Has ‘Leadership Potential’ Gone the Way of the Dinosaur?

Over the past few decades, job listings typically included that the employer was looking for someone with “leadership potential.” But is that changing?

Well, consider Resume.org’s recent survey of U.S. hiring managers about their 2026 hiring plans, which showed leadership potential lagging in eighth place on the rankings of organizations’ most desired candidate skills. According to the career tools website’s poll, just 21% of respondents put leadership potential as one of their top-three must-haves or should-haves, falling behind:

• Problem-solving skills (54%)
• The ability to quickly learn new skills and technology (44%)
• Communication skills (43%)
• Adaptability (39%)
• Collaboration or teamwork (36%)
• Hard skills specific to the role (33%)
• Familiarity with artificial intelligence (AI) tools (31%)

“For decades, organizations equated leadership with executive presence, charisma, decisiveness and tenure,” said Kara Dennison, Resume.org’s head of career advising.

In some ways, leadership was viewed as an innate, intangible mystique, or je ne sais quoi.

“Those traits still matter, but they’re no longer what makes the cut, especially in a market defined by simultaneous hiring and layoffs,” she said.

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Leadership Isn’t Extinct — It’s Evolving

The Resume.org data doesn’t necessarily mean employers are no longer looking for leadership skills. Rather, experts point to an evolving view of leadership that better reflects today’s unique workforce needs. And in fact, many of the skills hiring managers prioritized in the recent survey resonate with the modern take on leadership.

“Traditional views of leadership potential haven’t disappeared; they’ve evolved,” Dennison said. “In today’s environment, leadership is less about hierarchy and more about influence, alignment and resilience.”

In the past, managers, supervisors and other leaders were often tapped for those roles because they had excelled in their previous roles — but those technical skills don’t always translate to the ability to lead. In some cases, individuals may have stepped into those roles because it was expected — without ever actually having the desire to fill them, which is rarely a recipe for success, said Rosey Rhyne, a senior research manager at DDI’s Center for Analytics and Behavioral Research, a leadership consulting firm.

According to Dennison and Rhyne, the ingredients and behaviors of leadership today include:

• Adaptability
• Change readiness
• The ability to stabilize teams during restructuring
• Transparent communication
• Learning agility and curiosity
• The capacity to learn new technology and mentor teams through tech shifts
• Emotional intelligence, empathy and trust building

“It’s about maintaining strong relationships and using those trusting relationships to drive business outcomes,” Rhyne said. “It isn’t just about assigning work.”

The emotional intelligence aspects of this new leadership model are essential, said Anne Grady, an adaptability expert, TEDx speaker and author of the book EvolvAbility. She noted that leaders who are strongly self-aware tend to have higher-performing teams, with a foundation of trust and psychological safety.

An adaptable mindset also is a vital tool for today’s leaders, Grady noted.

“Leaders with a fixed mindset look for people who have the exact set of skills needed for the current role they’re trying to fill,” she said. “But by the year 2030, 40% of those skills are going to change. You’re not trying to find the people with perfect skills. [Instead, it should be a focus on] the people who are willing to do the hard things to learn the skills in the moment.”

The Bones of Leadership Going Forward

What’s necessitating these leadership style changes? Rhyne and Dennison pointed to volatile and shifting work environments, the barrage of new workplace technologies, economic uncertainty and market shifts, hybrid workforces and multi-generational teams, rising burnout and disengagement, and eroding internal bench strength.

Increased employee expectations of transparency and flexibility are playing a role as well. Some Generation Z workers, in particular, have indicated that while they may not be interested in traditional frontline leadership, they do prioritize autonomy, work-life balance, personal well-being and having a strong leader to report to, Rhyne said.

“If they do not have strong leadership,” she explained, “they’re more likely to say, ‘I don’t want to be a leader, and I don’t even want to be here. I’d rather leave and find another opportunity.’”

For HR and total rewards (TR) leaders, today’s leadership landscape carries several important takeaways:

• Leadership potential is not an innate talent — it’s a skill that can be taught, developed and practiced.
• Rewards programs, internal development pipelines and workforce planning must evolve to reward these recalibrated behaviors and skills.

“We have to promote people not just based on seniority or title, or because they’ve come in through another part of the organization, but based on performance and how they impact people as work is getting done,” Grady said. “Some performance reviews are shifting to not just be about core competencies but also the behaviors that reflect them. Someone might deliver a great result, but if they’re difficult to work with, misread people and create friction along the way, that matters just as much as the outcome itself.”

Editor’s Note: Additional Content

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