Do you remember when you first heard the term ‘polycrisis’? The idea that anyone would need to have a strategy to manage a crisis – other than assigning a fire warden or providing personal leave to employees – was not something most organisations thought about prior to the pandemic.
If there’s a crisis, we’ll deal with it, was the general sentiment.
But what happens when not one, but multiple events or major unprecedented changes occur concurrently? “A problem becomes a crisis when it challenges our ability to cope and thus threatens our identity. In the polycrisis the shocks are disparate, but they interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts.” (Adam Tooze, ‘Welcome to the world of the polycrisis’, Financial Times, 29/10/22).
By the end of 2024, 79% of CEOs will have their post crisis business strategy (Gartner). They know that’s important – because their number one priority for 2025, according to Gartner research – is growth.
But there’s a critical disconnect: while CEOs focus on growth (62%), technology (33%), and workforce (27%), they may be missing the fundamental engine that powers all three.
The Growth Paradox
Today’s CEOs are navigating a complex paradox, one where they must aggressively pursue technological advancements and digital transformations to stay competitive, while simultaneously committing to sustainability and ethical practices to meet the growing demands of stakeholders. They are expected to lead with an innovative mindset that embraces remote and flexible work cultures, ensures meaningful customer and employee experiences, and drives significant business growth through strategic mergers and transformative thinking.
And yet HR leaders are seeing a different picture. Leadership overwhelm, cultural disconnection, change fatigue, burnout… When leaders set their sights on growth through transformation or the deployment of advanced AI models for example, there’s a cost paid at the people level.
In considering your strategies for the next five years, consider this: culture and leadership are enablers rather than barriers to growth.
The Reality Check
Look at CEOs’ top 3 priorities for 2025, with a people and culture lens.
1. Growth vs Culture Gap
- While CEOs are heavily focused on growth (62%), they may be underestimating how critical organisational culture and leadership capability are to enabling that growth
- HR leaders see culture and leadership development as their top priorities, suggesting they’re seeing challenges at the execution level that may not be visible to CEOs
2. Technology Implementation Reality
- Technology ranks second for CEOs (33%) but fifth for HR leaders
- HR leaders are seeing firsthand the change fatigue and implementation challenges, particularly around AI and digital transformation
- This could indicate a disconnect between technological aspirations and organisational readiness
3. Workforce Planning Depth
- While workforce appears in CEOs’ top 3 (27%), the research shows only 15% of organisations practice strategic workforce planning
- This suggests CEOs may recognise workforce as a priority but underestimate the strategic complexity and transformation required
- Consider (from Gartner):
- Only 23% of employees report high cultural embeddedness
- 75% of managers feel overwhelmed
- Only 15% of organisations practice strategic workforce planning
If growth is the number one priority, what is the cost to that growth when you place culture at the bottom of the list?
What’s Working?
We work with hundreds of leaders across a range of sectors, from a range of diverse backgrounds. One of the key themes we saw emerge in 2024 is that leaders are increasingly recognising the importance of relational trust over traditional top-down authority. Rather than focusing solely on control, leaders who are successful today understand that trust must be built through connection, vulnerability, and shared purpose. Effective leaders are not afraid to admit they don’t have all the answers; they prioritise listening and engaging with people at all levels of the organisation.
This shift requires leaders to unlearn the conventional wisdom that they must have all the answers or that they should maintain an authoritative, omniscient presence. Instead, leaders must embrace uncertainty, create environments where dialogue and collaboration are central, and trust their teams to innovate and solve problems collectively. They are also unlearning the myth of the heroic leader, understanding that true leadership emerges through community and interdependence rather than individual brilliance.
(For more, see Margaret Wheatly’s book Turning to One Another.)
Recognising relational trust and building it are two separate things. Organisations such as Vetassess, Armidale Regional Council and others, have actively invested in this. Not just at the top levels, but all the way to frontline staff – educating, bringing everyone together, owning culture as one.
What we see now in these organisations is that constructive leadership is being modelled from the bottom up, holding leaders to account, reinforcing supporting behaviours, and driving results. And executives are investing in it. They know it works.
The 2025 Leadership Imperative
What do leaders need to prioritise in order to activate culture as an engine for growth?
1. Embed culture and make it meaningful
Leaders need to move beyond simply articulating values to actively embedding them into everyday decisions and behaviours. The most effective leaders in 2025 will excel at translating broad organisational culture into specific, meaningful contexts for their teams, addressing the current reality where only 23% of employees feel truly connected to their organisation’s culture.
2. Embrace and role-model continuous, iterative change
Rather than treating change as a series of isolated events to be managed, leaders must develop the ability to integrate continuous change into the organisational fabric. This means building collective resilience and reducing change fatigue, which currently affects 73% of employees, by making adaptation, evolution and genuine consultation and collaboration a natural part of how teams operate.
3. Develop your people, enable their talent
With 85 million jobs projected to go unfilled globally by 2030, leaders must move beyond traditional workforce planning to become strategic enablers of talent. This means developing intelligent, curious and data-rich succession plans for bringing up emerging leaders, building performance and productivity plans that consider how to align and develop human capabilities alongside technological advancement, and continually investing in the value propositions that attract and retain key talent. We’re long past the times of Friday lunches and table-tennis tables. This is about embedding a human-centred approach to how, where, when and why we work.
4. Know that you are not alone
The complexity in which modern organisations all find themselves operating now demands a shift from traditional hierarchical leadership to a more networked approach. Successful leaders focus on building trust and fostering collaboration across traditional organisational boundaries, creating psychological safety in pursuit of an environment where innovation and adaptability are simply part of the everyday norm.
This means bringing people together – not putting them in front of a webinar or a lone ‘expert’ – providing opportunities to focus on relationships, share challenges, normalise constructive, vulnerable conversations and integrate learning.
5. Informed, sustainable performance leadership
If 75% of managers currently feel overwhelmed by their responsibilities, leaders must become skilled at balancing high performance expectations with capacity. This means authentic and regular consultation across the organisation, so that they understand the causal factors behind the data. Create conditions for a culture that is constructive, effective and an environment whereby individuals might enjoy some of the best moments of their careers.
Repeated, embedded and supported learning is far more likely to produce sustained change than isolated touchpoints.
What to focus on first
Gartner research reveals that issues such as recruiting, talent analytics and a focus on rewards are just about the least important priorities, and yet they frequently get the most attention and investment. Instead, HR and People and Culture Leaders are asking CEOs to focus on these priorities:
- Leader and manager development: leaders and managers are overwhelmed by the growth of their jobs and responsibilities and aren’t actually equipped to lead change. Focus on this layer first.
- Organisational culture: Managers don’t tend to embed the ‘culture we want’ into their teams, or measure culture effectively. Communicate values by equipping teams to translate culture values into specific, measurable behaviours.
- Strategic workforce planning: most organisations don’t know how to demonstrate the ROI of strategic workforce efforts – it’s frequently limited to headcount planning and ignores skills predicted to be most important for the future. Succession planning and equipping workforces for the future is critical.
Culture vs. Climate
While organisational climate – the mood and feeling in your organisation right now – may shift with each challenge or success, culture is the lasting foundation that determines how your people will respond to those shifts.
As you craft your strategy for 2025 and beyond, remember that investing in culture and leadership isn’t just about creating a nice place to work – it’s about building the resilience, adaptability and human capability that will power your growth agenda. The organisations that thrive in the coming years won’t be those that simply chase growth, but those that intentionally cultivate the cultural engine that makes sustainable growth possible. The question isn’t whether you can afford to invest in culture and leadership development – it’s whether you can afford not to.
Join Us for an Exclusive Live Event
Culture and leadership are the hidden engines of sustainable growth—are you leveraging them effectively?
Join senior leaders from across industries for an interactive live event where we’ll unpack the findings from this article and explore actionable strategies to bridge the gap between growth ambitions and cultural reality.
Ready to drive organisational growth in a way that doesn’t burn out your workforce? Join leadership expert Fabian Dattner for this free online event on Tuesday 6th May 12 – 1:30 AEST. Register here, places are strictly limited.
