What are the leadership skills that a leader really needs? There are 17 skills. It isn’t a definitive list. Nor is it an even, nicely rounded number. But leadership is messy and always changing. This is reality.

What does it take to be an effective leader in 2025?
Before I outline what, I believe the skills are, may I first explain who I am to be defining them. This post has been a long time coming. I’m in my mid-forties. I’ve worked with, trained with and learned from some of the world’s best across leadership, executive coaching, strategic communication, marketing, reputation and personal impact. I continue to be privileged enough to consult to some leading and wonderful people, teams and organisations.
And this is written from my hands on, ‘real-world’ experience of seeing what leaders struggle with. I share it in the hope that it will provide leaders – right now – with some practical guidance on where the really useful work is.
And one more thing. In my opinion, the current leadership market is outdated, archaic, disparate, and stagnant. It is over-reliant on established methods, dependent on an intellectualised approach, disparate in its elements and apathetic to creating a holistic leadership development offer that provides real support for leaders.
There, I have said it.
Leadership has changed and leaders need and deserve better.
Leadership is not about learning how to ‘do’ leadership. It’s about learning how to ‘be’ a leader.
That means moving way beyond going to academic institutions to learn theories, case studies, models and acronyms. Today’s leader must experience and develop a holistic way of leading. That takes a blend of leadership development, coaching and communication skills, all of which must be set against the realities of the world in which we lead.
Never has our planet needed leaders who can deliver change quickly and in, what feels to be, constant uncertainty. The demand on them is to remain well and healthy, to perform at their best, to enable others to do the same and to understand how to bring about rapid change in service of our real and immediate global challenges.
In a nutshell, leadership in 2025 is about becoming an integrated and effective human being in order to be an integrated and effective leader.
Leadership skills of 2025
It is my opinion, that proficient leaders in 2025 must have a range of skills that can be categorised under the four headings of leadership, coaching, communication and sustainability.
Develop the skills to ‘be’ a leader.
Don’t learn how to ‘do’ leadership, learn the skills of how to ‘be’ a leader. It is very, very different.
- Discover who you are as a leader. Develop your own unique sense of leadership, know who you are as a leader, it is as unique to each of us as our fingerprint.
- Understand why you lead. Discover ‘why’ you lead and understand what has meaning and purpose to you, how that meaning links to your professional purpose and to the impact you seek to have.
- Choose how to be. Focus on becoming skilful at ‘being’ the leader you are. Conscious. Authentic. Purposeful. Know how to access your natural sense of self and always tap into the real you. Authenticity is powerful.
- Become proficient at the ‘real’ leadership skills. Learn how to connect, how to coach, how to create a vision, how to lead with emotion, how to create and manage relationships, how to build reputation, how to use storytelling to engage and influence. There is a full suite of ‘being’ skills involved in leadership today.
- Know your leadership development ecology. Appreciate the leadership ecology. Take care to do the groundwork on yourself as a leader. Only once this work has been done, can you really be equipped to move to leading others, leading teams, leading for purpose and leading for the planet. This is the full leadership development spectrum.
- Relinquish reliance on technical knowledge, expertise and ego. It isn’t just how much you know! Know that letting go is key to creating, accelerating, and sustaining the change that you wish to bring about.
‘Be’ coached and be a coach
Know what it takes for you to be relentlessly at your best and how to enable the same in others.
- Be an optimal, healthy and enduring leader. Having a coach, enables you to tap into your natural resources and to be at your best. Being coached, enables you to work and lead from a place that is free from unhelpful beliefs, habit or fear and ensures authentic leadership. The aim is to lead from a place of conscious choice, with a clear purpose, a defined vision and a definite direction. This not only ensures that your levels of resilience are high, it also reduces the risk of burnout and ensures your leadership becomes optimal, healthy and sustained.
- Lead by coaching. The ability to coach others and to connect others to their potential through a coaching approach, ensures optimal leadership and wellbeing across the leadership population.
‘Be’ exceptional at human connection and communication
Know that every change begins with human connection and communication.
- Congruence. Effective leaders work on being intellectually calm, physically at ease and emotionally open. Take a moment to read that again. Congruence in when, what a leader thinks, feels and does at any one moment is aligned. This enables connection with others. A leader accepts that they are one system and uses all the intelligences available to them in order to lead. Their mind, their body, their heart. They place equal importance on every aspect of human intelligence and reach way beyond intellect.
- Deeply human connection. Leaders know how to connect with others. From active listening, to knowing the value that comes from silence, to being relentlessly curious and vulnerable, to understanding the information of body language. They prioritise human connection over everything they have to do.
- Flexibility in communication styles. Being proficient in moving between inspiring to compassionate, authoritative to analytical and often in the space of one meeting. They can flex their communication to the situation they are in and adapt it to who they are with.
- Invite all the voices. The natural leader actively seeks to include all the voices in their leadership system, knowing that there is truth, richness and resilience in seeking all intelligences and perspectives.
- Comfort and confidence in emotion and conflict. Being able to work intelligently with emotion in themselves and others, they maintain relationships and integrity while managing conflict and neutralising toxic behaviours.
- Awareness and responsibility for impact. Holding themselves responsible for their own impact, they always consider themselves ‘response-able’ and accountable for how others are experiencing them.
Sustainability and Regenerative Leadership
Hold the perspective that leadership is connected to, not separate from, our natural world.
- Hold the nature-based leadership perspective. Hold the broadest perspective on leadership impact; one that reaches beyond profit and towards the continuation of our natural world. Hold the ultimate perspective of success being ‘connected to’ not ‘separate from’ the natural world. Consider that 3.8bn years of nature’s research and development, holds may of the answers we seek to our modern challenges.
- Have a considerable understanding of global challenges. Gain a practical knowledge and awareness of each of our global challenges. This is the context in which you lead. From anti-biotics to bio-diversity, climate change and equality. Consider ESG to be an integral part of your leadership strategy and certainly not a department or specialism.
- Articulate how your leadership links to global responsibilities. Do the hard work of articulating how your leadership role and that of your leadership population is serving our global challenges.
And there it is.
An offer as to what I consider to be a helpful checklist for leaders in 2025. My hope is that is switches leaders towards a more holistic view of what it takes to be a leader and away from the need to ‘learn’ or ‘do’ leadership.
And from now on I will be speaking up a lot more.
Because my personal and professional purpose is to connect others to their natural brilliance. I believe that the current leadership market is failing to support leaders in that. I also believe that the skills of being human are often ‘left out’ of leadership.
So from today, I’ll be walking my talk. I’ll be taking my purpose into the leadership world and – as Ghandi once said – being the change that I wish to see.
Thanks for reading.