The latest leadership trends for 2024 focus on empathy, emotional intelligence, compassionate leadership, health and wellbeing, equality and diversity. By embracing these trends, leaders can create a positive work environment, build strong relationships with employees and contribute to the success of their organisations.

In my opinion these should not just be trends but a long-lasting choice on how to lead a company. When we recruit leaders, we not only conduct in-depth interviews, but we also do extensive personal assessments and reference checks. Through in-depth interviews, we get to know the leader better, and personal assessments tell us more about them.

It is difficult to be a leader today, at least a leader of people, without strong emotional intelligence and compassion and an understanding of the importance of diversity.

Good leadership is usually based on soft, social skills. We still need strong strategic skills, an understanding of numbers, the ability to analyse and sub-skills. But identifying and developing potential leaders has never been more important.

A degree of uncertainty has spread throughout the industry and the world. So, we need leaders who understand what it takes emotionally to navigate the storm, and how to help those around them do the same. That doesn't mean keeping your head up and your lips stiff. In fact, quite the opposite. It means cultivating the emotional intelligence and high-level interpersonal skills to enable others to face challenges in a healthy way - and companies need to guide their high-potential leaders on their journey.

High-potential leaders are those who have the ability, aspiration, and engagement to take on higher-level roles and challenges in the future. We help your company to find those HIPO-leaders. We help you to assess potential, design development plans, create opportunities to them and help you to monitor their progress. High-potential leaders four dimensions are strategy, organisation, culture and skills.

We can help you by finding the right HIPO-leader and help this new person to fill all expectations by giving FIRST100 onboarding and mentoring support.

At Birn+Partners, we help leaders to achieve their goals. We offer a wide range of different programmes to do this. Only around half of leaders are getting effective onboarding, and mentoring and coaching is a rarity.

Written by Mona-Maria Ilola, Managing Director, Birn+Partners Finland