What Does Leadership Look Like in This New Era of Work?

Leadership was a subject of inquiry for Plato and Sun Tzu long before “leadership studies” became part of the modern academic canon a century ago. Since then, scholars have published more than 32,000 papers and 4,500 books on leadership-related matters.¹

Despite this abundance of research, key questions about leadership remain unresolved. What does it mean, for example, to be an effective leader? What values, traits and behaviors must a leader embody to be successful? Are there “natural-born leaders”? Or is effective leadership a skill set that can be taught, developed and honed over time?

Leadership and management are related, but they are not the same thing. Management involves applying resources to meet organizational objectives while leadership is about social influence: An effective leader motivates and enables others, spurring them to contribute toward collective goals. There is often overlap between managers and leaders, yet the two roles are not necessarily found in the same individual.² Some managers are ineffective leaders whereas some workers become leaders without any formal managerial role. Effective leadership, in other words, cannot be bestowed like a job title upon an employee. Research suggests, however, that it can be taught and learned.³

In an era where work’s unwritten rules have shifted and the demands on leaders are greater and more varied than ever before, how should we teach leadership?

Dynamic Leadership: Meeting the Demands of a Changing World

In any introductory course on leadership, business students are taught about effective leadership traits, behaviors and styles. Over the past half-century, leadership theories have proliferated under the academic umbrella of situational leadership — the theory that the effectiveness of certain leadership traits and behaviors is contingent on the situation. This theory is management bedrock, but it assumes a level of stability that no longer fits today’s world. An improved, contemporary approach should emphasize dynamism and adaptability among business leaders, reflecting the economy’s growing variability and diversification.⁴

What should a leader do when situations change rapidly and unpredictably? The tumult of the past two decades — namely, the Great Recession, COVID-19 pandemic, proliferation of flexible work, and rise of artificial intelligence technologies — demonstrate the sort of extreme shifts to which leaders must now react and adjust.

In these volatile times, academic teachings on effective leadership often fall short: Traits (e.g., confidence or conscientiousness) describe relatively stable characteristics but offer limited guidance on what leaders should actually do, while styles (e.g., transformational or transactional) are too broad to be useful on their own. Neither approach prescribes the actions and behaviors that leaders can embody to be effective across situations and contexts, from routine decisions to leading in demanding moments. Today’s environment demands tremendous dynamism, flexibility, adaptability and resilience, challenging leaders to adjust on the fly to rapid change in high-uncertainty situations. Yet how do we measure, track and train these high-order skills?

Developing Dynamic Leaders: From Knowing to Doing

UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School faculty are rethinking leadership development to meet the demands of today’s workplace, with an emphasis on training competencies that promote adaptation, flexibility and other core features of dynamic leadership.

We sat down with 2026 Kenan Institute Distinguished Fellow Michael Christian, UNC Kenan-Flagler professor of organizational behavior, Bell Distinguished Scholar and Area Chair of Organizational Behavior, to tell us about the challenges and opportunities involved with training the leaders of tomorrow. Below is our Q&A, lightly edited for length.

What is your short answer to the question, “What does leadership look like in this era of work?” What about leadership today is new, and what is enduring?

Effective leaders today must be adaptable. Dynamic leadership is when leaders have the capacity to deal with disruption and rapid change, and they can adapt and find flexibility in shifting circumstances.

We study dynamic leadership in part because the business environment is now defined not only by change but by accelerated change. There’s quite a bit of dynamism in today’s environment. Some scholars refer to it as VUCA — Volatile, Uncertain, Changing and Ambiguous — and those qualities define the business world and what a lot of leaders must cope with today.

To meet these challenges, which feel urgent and new, leaders can build a skill set made up of enduring skills and capabilities. We focus a lot on skills like foresight and vision, analytical reasoning and judgment, and relationship building, so that teams have high levels of built-in trust when a situation calls for change. Leaders today must be prepared to pivot, and the answers informing the best path forward often come from the people on your team or in your network. These situations highlight the importance of relationships and the social capital built over time. We find that many successful leaders have a well-defined core of relationships that pay off when they need advice or when they seek a new solution.

Other enduring leadership qualities are still relevant today. It’s important, for instance, for leaders dealing with change and adversity to have self-awareness and solid grounding in their own values. What do you stand for? What will you not compromise on? And where are you more flexible?

The answers to these questions come from within. They involve values and ethics and knowledge of what the company stands for and what the team needs in the moment.

What we’re recognizing with dynamic leadership is that leaders aren’t just one thing, they don’t practice just one style. In fact, they have many different types of effective behaviors that are part of a repertoire for leading in changing circumstances.

Based on your experience as a business school professor who researches and teaches leadership development, what aspects of leadership can be taught in a classroom and what must be practiced?

I believe the best strategies for leadership development have some common features. The first is to identify the skills that emerging leaders need in the current environment and to project this process into the future. A lot of these skills relate to interpersonal, human skills and high-order problem-solving abilities. There are also emerging technical skills that are really important — working with AI tools, for example, and staying on top of the waves of emerging tech is increasingly vital.

Beyond the idea of rote instruction, our job at a business school like Kenan-Flagler is to develop leaders and to develop their potential. We bring in such amazing graduates, and we nurture the leadership qualities that they already possess. We provide a crucible for them to experiment and fail and try again and learn some of the human elements of leadership, which are difficult to gauge but have a lot of subjective learning associated with them. In my experience, giving students a sense of identity, efficacy and wisdom, earned by working through adverse circumstances, helps them build confidence to do a job well and lead others effectively.

I believe that organizations like ours, those tasked with developing the leaders of tomorrow, must give students experiential opportunities where they get to try things, break stuff, fail, experiment and try again. Having had these experiences when they enter an organizational environment with real stakes and high pressure, they will feel comfortable making difficult decisions, and they will know when to say, “I don’t know, but I’m going to ask somebody who does.”

So, my answer is a sort of hybrid solution: Some leadership skills can be taught, yet we must employ an experience-based learning environment and use teaching methods based on practice.

In a recent conversation with Kenan Institute Executive Director Paige Ouimet, you described how AI may disrupt the traditional development pipeline for early-career employees. How does hybrid or remote work add to that challenge? What can organizations do to make leadership development more deliberate?

Remote work has caused a loss of informal learning by removing people from the context where we learn high-order interpersonal skills, which are key to developing sound judgment. Overhearing a negotiation, watching a manager handle a difficult conversation, hearing the thought process behind a decision that doesn’t come up in a Zoom meeting: Fewer days in the office means fewer of those learning moments.

Organizations can respond to this deficiency in several ways. First is to purposefully assign the “inefficient” informal learning work by, for instance, letting the junior person write the first draft. Another way is to pay for mentoring and measure the results. Unmeasured work gets neglected, and some firms now tie a meaningful share of partner compensation to professional development. Firms can also design connections rather than assuming it will happen. This can be done through structured shadowing, in-person days built around coaching rather than meetings, and training leaders to deliberately and regularly give feedback. These methods for stimulating learning and growth show that firms, now more than before, must be intentional and structured in their development strategies.

Along with UNC Kenan-Flagler colleagues, you are rethinking how the school develops leaders. What problem in leadership education are you trying to solve?

Leadership education has a knowledge and skills transfer problem. Students learn new concepts and then revert to old behavior. Knowing what good leadership looks like is not the same as being able to produce it, especially when under pressure. The answer is to close the gap between classroom learning and real-world action, to move students from understanding leadership behaviors to performing them in situations that demand a shift, and then to give feedback fast enough to change what the students do next. Doing this well requires measurement. If we want students to grow, we must observe that growth over time rather than assume it.

Would you give an example of how experiential learning helps students move from learning leadership concepts to practicing behaviors? How does this type of experiential learning help students develop their leadership capabilities?

Good experiential learning follows a cycle: Principles, practice, feedback and reflection. Take giving feedback: Students learn in class the principle that effective feedback is specific, behavioral and tied to a goal that the other person holds. That is easy to understand and hard to do. In practice, students rotate through the roles of coach, coachee and observer in a live coaching conversation with a classmate. The coach must ask rather than tell, hold to the structure when the conversation drifts, and give feedback that the student can act on. The observer rates what happened against the principle, and the student then writes a short reflection on the gap between what they intended and what they did. Employing this iterative, practical approach helps students learn concepts and train behaviors. In this way, leadership development can apply fundamental business concepts — data-backed theory, measurement, active management and constructive feedback — to the training and growth of tomorrow’s leaders.