Hello KSKOers
On the 5th December, my grandfather would have been 124 years old. What was the world like when he was young? What was work like and what were leaders like?
When I joined the Gloucestershire AiSpire Network a few week ago, we talked about how we’re living through the latest revolution - the Digital Revolution. We agreed, it wasn’t on the horizon and coming, it was here and it is now. Join me in looking back at leadership through history and what that means for what we’re going to be expecting of leaders as we hurtle to 2036.
Looking forward to joining you on your learning journey!
Leadership is one of the most researched, debated, and yet persistently misunderstood aspects of organisational life, largely because it shifts as our societies, systems, and expectations shift. I explored the big questions of ‘what is leadership?’ as part of my doctoral research and it became clear that it isn’t one thing, and it’s always changing. Leadership styles have evolved over time and that ongoing evolution tells us that leader effectiveness, self-awareness, and the kind of leadership we want today won’t be what we want in the future. As we look forward to 2036, it makes sense to look back at where we’ve come.
Why Leadership Definition Still Matters
Leadership has been studied systematically since the early twentieth century and it remains an active and contested field. This is not accidental. The effectiveness of leaders is closely tied to the success or failure of economic, political, and organisational systems - families, even. Yet despite the volume of research, leadership continues to resist neat or universal definition. There isn’t a definition that will translate across the ages and be nearly packaged with a bow.
One of the central lessons from my doctoral work is that leadership definitions are never neutral. The definition chosen in any study reflects its purpose and shapes what is noticed, measured, and developed. While different researcher differ in their emphasis, there is broad agreement that leadership involves influence, motivation and the enabling of others to contribute to shared goals and organisational success.
A note to add here - being a leader is not the same as being a boss. That part about ‘enabling others’ doesn’t usually fit under the definition of being a boss!
Bringing these strands together, the definition I’ve developed is ‘the ability to influence and motivate people and move them towards a common goal by enabling others to contribute to the effectiveness and success of an organisation’. This framing matters because it places leadership into the domain of being a relational thing. Leadership is not about role, hierarchy, or personal charisma, it’s about the relationships that happen between people, within systems, and over time.
From Traits to Styles
Before the Ohio State studies of the 1950s, leadership research was predominantly focused on traits. The implicit assumption was that leaders had stable, identifiable characteristics that set them apart from people who weren’t leaders. Over time, thinking shifted away from traits and toward leadership styles and behaviours, reflecting a growing interest in how leadership could be described, learned, and developed.
This shift was important, but it didn’t render traits irrelevant. Traits continue to shape how leaders interpret situations, respond under pressure, and relate to others. Much of what we now describe as self-awareness is, in effect, an understanding of how our traits, preferences, and default responses play out in real contexts. Leadership styles offer a useful descriptive and sometimes prescriptive lens, but without attention to traits and inner life, they risk becoming superficial and perfunctory.
The Eras of Man
Leadership styles have always reflected the dominant economic and organisational realities of their time. This is not a story of steady improvement or replacement, but of layering. Older styles and thoughts about leadership don’t disappear; they coexist with newer ones, often uneasily.
In agrarian societies, leadership was bound up with land, food production, and survival. Authority was hierarchical and stable, rooted in control of essential resources. Predictability mattered because uncertainty carried existential risk. The leadership style was custodial, concerned with maintaining order and continuity.
As mercantile economies developed, leadership began to shift toward trade, exchange, and the accumulation of capital. Influence depended increasingly on trust, reputation, and negotiation. Leadership became more relational, though authority was still tightly held. The leader’s credibility mattered as much as their position.
Industrialisation reshaped leadership again. Mechanised production, bureaucracy, and scale required leaders who could manage systems, processes, and people efficiently. Leadership styles became more directive and task-focused, concerned with standardisation, control, and compliance. Behavioural theories reflected this worldview and it was assumed that complication and complexity could be managed through structure, roles, and clear lines of authority.
As economies moved towards services, care, and expertise, leadership had to accommodate human judgement, emotional labour, and relational work. Transformational and charismatic leadership gained prominence because leaders needed to engage motivation, commitment, and meaning, not just compliance. Emotional intelligence began to feature more clearly, and leadership was increasingly understood as something that could exist at multiple levels of an organisation.
In the digital era, we’re seeing leaders operating within highly interconnected, fast-moving, and uncertain environments. Organisations function less like machines and more like complex adaptive systems. Leadership has shifted from providing answers to creating conditions for learning, adaptation, and collaboration. Strategic leadership and complexity-informed approaches reflect this reality, recognising that leaders themselves are part of the systems they seek to influence.
About Self-Awareness in Leadership
Across this complexity, one capability consistently emerges as critical to leader effectiveness: self-awareness.
In contemporary environments, effective leadership is increasingly about managing change, ambiguity, and emotionally demanding situations. Change processes are often long-term, novel, and uncertain. Leaders can’t rely solely on technical competence or positional authority to navigate them.
Self-awareness links directly to leader effectiveness because it shapes how leaders interpret events, regulate emotion, communicate under pressure, and relate to others. Research highlights self-belief and self-awareness as among the most important emotionally intelligent attributes leaders need to demonstrate, particularly in public service contexts where leaders are required to hold care, accountability, and constraint simultaneously.
Self-awareness connects three critical domains: the individual leader, organisational capacity to deal with complexity and change, and leadership enacted at all levels rather than confined to formal roles.
From Complexity to Crisis
The COVID-19 pandemic moved leadership research beyond complexity and into crisis. Leadership during crisis requires calm, clear communication, collaboration, coordination, and support. These are not simply behaviours that can be switched on. They depend on a leader’s ability to understand and regulate their own responses to stress, fear, and uncertainty.
Deliberate calm requires self-knowledge. Clear communication requires emotional regulation. Empathy requires awareness of both self and other. Crisis leadership makes visible what is often implicit: self-awareness is not an optional leadership attribute. It is foundational.
Crisis also creates opportunity. It offers leaders the chance to reflect on their assumptions, learn from experience, and consciously adapt their leadership in response to what the situation demands.
Looking Towards 2036
As we look towards 2036, leadership will be exercised in environments that are even more complex, interconnected, and ethically charged. What will distinguish effective leaders is not mastery of a single style, but the capacity to move between styles consciously, informed by self-awareness and contextual understanding.
Leadership will increasingly be understood as a distributed capability rather than an individual skill. Formal leaders will remain important, but their role will centre on enabling leadership in others, shaping conditions for adaptation, and holding organisational purpose steady amid uncertainty.
Human-centred leadership will no longer be a progressive aspiration, it will be an expectation. As automation and artificial intelligence continue to reshape work, distinctly human capabilities such as empathy, ethical judgement, meaning-making, and relational intelligence will become more, not less, important.
Ethics and purpose will sit at the heart of leadership legitimacy. Leaders will be expected to navigate moral complexity around technology, inequality, climate, and public trust, not as abstract concerns but as lived leadership challenges. Purpose will shape strategy, not trail behind it.
Digital fluency will be assumed, but it won’t be enough on its own. Leaders will need to integrate data-driven insight with human judgement, making conscious decisions about how technology shapes power, work, and human experience.
Continuous learning, unlearning, and adaptation will become defining leadership capabilities. As the pace of change accelerates and the shelf life of knowledge shortens, leaders’ ability to reflect, recalibrate, and remain grounded will be critical. Adaptability will become an essential behaviour for leaders who want to stay the course.
The Last Word
Leadership has never been static. It has evolved alongside our ways of living, working, and organising ourselves. What has changed is not the need for leadership, but the demands we place on it.
As complexity increases, leadership becomes less about certainty and control and more about awareness, adaptability, and relational judgement. Less about heroic individuals and more about collective capacity. Less about knowing the answers and more about knowing oneself well enough to create the conditions in which good answers can emerge.
The future of leadership is not about louder voices or tighter grip. It’s about standing within complexity with clarity, humility, and intent. And that work, as always, begins with self-awareness.
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Nia is an expert leader who talks the talk and walks the walk. She is an academically awarded thought leader in self-aware leadership and practices self-aware leadership every single day in her role as a strategy and operations leader.
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