4 leadership trends you’ll regret ignoring

Unlike changes in fashion, leadership trends quickly become standards. From the deployment of AI and data-driven insights to the protection of teams’ mental health and the valuing of diversity, equity, and inclusion in hiring practices, absorbing critical shifts today can help your small business thrive tomorrow.

So, whether your feet are clad in platform sneakers or penny loafers, pointing them toward these 4 key leadership trends can help ensure your company leads the charge into the future.

Leadership Trend #1: The Rise of AI-Driven Decision-Making

In the late 1970s, then-15-year-old Severin Sorensen was tapped to study the nascent field of computer science at the University of Utah. While fascinated by the endless possibilities that computing held, Sorensen decided to pursue his dreams of playing Major League Baseball in college and largely walked away from tech until 2022, when he was introduced to ChatGPT.

This time, Severin wasn’t going to shut the door on the unfolding future. He dived deep into AI, becoming a well-known “AI whisperer,” and today he helps companies leverage AI to advance their businesses.

“How many times in life do you get a second shot?” says Sorensen, CEO of ePraxis, author of five books on AI and a frequent Vistage speaker.
Sorensen’s advice for leaders who want to leverage AI in decision-making can be divided into three pillars: embrace it strategically, allow it to inform your leadership and learn more about it.

Implement AI strategically

Adopting AI in business is not enough. Like any tool, it must be deployed strategically to enhance human decision-making. Decide what you want AI to accomplish, what specific tools will help you get there and who should be in the driver’s seat, running the queries (Hint: it should be a human).

For example, Sorensen created AI tools to help clients create job descriptions that pull from the entire internet’s worth of resources. He trained AI to generate precise compensation analyses, develop targeted interview questions and identify competitive market positioning. By deploying AI in this way, Sorensen’s clients are able to enhance the decision-making that goes into recruiting the right candidate.

Evolve your leadership

Sorensen dismisses any “robots will replace us” thinking as nonsense that can paralyze progress. The real threat to job security lies in failing to evolve one’s leadership to take advantage of new tools and failing to see technological shifts as opportunities.

“One of the last things that will be automated will be the role of the CEO. There’s so much that a great CEO can do with new information,” he says. “The CEO is the sculptor and visionary for their company.”

Leverage your network to build AI acumen

According to Sorensen, Vistage is the ideal training ground for leaders who want to leverage AI. Besides the peer advisory groups, expert-led workshops and networks to share best practices, Vistage provides another key advantage.

“It comes down to questions,” says Sorensen, a former Vistage Chair. “In a peer group, we do not allow people to give answers before we have percolated. Only after we define the question properly do we start building out additional questions and then get to an answer. It is the same with AI. If we ask a question that is the wrong question, it’s off and running to give us some material. But if I ask it a better question, it’s better aligned to help me.”

Leadership Trend #2: The Importance of Mental Health and Well-Being

As a pastor of a large church, Mitch Harrison was in the people-care business. But the one person he didn’t take care of well was himself.

“I ran into my own season of burnout several years ago, where I did the classic crash and burn, six months of recovery, counseling, all the stuff to get it back together,” Harrison says.

When he emerged from his journey, Harrison, who is now a Vistage speaker and business coach, decided to use his experience to help others avoid the same fate. Today, Harrison advises business leaders about the critical role mental health plays in the overall health of organizations.

The topic can seem ambiguous — “squishy” in Harrison’s own words — but he explains that mental health is a critical leadership priority, one with demonstrable ROI and clear steps to employ.

Prioritize and model well-being

“People do well when the culture of the leadership and the culture of the organization are bent in the direction of wanting to help,” says Harrison.

With this in mind, Harrison warns that companies sometimes conflate “culture” with “compliance,” pointing to “use it or lose it” vacation policies as an example.

The goal of such policies is benevolent: to encourage people to take time off for themselves. But the practice may be punitive. Instead, Harrison recommends turning off the corner office lights every now and then, as “modelling creates culture.”

Find the strategies that work for you

“Talk to your employees, ask them how they’re doing,” Harrison says. “Find some of your best people, and invite them into conversations around this.”

From these conversations, Harrison suggests using a five-part framework to develop mental health strategies:

1. Ask and listen. Harrison says that when a wellness officer asked employees of a large company, “What is burning you out?” The top answer was, “Emails from senior leaders on Friday night and Saturday morning.” That simple query led to a transformative policy change.

2. Address toxic co-workers. “You may have relative health across the rest of your organization. But if a supervisor is toxic, their employees will view the company as toxic,” Harrison says.

3. Ensure people have a sense of purpose. Everyone wants to matter, and in a workplace, that translates into understanding how their work contributes to the organization’s outcomes.

4. Provide training to keep people motivated. This helps communicate that the organization values their advancement.

5. Keep it fun. This doesn’t mean installing a skateboard ramp in the conference room. “It’s about the tone of the organization,” he says. “Do people enjoy coming to work here?”

Reap the benefits

A recent Gallup study found that if the world’s workplace were fully engaged, $9.6 trillion in productivity would be added to the global economy.

“The number one place where organizational capacity gets left on the table is around this issue of wellness. You want an organization full of people who show up at their very best,” he says. “When you have an organization full of people like that, they will beat any company full of burned-out people every time.”

Harrison says Vistage can help here. By providing peer groups, speakers and tools to create supportive work environments, Vistage empowers leaders to prioritize mental health and wellness and reap the benefits.

Leadership Trend #3: Flexibility in Leadership for Hybrid and Remote Work

Kathleen Quinn Votaw became a mother the same year she was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. It was the highest of highs, the lowest of lows — and the worst possible situation for her and for her employer.

“I was an awful employee at the time,” says Quinn Votaw, who today is the Founder and CEO of KQV Speaks and TalenTrust, a strategic recruiting and consulting company. “My employers were all men. They were scared to talk about it. They didn’t know what to do with me, and in the end, I was fired. And they were right to fire me.”

Quinn Votaw says the disconnect between an employee’s needs and an employer’s expectations can create an unnecessarily adversarial environment — and these days, that disconnect seems ever present in the conversation about in-person, hybrid and remote work expectations.

We have not seen the conclusion of this ongoing workplace evolution. Leaders need to adopt empathy, creativity and flexibility to stay competitive in these changing times.

Grow your understanding

“The key to leading in the new way we work is understanding the definition of flexibility from the perspective of every single person in the organization, including vendors and customers,” says Quinn Votaw, who is also a speaker and Vistage sponsor. “It’s an ecosystem.”

This doesn’t mean everyone gets what they want, but at least everyone has a voice.

“One large company I know of is now losing employees because they shifted their hybrid policy from three days a week in the office to four days a week,” Quinn Votaw says. “Even for employees who can accommodate the change, the fact that they didn’t at least have a conversation with employees made those employees feel undervalued. And they are leaving.”

Grow your creativity

Quinn Votaw worked with married founders of a company who wanted to retire. The couple selected a new president who lived out of state and stayed on for a full year, sharing the role with the new leader, as he alternated weekly between working remotely and working onsite.

This allowed the new president and his family to start a new life in the new state slowly and more successfully.

“They honored the family and what they needed, and didn’t just say, ‘You start March 1. You can go home on weekends. Good luck,” she says. “They designed a solution together, and everybody won.”

Grow your curiosity

While it is true that there is no playbook for the shift in expectations and needs of the modern workforce, the playbook is being written every day. Quinn Votaw says Vistage has its finger on the pulse of emerging leadership trends.

“Joe [Galvin] and Anne [Petrik] run a Resource Center that is second to none,” Quinn Votaw says. “It is highly leverageable. So, if you have a question, I’d go there first.”

Quinn Votaw has taken her own advice, crediting Vistage’s resources, speakers and peer support with her success as an author, speaker and CEO. As she says, “The sum of us is stronger than any one of us. So, don’t go it alone.”

Leadership Trend #4: Data-Driven Leadership

Data has emerged as a key business tool, providing insights that direct Uber drivers toward high-demand areas and determine your next favorite specialty latte at Starbucks.

Don’t know where to start looking for data to make smarter, faster leadership decisions? Peter Celeste has a fail-safe recommendation about which platform to choose: The one you’ll use.

“Most software today has dashboarding built right into it. So an easy place to start is to leverage the dashboarding functionality of existing systems,” says Celeste, a frequent Vistage speaker and business advisor.

Celeste came to his expertise in data-driven leadership organically. While heading a digital marketing company, he decided to break down data into its simplest terms to identify his KPIs. The results not only helped the company but also illuminated for Celeste the power of data to simplify the complicated, identify problems, and then solve them.

Today, Celeste advises companies about tools and techniques leaders can employ to leverage data effectively and efficiently. An expert in breaking down data into key, actionable pieces, Celeste offers the following advice:

Stay curious

“You don’t need to be a math whiz or anything like that. You just need to have a healthy curiosity for the numbers and understand how they interplay across different aspects of your business,” he says.

The data you are probably already gathering will reveal patterns and leadership trends that might challenge (or validate) your gut feelings. This, in turn, helps identify opportunities for efficiency and profitability.

“You can go through every single functional area and identify a handful of really important productivity or efficiency metrics to determine how any given team is working,” he says. “And when you start to leverage those insights, that’s when data starts to become really powerful, because not only are your teams becoming more efficient, you’re also identifying opportunities.”

Measure what matters

Where companies get tripped up is in understanding which activities truly drive business value. To avoid this trap, filter data through the lens of your business goals. This will help determine which of the mountains of numbers deserve your attention.

For example, Celeste consulted for a large general contractor that had been focused on earning new business. Using nothing more than the company’s Excel spreadsheets, he discovered that 45% of the jobs accounted for 3% of the revenue. This uncovered opportunities to grow revenue, reallocate resources and improve customer experience.

“They were able to stop doing the small stuff and start focusing on the high-value stuff,” he says. “Data was able to give them really valuable insights.”

Leverage all your resources, including Vistage

Perhaps it’s unsurprising that a data guy recommends harnessing data to inform business decisions, but Celeste advises leaders to talk with and learn from as many other professionals as they can.

As a Vistage member, Celeste leaned on his network for advice on managing a software development team, something he says he knew nothing about.

“My Vistage Chair was able to introduce me to people from the technology sector who were very generous with their time and helped me learn how to manage the team and determine their productivity and efficiency,” he says. “With Vistage, you can do that for any given function, because people come from so many different backgrounds.”

Prete-A-Travailler

The business world may not strut its latest leadership trends on a Parisian runway, but the evidence of what fits our times — and what will shape tomorrow — is evident in everything from hiring decisions to customer experience.

Staying competitive in today’s landscape means embracing these key shifts in leadership practices, including the rise of AI-driven decision-making, the importance of mental health support, and the growing role of data in making smarter decisions.

Through Vistage’s culture of continuous learning, small and midsize business leaders can stay ahead of these trends with the help of peer advisory groups, resources and expert guidance, giving them the confidence to walk into any room sporting today’s latest trends and setting tomorrow’s leadership trends.

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