Why future-ready leadership requires more than experience
In a business environment shaped by labour shortages, AI adoption, digital transformation, succession risk and rising governance expectations, organisations need leaders who can deliver results today while preparing for tomorrow. Yet many still rely on experience, seniority and trial-and-error to build leadership capability.
Aad JCM van Vliet, Global HR Executive, Founder of Avvartes, former Global Head of HR for several blue-chip companies and Visiting Professor at BMI Executive Institute, argues that this is becoming a business risk. Drawing on decades of international HR leadership, he explains why evidence-based leadership development must be intentional – at the level of the individual leader, the manager and the leadership team.
Why Leadership Development Matters More Than Ever
One issue making this challenge particularly visible across Europe is the EU Gender Balance on Corporate Boards Directive. By 30 June 2026, large listed companies are expected to achieve either 40% representation of the underrepresented sex among non-executive directors or 33% among all directors.
While often discussed as a governance or diversity requirement, the directive highlights a broader leadership challenge. Organisations need stronger succession pipelines, more inclusive talent development processes and a larger pool of board-ready leaders.
Across the Baltics, relatively small talent markets make this challenge even more significant. Many organisations cannot simply recruit all the leadership talent they need from the market. They need to identify, develop and retain future leaders internally.
At the same time, AI, automation and digitalisation are transforming industries, jobs and business models. Economic uncertainty and changing workforce expectations continue to reshape the environment in which leaders operate.
All of these challenges point to the same underlying issue: Organisations need a more deliberate approach to building leadership capability.
Having worked with leaders and organisations across industries and countries, Aad has observed that leadership capability becomes a competitive advantage only when it is developed intentionally.
“Many organisations still assume leadership capability will emerge naturally through experience. Sometimes it does. Often it doesn’t. The organisations that succeed are usually the ones that develop leaders intentionally.”
This raises an important question for HR leaders:
Are we intentionally building the leaders our organisations will need tomorrow, or are we hoping experience alone will get us there?
From Instinct to Evidence-Based Leadership Development
When Aad began his HR career decades ago, leadership development was largely based on intuition, personal experience and anecdotal evidence.
Today, the situation is very different. Research from psychology, neuroscience, organisational behaviour and leadership science has significantly improved our understanding of how leaders build trust, engage people, develop high-performing teams and lead through change. What is particularly interesting is that much of this research confirms what many experienced leaders have observed for years: leadership is not simply a matter of personality or natural talent. It can be learned, practised and strengthened. Yet a significant gap remains.
While the knowledge exists, many leaders are still unfamiliar with it. Even more concerning, many organisations have not clearly defined what effective leadership looks like in their own context. The result is that leadership development often remains reactive rather than strategic.
What the Science Tells Us About Effective Leadership
1. Leading Yourself
Effective leadership starts with self-awareness and self-mastery.
Daniel Goleman’s research on emotional intelligence demonstrates that leaders who understand and manage their emotions tend to build stronger relationships, make better decisions and perform more effectively under pressure. Carol Dweck’s work on growth mindset highlights the importance of adaptability and continuous learning. Tasha Eurich’s research shows that self-aware leaders build stronger trust and make better decisions.
The implication is straightforward. Leaders who cannot lead themselves will struggle to lead others. However, self-awareness alone is not enough.
Leadership also requires self-mastery: the ability to consistently show up as your best self, especially when the pressure is high. In practice, this means deliberately managing the foundations that influence performance every day: physical energy, mental focus, emotional resilience and the quality of relationships.
Aad often describes self-mastery as taking care of four interconnected foundations: body, mind, spirit or purpose, and relationships. Together, they shape how leaders think, feel, decide, communicate and perform. When one of these foundations is neglected, leadership effectiveness often suffers.
In Aad’s experience, many leadership challenges that appear to be organisational problems are rooted in how leaders manage themselves.
“Leaders cannot consistently lead others beyond the level at which they lead themselves.”
Leadership development therefore cannot focus solely on knowledge and technical skills. It must also help leaders understand their strengths, limitations, behavioural patterns and blind spots while building the habits that support sustained performance, resilience and wellbeing. Leadership starts with the person in the mirror.
Question for HR leaders:
Do your leaders receive enough meaningful feedback, reflection and support to understand how they show up under pressure – and what enables them to consistently perform at their best?
2. Leading Others
Leadership is fundamentally about creating the conditions in which other people can succeed.
Research on trust, motivation, strengths-based leadership and employee engagement consistently points in the same direction: people perform better when they feel trusted, respected, valued and connected to meaningful goals. What makes this particularly important is that trust and engagement cannot be taken for granted.
Despite decades of investment in leadership development, employee experience and workplace culture, global research continues to show that employee engagement remains surprisingly low in many organisations. Studies consistently find that significant numbers of employees are either disengaged or only partially engaged at work. Similarly, trust in leaders and institutions remains fragile and can be lost far more quickly than it is built.
For HR leaders, this sends a clear message: trust, engagement and commitment do not emerge automatically. They are outcomes of leadership.
In Aad’s experience, organisations often assume trust exists until it is tested. The reality is that trust is built through thousands of everyday leadership interactions. People pay close attention to whether leaders listen, communicate openly, act consistently, keep their commitments and genuinely care about the people they lead.
Many managers are promoted because they are excellent technical experts. However, expertise and leadership are not the same thing.
The skills that make someone successful as an individual contributor do not automatically prepare them to coach others, manage conflict, influence stakeholders, provide meaningful feedback or build trust.
Research from Gallup consistently shows that managers have a significant impact on employee engagement, performance and retention. In organisations already struggling to attract and retain talent, this matters enormously.
For HR leaders, the implication is clear. Leadership development should focus not only on what leaders know, but on how they behave every day. Communication. Listening. Feedback. Coaching. Influence. Trust-building. These are not soft skills. They are business skills.
Looking ahead, Aad believes these capabilities will become even more important as organisations continue to adopt AI and advanced technologies.
“As AI becomes more capable, the human side of leadership becomes more important, not less. Trust, judgement, communication and the ability to bring people together are becoming critical differentiators.”
Technology may transform how work gets done, but leaders will remain responsible for creating clarity, building trust and helping people navigate uncertainty.
Question for HR leaders:
Are your managers equipped to build trust, have difficult conversations and create clarity when uncertainty increases?
3. Leadership Is a Team Sport
For many years, leadership was often viewed through the lens of the individual leader. The vision, capability and decisions of one person were seen as the primary drivers of success. Today’s reality is different.
The challenges organisations face are increasingly complex, interconnected and cross-functional. Success depends less on individual brilliance and more on how effectively leadership teams work together.
In many organisations, the biggest barriers to performance are no longer technical. They are organisational. Competing priorities, silo thinking, poor collaboration and slow decision-making often limit performance far more than a lack of expertise.
Research by Amy Edmondson on psychological safety demonstrates that teams perform better when people feel safe to speak up, challenge assumptions and learn from mistakes. Google’s Project Aristotle reached a similar conclusion, identifying psychological safety as one of the most important characteristics of effective teams.
This is not simply about creating a positive environment. It is about improving decision quality, innovation, adaptability and organisational learning. In Aad’s experience, many leadership teams spend significant time together but do not necessarily lead together. High-performing leadership teams align around shared priorities, challenge each other’s thinking constructively, make decisions collectively and take ownership beyond their own function or department.
Having worked with leadership teams across industries and countries, Aad has observed that organisational success increasingly depends on collective leadership rather than individual leadership.
“Leadership is increasingly becoming a team sport. Individual leadership still matters, but organisational success depends more and more on how leadership teams work together.”
For HR leaders, this means leadership development should not focus only on individual leaders. It should also strengthen the quality of collaboration, communication and decision-making within leadership teams.
Question for HR leaders:
Are your leadership teams equipped to collaborate, make decisions and maintain trust when the pressure is high?
What This Means for HR Leaders
The science behind effective leadership has never been stronger.
We know more today about what makes leaders effective than at any point in history. Research has given us valuable insights into self-awareness, emotional intelligence, trust, engagement, psychological safety, team effectiveness and leadership development.
Yet many organisations still rely heavily on experience, seniority and trial-and-error to develop leadership capability. The challenge is no longer a lack of knowledge. The challenge is translating that knowledge into everyday leadership behaviour.
For HR leaders, this means moving beyond fragmented development initiatives and connecting leadership development directly to business strategy. That may include:
- Strengthening succession pipelines
- Developing more diverse leadership talent
- Preparing leaders for AI-enabled workplaces
- Supporting managers moving from technical expertise into leadership roles
- Building stronger collaboration across functions
- Increasing organisational resilience and adaptability
- Developing leadership teams that can lead together effectively
The most effective organisations recognise that leadership development is not simply an HR programme. It is a business capability. And like any strategic capability, it requires investment, focus and long-term commitment.
Research consistently shows that organisations with stronger leadership capability tend to outperform their peers in areas such as employee engagement, adaptability, execution and long-term performance. Increasingly, leadership capability is becoming a source of competitive advantage.
Leadership Requires Continuous Development
One of the clearest findings from leadership research is that effective leaders never stop learning.
Research on learning agility suggests that a leader’s ability to learn, adapt and apply new insights is one of the strongest predictors of future success. In a world shaped by AI, rapid technological change, shifting workforce expectations and increasing complexity, this capability is becoming more important than ever.
The organisations that thrive in the future will not necessarily be those with the best strategy. Increasingly, they will be those that can learn, adapt and evolve faster than the environment around them changes.
Leadership plays a critical role in making that happen.
Different leaders require different forms of development. Some benefit from broader business education and exposure to international perspectives. Others need to strengthen board-level thinking, executive presence, crisis leadership, negotiation skills or their ability to lead transformation.
At BMI Executive Institute, these leadership challenges are increasingly reflected in conversations with HR leaders, executives and boards across the Baltics and beyond. Some organisations are focused on strengthening succession pipelines. Others are preparing future executives, developing board-ready leaders or building stronger leadership teams. Increasingly, they are looking for practical ways to translate leadership science into everyday leadership practice.
Through executive education, coaching and customised leadership development programmes, BMI supports leaders and organisations in building the leadership capability required for long-term success.
The Leadership Opportunity
The research is compelling.
We know more today about what makes leaders effective than at any point in history. We understand far better how leaders build trust, engage people, create high-performing teams and navigate change.
Yet many organisations still rely heavily on experience, seniority and trial-and-error to develop leadership capability.
In Aad’s experience, the organisations that build strong leadership capability are rarely the ones with the most sophisticated leadership programmes. They are the ones that are clear about what great leadership looks like, consistent in how they develop it and deliberate in how they reinforce it. Many organisations say leadership matters. Far fewer apply the same discipline to leadership that they apply to financial performance, operational excellence or customer satisfaction. Yet leadership influences all three.
For HR leaders, this creates a significant opportunity – not simply to run leadership programmes, but to help shape the leadership capability of the organisation. Because leadership capability rarely becomes a competitive advantage by accident. It becomes a competitive advantage when organisations decide to build it.