial performance, international business and the changing world of work, combining research with lessons drawn from operating across industries, markets and cultures.
