Over the past year, leadership and inclusion have been characterized by constant change. Leaders have faced a series of unique challenges ranging from adopting AI to navigating complex economic and political pressures. As we look toward the future, there are new changes on the horizon that will reshape how leaders manage their teams throughout the coming year. Here is a closer look at the top five emerging leadership and inclusion trends and how leaders can use them to drive efficiency, accelerate growth, and support a better team dynamic.
Trend 1: Strategic Deployment of Artificial Intelligence
In 2024, the power of AI and our awareness of what it is capable of accelerated. As organizations move from dabbling in AI to deploying it, it is important to harness the enthusiasm of the employees who are excited about its potential. At the same time, it is equally important to motivate those with a wait-and-see attitude to begin actively taking steps toward implementing AI technology.
Break Down Resistance Through Open Communication
One key to effective AI adoption is clear, constant communication. According to our research, less than half of the individual contributors that we surveyed said they are talking about AI frequently enough; a missed opportunity to be sure. Leaders need to underscore that AI is a tool that requires human input to create real value.
By reshaping the narrative and engaging in conversation, leaders can create an environment where people feel empowered to use, discuss, and support generative AI. Messaging needs to include an acknowledgment of employee contributions and a demonstration of how those contributions connect to the organization’s strategic goals. At the same time, leaders should be transparent about how their team members’ roles may be reshaped because of AI and explore upskilling and reskilling training options with them. Leaders can help reduce employee anxiety through communication and involvement. Only then can they move on to exploring the value AI can bring to their individual roles.
Harness Employee Insights to Drive Successful Implementation
Leaders who fail to involve their employees in the implementation process are missing the chance to further harness their excitement and capture their ideas. What do they notice? What excites them? Where do they have concerns? Employees bring their unique perspective to technology initiatives. The insights they provide can help uncover potential problems and identify creative solutions that might not be obvious from a leader’s point of view. Engaging employees in this way not only fosters a sense of ownership and collaboration but also drives innovation and ensures that technology solutions are practical and impactful.
Trend 2: Increased Focus on Cognitive Skills
AI can accomplish tremendous things, but only when guided by human intelligence. To reap these rewards, leaders must develop the skills necessary to incorporate AI into their daily workflows and make sense of the information that AI provides—this is where cognitive skills come into play.
Build Business Acumen and Enable Data-Driven Decision-Making
While AI provides lots of actionable information, human beings still make the tough decisions. To get the most out of AI, leaders need to understand every aspect of their organization, from its operations and finances to its position in the marketplace. When leaders build strong business acumen, they can place AI-generated insights into their business’ unique context. This enables leaders to evaluate potential risks, identify opportunities, and create long-term strategies that drive sustainable growth. Business acumen, combined with data-driven decision-making, enables leaders to make informed decisions that position themselves and their organizations for success in an increasingly complex landscape.
Embrace Enterprise and Strategic Thinking
Both leaders and organizations are recognizing the value of cultivating enterprise thinking, which involves focusing on the bigger picture and recognizing how the work they do contributes to that larger mission. An enterprise mindset helps leaders connect their AI initiatives to the organization’s strategic goals, ensuring that they provide real value.
An enterprise mindset can be especially valuable when combined with strategic thinking. By considering information from different angles, leaders can apply AI-generated information to long-term planning. This empowers leaders to identify opportunities, evaluate risks, and make choices that drive sustainable growth.
Emphasize Critical and Creative Thinking
It will not be long before everyone is applying the same AI tools to the same problems. When we reach that point, competitors will begin generating nearly identical solutions. Leaders who can think outside of the box will be able to apply AI in unique and innovative ways that generate more original insights and help them outpace the competition. Creative thinking is essential for powering innovation and originality. While AI can provide a massive head start, leaders need to think critically about how to use AI outputs to generate truly transformative results that set them apart in a crowded marketplace. By leveraging AI creatively and strategically, leaders can unlock new opportunities, drive significant advancements, and maintain a competitive edge.
Trend 3: Prioritizing Humanocity
With all this focus on technology, it can be easy to lose sight of the human side of the equation. Leaders have begun embracing a more human-centered focus that prioritizes employee needs while still maintaining the rapid pace of change. It’s a human-centered approach with velocity—humanocity. To create this balance, leaders should consider what their people need while pressing for the results the organization requires.
Strike a Balance Between Personal Values and Professional Responsibilities
As a leader, you will occasionally have to implement policies that do not align with who you are or what you stand for. This may mean enforcing a corporate mandate to return to the office or shifting focus away from inclusion initiatives. This can be an uncomfortable position, but there is a way to strike a balance between these two opposing points of view.
It is important to remember that leaders are not required to become cheerleaders for decisions they do not agree with. Instead, leaders should use their cultural influence to ensure that these decisions are being made ethically and that the human impact is being considered by C-suite executives. On the team level, leaders can shepherd their people through times of transition by addressing their sense of loss and by helping them to see the positive side of the potential change.
Emphasize Reengagement
Industry and GP Strategies data suggest employees are not as engaged as they could be. The balance for leaders is in acknowledging the flexibility employees crave while driving contribution to the organization’s goals. Leaders should find creative ways to reengage employees to ensure that their people feel connected with the work that they do. When leaders can show the relationships between organizational goals and day-to-day responsibilities, they demonstrate an enterprise mindset and more effectively engage their people.
When leaders demonstrate they are not only competent but also work to forge connections with their people, they can maintain that human-centric focus while still delivering for the business. Leaders demonstrate competency by using their skills, knowledge, capabilities, and experience to help their team members succeed. Connection means investing in relationships with the members of their team, building trust, and exhibiting emotional intelligence. The goal here is not simply to help the team move forward but to enable them to move forward together.
Celebrate Individual Impact
Providing a sense of purpose is essential for creating high-performing teams, and yet employees are rarely encouraged to consider their personal impact. Far too often, the conversation about value focuses entirely on roles, rather than people.
To truly unlock the potential of their people, leaders should aspire to recognize the unique value each member brings to their role. This may require leaders to shift from a traditional leadership role to that of a strategic coach. Using this approach, the leader focuses on empowering their people, driving collaboration, and providing autonomy for individuals so that they can bring their unique value to the table.
Foster a Sense of Team Unity
Employees need to recognize when it is most effective for them to work independently and when they should seek to collaborate with other members of the team. There will be times when an individual may lack the critical skills necessary to accomplish a particular task. As leaders, it is important to create an environment in which individuals feel comfortable asking for help. This enables teams and individuals to work together at pace to deliver the best outcomes.
Trend 4: Incorporating Inclusion
Despite several organizations eliminating or downsizing their inclusion efforts, research reveals that in the US and across Europe, new inclusion requirements are coming into play for 2025, with strong practicalities regarding inclusion.
Embrace Authenticity and Self-Awareness
Employees want inclusive leaders whose actions match their words, who are deeply committed to their values, and who can create psychological safety within their teams. As we approach 2025, all leaders should take a moment to step back and reflect on their behaviors, values, and interactions with others.
Cultivating self-awareness can be difficult because we are blind to our own faults. For this reason, it is important for leaders to ask their teams for feedback on their performance and hold themselves accountable for their actions. This requires a significant mindset shift in which the leader places as much value on their behaviors and impact as they do on productivity.
Support Underrepresented Employees
Every team contains individuals who are widely recognized as being exceptional. The challenge leaders must rise to is focusing on team members who could be equally brilliant, but who are not prioritized in the same way. Leaders should rethink how they delegate responsibility. Instead of going with the traditional choice, it is important to provide everyone with the opportunity to showcase what they can do. At its core, inclusive practice is not about advancing people based on race or gender but providing everyone with the ability to develop their talents and live up to their full potential.
Psychological safety plays a key role here. Authenticity is only possible when every member of the team feels seen, heard, and understood. Leaders can foster this environment by placing as much value on how each employee influences their peers as they do on their overall performance.
Trend 5: Emphasizing Well-Being
In the first few months of 2025, there has been an increasing focus on employee well-being. This new paradigm goes beyond simply providing well-being packages to promoting well-being as a measurable leadership performance. It can be challenging to balance employee well-being with the need to succeed in an ever-changing environment, especially when leaders are required to do more with less. Despite this, there are practical commitments leaders can rely on to prioritize well-being.
Provide Flexibility
Flexibility does not cost anything, yet it can be a game changer in improving well-being. Many organizations have already taken a step in this direction by establishing remote and hybrid work environments. The next evolution of this trend centers on helping to create a greater work-life balance for employees. Leaders have already begun experimenting with new ideas such as compressed work weeks. In this framework, employees work the same number of hours but consolidate these hours into fewer workdays. This approach has been successful in preventing burnout, driving greater employee engagement, and providing better employee coverage across different time zones.
Leaders can also model flexibility by recognizing that each of their employees is a unique individual and by setting up personalized performance metrics to measure their value, rather than relying on a one-size-fits-all review process.
Address Employee Burnout
Burnout comes from unclear expectations, a lack of support, and insufficient leadership. Leaders can help offset burnout by challenging unhealthy policies and examining the company culture to uncover the root cause of workplace stress. When these causes have been uncovered, leaders should create alternative workflows that help employees achieve their goals in a healthier way.
Most important of all, however, is the need for leaders to model healthy work habits. If a leader never takes breaks, their team will interpret that as an expectation and follow that example. Leaders should aspire to set the correct tone by modeling a healthy balance between work and life.
Striking the Balance: Leading Successful Change in 2025
In an era where the pace of change is constantly accelerating, leaders should strive to find an equilibrium between organizational goals, technological advancements, and human needs. This balance is crucial for fostering a resilient and adaptive workforce. To achieve this, Leaders can model change through their behaviors and embrace opportunities to build new skills, cultivate self-awareness, learn from mistakes, and prioritize the needs of their teams. By adapting to these trends, leaders will help their people navigate the complexities of the modern workplace and create an environment where change is seen not as a threat, but as an opportunity to grow and innovate.
Are you interested in creating a culture that incorporates these new ways of working? Our Leadership experts can help you develop solutions that enable your business to thrive in the face of change.
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