The Future Leadership Skills Leaders Need Most

The Future Leadership Skills Leaders Want, and the Ones They Overlook

The Leadership Development Priorities Leaders Rank Highest

Future leadership skills are the capabilities leaders say they will need most over the next three years. And leaders know exactly what they want to be ready for. Driving innovation tops their list of skills to develop over the next three years at 40%, followed by managing change (39%) and setting strategy (38%). Identifying and developing future talent (33%), leading through ambiguity (33%), and coaching others (32%) round out the top six.

None of these is a request to get better at the current job. These skills enable a leader to move an organization somewhere it hasn't been: seeing what's coming, charting a path, and having the right people ready when they arrive. Leaders are defining future-ready leadership as the capacity to navigate disruption. The signal appeared in DDI's Global Leadership Forecast 2025, where 83% of HR professionals predicted a surge in the need for new leadership capabilities within five years. Setting strategy, managing change, and identifying and developing future talent ranked among the most critical and least developed skills. Two years on, leaders are naming the same capabilities themselves.

The list leaves out what makes those capabilities work. Change lands or fails on communication. Strategy executes on trust. Every skill at the top of this list rests on one near the bottom. 

Future Skills Demand No Longer Follows the Org Chart

Even more surprising: driving innovation, managing change, and setting strategy rank in the top three for every leader level, from individual contributors through the C-suite.

That convergence has been building for years. When leadership careers climbed a predictable ladder, development followed the same order: fundamentals first, strategic responsibilities later. But that’s no longer how the work is shaped. More recently, AI has opened the leadership role to far more people, who now scope work, hand it off, review outputs, and decide whether it is good enough to use. That’s leadership behavior without the title. And constant volatility has made strategy and change everyone’s problem, whether they own the decisions or not. 

Those shifts show up in what leaders say they need. Today, the person with no direct reports is naming the same three needs as the person running the enterprise.

The person with no direct reports is naming the same three needs as the person running the enterprise.

Leaders Rank Essential Interpersonal Skills Last

The bottom of the skills list is entirely interpersonal. Empathy ranks last of 15 capabilities at 17%. Building trust (21%), communication (21%), and resolving conflict (23%) sit just above it.

The skills at the top and the skills at the bottom aren’t equivalent units. The interpersonal skills are components that make more complex skills work. Leaders want to lead change, but change lands or fails on communication. They want to set strategy, but strategy executes on trust. They want to drive innovation, but innovation only surfaces when people feel safe enough to raise a half-formed idea. The capabilities leaders rank last are the delivery system for the ones they rank first.

Leaders may believe they have already mastered these skills or that these skills matter less in an AI-shaped future. Interpersonal skills may also feel so familiar that they don't register as requiring development. Another reading may be likeliest. These skills may not seem unimportant so much as deprioritized, reflecting what leaders hear from above.

Leaders are overwhelmed and do not have time to focus on people leadership responsibilities.

HR Leader, Financial Services

Whatever the reason, the leaders that organizations are betting on actually do spend their time investing in people. High-potential leaders report 9 hours per week coaching and developing their teams, compared with 7 hours for leaders not identified as high potential. Over a year, that’s more than 100 additional hours. Leaders being groomed for what's next do the work everyone else ranks last.

The Skills HR Prioritizes

Communicating effectively is the most widely developed capability across organizations today, at 87%. Looking out three years, HR's priorities top out between 85% and 88% for managing change, identifying and developing future talent, driving innovation, setting strategy, leveraging AI effectively, and communicating effectively. The steepest planned increase is leveraging AI, up 25 percentage points, followed by fostering AI adoption, leading through ambiguity, and critical thinking, each up 18 to 20 percentage points.

Compared with everything else on HR's list, essential interpersonal skills sit near the bottom. Among the 15 capabilities, HR ranks empathy 13th and resolving conflict last for three-year investment, even though both remain at 70% or above. 

So, this isn't a case of HR seeing what leaders miss. Both groups rank essential interpersonal skills behind almost everything else.

Nearly Every Leader Is Worried About Becoming Obsolete

Eighty-seven percent of leaders have some degree of concern that their skills are becoming less relevant. Right now, leadership is being carried out by people who are not sure their skills will still count.

But that worry pushes leaders further toward what they already wanted. As concern rises, so does appetite for development, steadily, across all 15 capabilities. Leaders who fear becoming obsolete are reaching toward leadership capability, not away from it. In an environment where much of the commentary says the answer is technical reskilling, leaders are asking for leadership development.

In an environment where a great deal of commentary says the answer is technical reskilling, leaders are asking for leadership development.

But fear of becoming obsolete is not a harmless motivator. Leaders who are definitely concerned their skills are becoming less relevant are 1.3X more likely to often feel used up at the end of the day, and 5.1X more likely to report a definite intention to leave their organization. Even as most leaders are staying put, those who fear their skills are slipping are not. The leaders most eager for development are also the most likely to leave if they don’t get it. 

Future-ready leadership is not a choice between strategic and interpersonal capability. One doesn't work without the other. To build effective future leaders, organizations need to diagnose where leaders actually stand, make the case for interpersonal skills, and build those skills into the strategic programs leaders are already asking for.

Four capabilities sit at each end of the leaders' skills list: the strategic ones they rank highest and the interpersonal ones they rank lowest. Only 28% of organizations invest in all eight. The ones that do see it in their results. Compared with organizations that do not invest in all eight, their HR leaders report an 80% higher rate of overall leader quality. They are also 2.1X more likely to expect a strong leadership bench three years out and estimate that 52% of critical leadership roles could be filled internally today, compared with 42% in organizations that don’t.

Future-ready leadership is not a choice between strategic and interpersonal capability. One doesn't work without the other. 

1. Diagnose with objective assessment.

Leaders say they want development, and they mean it. Eighty-seven percent are worried enough about their own relevance to ask for more. What they can’t say reliably is where they need it most.

Objective assessment closes that gap. For example, simulations put leaders in realistic scenarios where they must use their skills under pressure and get feedback on how they performed. Simulations work because leaders experience the shortfall in a safe space to learn. A leader who watches a change conversation go sideways in a simulation doesn't need to be persuaded that communication is a gap because they’ve just seen it.

2. Make the case with data you already have.

Before asking leaders to develop a skill they don't believe they need, show them what its absence costs. Engagement and retention data usually carry that story, and most organizations already have it. Look at the relationship between manager behavior and engagement scores, and between team-level trust and regretted attrition. Pay particular attention to high-potential talent, where a weak manager relationship is most expensive.

3. Anchor interpersonal skills in your competency model.

Skills that aren't written down are optional. If communication, trust, and empathy don't appear in your leadership competencies, success profiles, or promotion criteria, leaders will read the signal and treat them as nice-to-haves. Embedding them where capability is defined and measured changes what leaders understand the job requires.

Only 28% of organizations invest in strategic and interpersonal skills.

4. Put executives in front of the business case.

Leaders take their cue from the top. When executives name these capabilities as business-critical, they stop reading as an HR initiative. The case is strongest when they also name the cost: the strategy that stalls, the change that never takes hold, the high performer who leaves.

5. Build essential interpersonal skills into strategic programs.

Leaders who would never take an empathy course will sign up for a strategy course. This provides a practical opening. Build the interpersonal work into the programs leaders are already asking for, rather than running it as a separate track. A change leadership program is, in practice, a communication and trust program, and it fails without the empathy to work through resistance. A strategy program is an influencing and alignment program. When you teach interpersonal capability as the mechanism that makes the strategic one work, leaders don't have to be convinced it matters first. They discover it in the context they already care about.

6. Start earlier than the org chart suggests.

Individual contributors and frontline managers are naming strategy, innovation, and change as their top development needs. Organizations that reserve those capabilities for senior levels are withholding development from a population that is asking for it, at exactly the moment the bench is thinnest. This does not mean giving everyone executive training. It means recognizing that the demand for future leadership competencies now runs the full depth of the organization. Build entry points that meet it early.