A future-ready leader puts people at the centre of the business: The executives and employees who carry a strategy and make it work. If you lead successfully today, you secure tomorrow's success by hiring good people and by keeping a culture of equals in your leadership team.
Being a future-ready leader means leading beyond the current financial year. You connect today's performance with a harder question: Which people and which attitudes will the company need in five or ten years?
The starting point is a set of questions senior executives have been asking me for years. I wrote about them in a German magazine article, «Leader für die Zukunft» (Leaders for the future), in HERO MAGAZINE in 2019.
What makes a strong leadership team? Do we need new leadership? Why do well-positioned leadership teams fail? And how can leadership teams secure their standing and success, today and in the years ahead?
Senior executives face these questions daily, usually between two meetings and rarely in peace. If you follow them seriously, you almost always end up with people and with the culture inside your own leadership circle.
Some challenges in top management can only be solved when the focus is on the people in the company. The same applies to executing strategy. A strategy is only as good as the people who carry it out on a Tuesday afternoon.
That's why recruiting strong executives and talented young people belongs at the top of the leadership agenda. Whom a leadership team hires and promotes says more about its future than any strategy paper.
What employees can really achieve often shows only with the right amount of appreciation and recognition from senior leaders. I mean specific attention to contributions that would otherwise disappear in day-to-day business.
In my experience, well-positioned teams often fail because of their own success. What worked for ten years becomes routine, and hardly anyone in the room questions that routine anymore.
Then there's a pattern I see in many executive boards: Each member defends their own area, and mainly the CEO feels responsible for the whole. How individuals turn into a team is the subject of Team collaboration: How individuals become a leadership team.
This is exactly where a future-ready leader comes in. A successful team needs the discipline to test its own assumptions before the market forces it to.
If you want your leadership skills to hold up in the coming years, build a leadership culture at eye level. Such a culture invites self-reflection and big-picture thinking. Strategies then tend to come from the people who will deliver them.
At eye level means: Arguments count, whoever makes them. Team research has a name for the underlying condition. In 1999, Amy Edmondson described psychological safety, the belief that you won't be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes (overview: Psychological safety).
Without that safety, self-reflection stays an exercise on paper. With it, bad news reaches the table earlier, and leadership still has options when it reacts.
Why people follow a clear why, especially in uncertain times, is the topic of Purpose in leadership.
I often hear the call for «new leadership» when a company comes under pressure. My impression from mandates: A large part of the answer almost always sits within the existing team. Leaders who examine their own behaviour and their collaboration often gain more than a change at the top would bring.
New people bring new perspectives. Even so, they rarely break a pattern that grows inside the team, because after a few months newcomers usually adopt the team's unwritten rules.
For me, being future-ready is mostly a matter of habit. Teams that regularly make time to talk about their collaboration and their assumptions tend to react earlier to change. That's how successful leadership becomes even more successful, usually quietly and without a big programme.
My position: Future-ready leaders question their own recipes for success while things are still going well. In a crisis there's rarely time for it.
I do object to the extreme. If you only talk about the future, you lose sight of the business in front of you. A leadership team that opens every meeting with megatrends and misses its quarterly targets burns the trust it needs for any change.
A future-ready leader secures today's results while building the people and the culture the company will need tomorrow. At the core are good people and a leadership team that argues and decides as equals.
A good test is the last big assumption your team deliberately dropped. If that was years ago, an honest look is worth it. A second signal: Bad news reaches the executive board late or only by detour.
An outside view makes patterns visible that a team hardly notices itself. With clients, I agree concrete, measurable goals for this, for example with 360-degree feedback at the start and at the end. On request, I work on a pay-for-results basis.
Further reading on hofmann.coach: Leadership team development · Leadership lives in the minds of those you lead · Crisis leadership: How leadership teams lead out of a crisis
Note: This article was first published on 3 November 2022 and was revised and expanded in October 2026. It also draws on a German article from 14 November 2019. Both referred to my article «Leader für die Zukunft» in HERO MAGAZINE.
Cristian Hofmann is an executive coach in Zurich and Schaffhausen (MAS Coaching & Supervision BSO, Forbes contributor). Over more than 20 years he has coached more than 1,500 leaders: CEOs, executive boards and leadership teams in Switzerland, with measurably agreed goals and, on request, pay-for-results. More about Cristian Hofmann.
This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Learn more
