2024 Debut Edition
Welcome to The Praxis Playbook—your essential guide for cutting-edge insights in leadership development. Designed for forward-thinking L&D and HR leaders, this monthly email delivers the top three leadership trends from the past month, plus actionable strategies and practical tips to elevate your organization’s people practices.
In our Debut Edition, we’re zooming out to explore the big picture: defining leadership trends of 2024. This year has been marked by flexibility, adaptability, continuous learning, and human-centric leadership—the key qualities driving leadership success in thriving organizations.
Ready to dive in? Here’s how you can translate these trends into impact.
Flexibility and adaptability have been ongoing trends since the shift in how and where people work began in 2020. While some companies are returning to in-office setups, dispersed teams remain prevalent, keeping key topics like virtual communication, trust-building, and asynchronous collaboration at the forefront of leadership development. Beyond team dynamics, leaders must also adapt to evolving employee expectations, rapid technological advancements, and the need for agility in responding to business challenges.Leaders can enhance their flexibility and adaptability by practicing self-reflection, active listening, emotional awareness and regulation, empathy, and pausing to ask questions before reacting.
Apply it:
Define flexibility and adaptability as leadership competencies within your organization. Consider leaders who exude flexibility and adaptability- what are their strengths, what skills do they have, and what do they do?
Review engagement surveys, performance reviews, and other employee or 360 feedback- what can you learn about the adaptability and flexibility of your leaders?
Talk with leaders and company leadership, what is important about adaptability and flexibility within your organization? How can it fuel goals for 2025 and into the future? Support leaders to develop tangible commitments to move in this direction.
Human skills and continuous learning, Human skills, often referred to as soft skills, encompass the personal attributes, social abilities, and emotional intelligence that empower leaders to build strong relationships and inspire others toward shared goals. These skills require continuous learning, as people are constantly evolving in response to changing environments, cultures, needs, and organizational dynamics. Leaders can develop human skills through self-reflection, feedback, coaching, practice, learning from others, fostering a growth culture, and using technology. Continuous learning requires a commitment to a proactive development strategy.
Apply it:
Resocialize “soft skills” as required leadership competencies. If not yet, identify necessary human skills and talk with leaders and people managers about the importance and value of these skills. Note champions who are already bought in and opportunities where managers or leaders still use the soft skills terminology and de-emphasize the importance.
Review existing systems, career maps, recognition structures. performance management scales, and skill development terminology. Observe where language and systems support fixed learning. Work to redefine what it means to be an expert. Experts do not acquire knowledge within a fixed system and then sit at the top, experts recognize the system is always changing and they sit in the middle developing feedback loops to consistently learn and iterate their approach based on the changing environment.
Begin recognizing and highlighting leaders and teams that support continuous learning at an individual and team level reinforcing productive behaviors.
Coaching and emotional intelligence are crucial in supporting the trends mentioned above. Coaching fosters self-awareness and serves as a powerful tool for continuous improvement, particularly when focused on specific goals. Emotional intelligence is essential for adaptability, flexibility, and the self-awareness necessary to sustain a commitment to ongoing growth and development.
Apply it:
If you are not already using one, consider a 1:1 or group coaching program.
For emotional intelligence, start by defining it. It is awareness of your emotions, management actions, self-motivation, empathy, and relationship management.
Supporting emotional intelligence development could be an investment in benefits that support therapy, an EQ survey, or circulating free resources. Review where your organization already supports emotional development and if needed commit to some new initiatives next year.
Bonus Trend: Since the release of ChaptGPT, AI has been trending, evolving to encompass the power of AI with human intelligence. We harness AI + human intelligence by aggregating the top monthly trends for Leadership Development in ChatGPT and then incorporating actionable strategies from our Praxis Playbook: a seamless blend of AI and human intelligence. AI becomes more than just a buzzword when applied with tangible examples—how are you and your team leveraging AI? Explore more real-world examples here.
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About Talent Praxis
Praxis is bridging the gap between theory and action.
We help companies and leaders practice proven academic management theories in the workplace to build results-driven teams.
Management and leadership are not skills you learn once but rather ongoing practices to achieve results.
Talent Praxis offers custom leadership development programs including leadership coaching, training in people management, and consulting in performance management to help leaders and companies develop their own strategic praxis.
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