Has Leadership Become a Lost Art?
When I think about this question, I find myself going back more than four decades to my first career in radio in Sydney, Australia.
I landed the job almost by chance. My mother heard an advertisement on the radio for an administrative assistant in the sales department and told me about it. Australia was in a recession; jobs were hard to find. I’d just completed four years at university, and I desperately wanted that opportunity.
The station itself was taking an enormous risk. We were the first in Australia to adopt an all-news format. It took four years to steadily build an audience from the bottom of the ratings and eventually reach number one in the Sydney market.
It was an exciting place to be, and I loved coming to work. But all the parties and reaching number one isn’t what I remember most vividly.
It’s the leadership.
The Leader I Still Remember
The head of the station was one of the most gifted relationship-builders I have ever encountered. He knew approximately 150 employees by name. He would regularly sit down beside me and ask how I was doing. We didn’t always talk about work. He was genuinely interested in me as a person.
I was young and relatively junior, yet he made me feel that I mattered.
Throughout my early career, I encountered other leaders who had that same ability. They inspired me, asked great questions and made it clear that our contribution was valued.
And, of course, I experienced the opposite: leaders who rarely listened, showed little interest in their people and seemed unaware of the impact they were having.
Decades later, I remember both.
People may forget what their leaders said or did. They rarely forget how they were made to feel.
Perhaps that’s part of what makes leadership an art. So, has leadership become a lost art? Maybe not. But some of the qualities that make leadership meaningful — trust, connection, authenticity and a genuine understanding of people’s experiences — seem harder to find.
The Contradiction We’re Living With
Organizations around the world spend billions of dollars every year developing leaders. We have more leadership research, training, coaching, models and technology at our disposal than previous generations could ever have imagined.
Yet Gallup’s global workplace research found that only 21% of employees worldwide are engaged at work, while 17% are actively disengaged. Gallup estimated that the decline in employee engagement cost the global economy US$438 billion in lost productivity in 2024.
With all this investment and knowledge, why aren’t we seeing better results? Four factors are worth examining.
Four Factors Worth Examining
1. Leadership is revealed through behaviour. Ultimately, people form their view of leadership through their everyday interactions with their leader. They notice whether someone listens and follows through, whether people are trusted to make decisions and whether a leader takes responsibility when something goes wrong. Leadership development can build capability, but the real test is how that learning translates into behaviour. My leader at the radio station probably had no idea that more than 40 years later I would remember him sitting beside my desk and asking how I was doing. Sometimes the smallest leadership behaviours have the longest-lasting impact.
2. What people expect from leaders has changed. The pandemic accelerated a shift that was already underway. People reconsidered their relationship with work, their priorities and what they expected from employers. Remote and hybrid work also changed how people connect, communicate and build relationships. At the same time, leaders are navigating relentless change, economic uncertainty, technological disruption, AI, workforce shortages, restructuring and pressure to do more with less. The challenge is staying connected to their people while managing enormous pressures of their own. People don’t expect their leaders to have every answer. They do expect them to communicate, listen, explain decisions, acknowledge uncertainty, take ownership and demonstrate that the people doing the work matter.
3. Trust is earned every day. Employees are continually assessing whether their leaders’ actions match their words. Can I believe what I’m being told? Will my leader follow through? Will I hear the truth when the news isn’t good? Will this person stand behind a difficult decision? People pay attention to what happens when circumstances become difficult — those moments reveal a great deal about a leader. Trust is built or lost through everyday interactions, decisions and conversations.
4. People want a reason to believe. Gallup’s global research into what people need from leaders offers a fascinating answer. After studying people across more than 50 countries, Gallup identified four universal needs: hope, trust, compassion and stability. Hope accounted for 56% of all attributes people associated with the leaders who had the greatest positive influence on their lives. Trust followed at 33%. In an era dominated by conversations about disruption, transformation, technology and speed, people are asking something much more fundamental of those who lead them: Can I trust you? And can you help me believe that we can move forward?
Conclusion
Maybe the art of leadership was never really lost. The world has changed enormously since that photograph of me was taken at my desk in a Sydney radio station. Leadership has become more complex. Work has become faster. Technology has transformed how we communicate. Expectations have changed.
Yet what people need most from their leaders may not have changed nearly as much as we think. They want to know that they matter. They want to be heard. They want leaders they can trust. They want to understand where they’re going and why. And they want reason to believe in what is possible.
Leadership hasn’t become a lost art. Perhaps some of its most important practices simply need to be rediscovered.
Forty years from now, what will the people you lead remember about you?