Being an inspired leader is a skill to develop and an honour to hold. And with few exceptions, no one begins as an exceptional leader. Even Alan Mulally, best known for his executive roles at Ford Motor Company and Boeing, and one of my personal favourite leaders to study, is someone who nurtured and developed his leadership style over time.
Great leadership is a growth exercise that builds on the character and strengths each of us already have. That’s exactly why new leadership development matters more now than ever. Our workplaces are more multicultural, more multigenerational, and increasingly AI-enabled… and that raises the importance of preparing a new leader before they’re handed a team.
Successful organizations understand this. They intentionally invest in developing high-potential employees into authentic high-potential leaders who can lead with EQ. They do this because it is good business and because they know that their investment says, “We believe in and invest in our people” to everyone watching. And if they don’t invest, they’re still sending a message. It’s just not the one their investors want them to send.
So what does that investment look like? In my work with organizations, it begins with five practices that transform promising employees into the trusted leaders and who build a high-performing, collaborative team culture with a growth mindset.
Practice 1: Build The Bench Before You Need It
Developing new leaders isn’t a single goal, it’s two jobs at once. Job one is making sure you have people ready to lead when the organization or projects demands it. You don’t want to be scrambling to find them. Job two is that your effort tells potential leaders that you believe in them and that you are committed to their success and their future.
Practice 2: Separate Performance From Readiness
It’s no longer good enough to promote your best performer and hope leadership comes naturally. Sometimes it works, but most often it doesn’t because being an excellent subject-matter expert, or the best sales representative are entirely different skill sets than someone being ready to lead people through that same work. And this challenge is increasing in the AI-enabled workplace. The expertise that got someone noticed doesn’t automatically translate into the judgment, patience, and people-sense that leadership requires. If anything, AI is making that gap more visible.
Practice 3: Trade Ability For Agility
Organizational psychologist Adam Grant increasingly argues that the currency that matters most in today’s workplace isn’t ability — it’s agility: the capacity to adapt, stay curious, and keep learning rather than defend what you already know. That shift changes what “ready to lead” actually looks like. It’s less about who has mastered the job, and more about who has the confidence, humility, and adaptability to grow into leading people who also must expect change.
Practice 4: Start Inward Examining Self
As someone who teaches leadership development, I’d say the most important skill for any new — or existing — leader is self-awareness. It’s also often the most overlooked. For example, before leading others, a leader must know and accept why they want to lead in the first place. That’s the foundation everything else is built on. Once that reason is clear, a self-aware new or potential leader must also understand important personal and professional characteristics like their:
- Strengths
- Blind spots
- Managing Emotional Triggers
- Communication style
- Humility
- Integrity
- Values
When leaders can see these things clearly, they invest in their own growth with more patience, interest, and excitement. They start to see leadership development as growth, trial, mistakes, and more growth; an evolution versus a checkbox. That same clarity also makes it easier for new leaders to recognize, understand, and work with other people because they can now understand and relate to those characteristics. Leadership development must begin inward before it ever moves outward.
New leaders have to realize that they can’t lead others if they can’t lead themselves first.
Practice 5: Sequence The Growth Toward Strategy
The inward work mentioned in Practice 4 is also where the character-based skills that matter most in an AI-enabled workplace are trained. Only after a leader has done that self-work should they move on to more advanced ground like giving recognition, having difficult conversations, strategic thinking, organizational change, innovation, executive influence, building future leaders, AI-enabled leadership, and culture transformation. Inspired leadership starts with self-leadership, but running before learning to walk usually leads to frustration, for the leader and for the team. The organizations that get this right don’t skip steps; they sequence them.
In Closing
The best organizations don’t wait for leadership to happen. They invest in high-potential employees early, help them build a genuine foundation, and give them room to grow into authentic, confident, capable leaders that people actually want to follow. It’s a habit an organization commits to — and it starts with these five practices, well before anyone is asked to lead someone else.