5 Leadership Trends to Watch out for in 2025. This month (Nov 2024) we take a look at five key aspects of leadership in 2025. We think that action in these areas will help you become a more successful leader.
1 – Resourcefulness and Creativity
As we face increasing complexity and uncertainty in our workplaces and the wider globe, and the rise of disinformation, cognitive skills such as reasoning and judgement are more important than ever.
According to Forbes (2025), resourcefulness and creativity has become even more critical since the introduction of artificial intelligence, highlighting the need for human reasoning and judgment.
If you’re interested in developing your resourcefulness, creativity, reasoning and judgement as a leader, what could be your next step? Here are some ideas:
- Don’t underestimate the power of a good question in the absence of clear answers. It’s something we focus heavily on in our workplace coaching programs.
- Dive into Daniel Kahneman’s book ‘Thinking fast and slow’. Most of the time, our systems for how we think and make choices works very well. But we’re also prone to errors and biases in our thinking. Understanding how our two systems of thinking work can be a powerful way to strengthen our judgement and decision making. It can help us to properly frame risks and understand the effects of cognitive bias on how we view others.
- Establish your creativity baseline or try some tactics that help boost your creativity. For your creativity baseline, try this quick test of creativity. If you’re looking to strengthen your creativity, here are six evidence-based tactics that could help you:
- Establish your creativity baseline or try some tactics that help boost your creativity. For your creativity baseline, try this quick test of creativity. If you’re looking to strengthen your creativity, here are six evidence-based tactics that could help you:
- Consciously push yourself to be more creative
- Work with someone creative
- Re-evaluate emotional events in a more positive way
- Keep a dream diary
- Forget perfectionism — strive for excellence — it’s better for creativity and also for your wellbeing
- Switch between tasks – temporarily set aside your main creative task to work on an unrelated one. Taking short breaks can help too.
At YES Psychology, we can help leaders connect with their creativity. Please get in contact if you’d like to find out more.
2 – Intergenerational leadership
According to the 2025 Skills Horizon Report, the ability to lead across generations is a skill that organisations should be keeping an eye on—and preparing their leaders for. Many leaders told the Skills Horizon Report authors about the growing challenges with managing intergenerational difference. These differences can be around work practices and styles, as well as differing expectations about feedback and what’s important in successful work and careers. It’s a trend we’ve noticed ourselves.
In our view, there are many benefits to be gained if you can help your leaders make the most of intergenerational difference and see it as an opportunity rather than a challenge.
Increasingly, leaders need to build common ground in teams, help teams work through differences of opinion or different perspectives, foster a sense of belonging, and steer their teams to work together towards a common goal.
Being an inclusive leader can help you recognise, celebrate and make the most of individual differences. Our blog ‘How to be an Inclusive Leader’ contains some helpful tips on this and we have previously run workshops on this topic. Forbes also recently shared tips on how to navigate the challenges of a multigenerational workforce.
3 – Trust
The 2025 Skills Horizon Report points to trust as one of five things that organisations should be worried about right now, pointing to an erosion of trust in institutions, ideas and geopolitical stabilities. The latest Qualtrics Employee Experience Trends report also points to trust as a key area of focus for organisations.
Whether you’re looking at global events, institutions, organisations, or individual leaders, trust is key. So, what should leaders focus on, to help drive up and maintain trust?
The Qualtrics survey identified the highest predictors of employee trust in senior leaders as being:
- Senior leadership responds to feedback from employees
- Senior leadership values diverse perspectives, even if different
To help your leaders earn and maintain the trust of their teams in the long-term, encourage them to:
- Listen with curiosity, seek feedback and act on it – In our blog ‘Is your team feeling heard? Listening may not be enough’ we look at the importance of listening to—and acting on—feedback from your team.
- Have regular check-ins – Regular check-in conversations can help demonstrate trust and care for others. It’s the reason we focus on this – and six other types of conversation that are important for leaders to have – in our Crucial Conversations program.
- Act honestly and ethically– and critical to this point is to ensure alignment between your ‘espoused values’ (what you say you are about) and your ‘values in action’ (what you actually do).
4 – Leading Change Well
In the Qualtrics 2025 Employee Experience Trends report, Dr Cecelia Herbert says ‘‘Engagement and wellbeing soar when employees feel they are working towards a positive future and supported in adapting to change. This isn’t a nice-to-have — it’s the only way towards sustainable productivity and reduced complexity.’’
Change is a constant in many organisations. And leaders can play a big part in how their teams experience and adapt to change. Whether its change brought about by AI, broader technological change, change to an organisation’s structure, change in the regulatory landscape, or change to stakeholder expectations, the ability to lead through — and help employees adapt to — change is a critical skill for leaders.
Alongside that, leaders need to help set a vision of a positive future. Focusing on the reasons why a change is happening, helping employees see the role they can play in shaping the change, and helping them see how a change will lead the organisation to a better place, is crucial.
At YES Psychology, we run a successful Resilience through Change program and would be happy to discuss how to help deliver effective change in your organisation.
5 – Emotional Intelligence
Emotional Intelligence was one of Forbes’ top 5 leadership trends driving success for 2024, and it remains in Forbes’ top 5 for 2025. The authors point to a recent study showing that higher levels of emotional intelligence are correlated with more effective leadership, improved organizational climate, better communication, enhanced decision-making, conflict resolution, and higher levels of employee engagement.
In our YES Psychology leadership and wellbeing programs we focus on many elements of emotional intelligence: helping leaders appreciate the strength in being self-aware of their emotions, exploring tactics which can help regulate emotions, exploring internal motivation and drivers, and focusing on empathy and social skills to help build good relationships.