Want a leadership role in 2024? This is what you need to succeed.

Perpetual business disruption, changing leadership expectations, and the continued focus on ESG demand a specific set of traits business leaders need in 2024. As the business environment changes rapidly, we will see boards looking for leaders who possess resilience, agility, and ESG intelligence. 

Resilience

Globally disruptive events – rare crises that businesses could expect once a decade – now occur almost yearly. The pandemic, de-globalisation of supply chains, the war in Ukraine, hybrid working, global inflation, and now artificial intelligence have made disruption both inevitable and constant. In the past two years, 96% of organisations experienced a major crisis – a statistic that is both staggering and sadly, unsurprising.

Understanding the reality of the business environment, boards in Ireland are looking for leaders who can navigate, deflect, and maintain their energy and conviction in the ‘perma-crisis.’ Resilience is quickly emerging as a critical and non-negotiable leadership trait, with boards looking for leadership candidates who demonstrate both physical and mental resilience. Not only must they be personally resilient, leaders must also be able to embed resilience in their leadership team and throughout the rest of the organisation. For many boards this has already become a priority, with two thirds of businesses in 2023 working on an integrated resilience strategy.

Leaders looking for roles in 2024, should be able to demonstrate two leadership capabilities. First, is proven experience of leading organisations through and out of heightened crisis scenarios. The second, is how they’ve maintained organisation-wide moral, focus, and productivity during those events.

Agility

Agility is an oft-quoted ‘core’ leadership trait encompassing the ability to adapt to events. While still true in 2024, leadership agility is just as much a personal mindset as it is a leadership approach.

Agile leaders possess creativity and speed. They focus on thriving, not just surviving, and are comfortable with setbacks or mistakes – and recover quickly by identifying learnings when these occur. They are purposeful and enable true self-expression for themselves and their teams. By showing genuine care and respect, they build an environment of psychological safety that enables employees to speak up without fear or scrutiny, and so embed initiative-taking and free thinking in the wider organisation, i.e. creating agility in the whole business.

A common trait of agile leaders is their heterogeneous connections. Often, they will crosscut their networks with a diverse range of experts and business contacts, ensuring their own knowledge is broad. This gives them greater visibility of emerging trends, challenges, and opportunities.

Examples of leadership agility might be using innovative thinking to respond quickly to problems, or building a strategic vision that is both long-term but flexible enough to adapt to new events. Likewise, it could be demonstrating how they’ve built a highly inclusive and trusting leadership team, where other leaders have space to contribute and provide ideas that have solved major challenges. 

ESG intelligence

Heightening ESG reporting requirements and anti-greenwashing legislation in the EU and elsewhere means boards are looking for leaders with more than just a rudimentary understanding of ESG. They want genuine ESG intelligence, encompassing regulatory developments, industry-specific knowledge, and a strategic vision that is ESG-led. With many ESG goals hitting stumbling blocks due to a lack of ESG knowledge among boards, companies are looking for leaders who can guide and upskill their directors in all areas of ESG.

Leaders with genuine ESG credentials possess a number of tell-tale traits. They have a strong personal belief that ESG transitions are ethical and necessary. They are moral, demonstrating genuine compassion for ethical initiatives and delivering a positive impact on the world. Often, they are curious, wanting to understand statistics behind ESG problems in order to better understand how they can fix them. They are ‘bridge-builders’ – using a highly collaborative approach to ESG goals, seeing the process as a journey the company is on to achieve a collective goal. Finally, they are courageous, unafraid to ‘break a few eggs’ in pushing through large-scale transformation and are not swayed by CEO-bashing, wokeism, or cancel culture. 

Evidencing ESG initiatives they have led and implemented, and how these initiatives meet regulatory standards will be necessary for most leadership roles in 2024.

With business disruption continuing at breakneck speed, the leadership paradigm is evolving rapidly.

To discuss the requirements for your next leadership position, or for help finding and appointing your next leadership candidate, please don’t hesitate to get in touch: mark.odonnell@odgersberndtson.com