Leadership in Crisis: Now what? Dr Richard Claydon.

DDI recently released the 2025 version of its annual Global Leadership Forecast. It doesn’t make good reading.

• The leadership role is now considered to be so stressful that as many as 40% of people in leadership roles are considering quitting.
• Trust is in freefall. Hardly anybody trusts their direct manager or senior leaders.
• Fewer and fewer people have any pride in their organisation.
• Leadership quality has flatlined since the terrible low of 2008 and the GFC.
• Cost controls are so tight that nobody is developing the next generation.
• The lack of candidates in the pipeline ready or willing to take on the leadership role is so severe that it the entire way we organise is under existential threat.

The general consensus amongst leadership development professionals is that things would switch if only leaders listened. My provocation is that that have listened, and that what they have been told to do is causal of these conditions.

In this Dialogic Drinks, we will:

1. explore how and why leadership has gotten itself into such a state
2. look at a number of leadership practices I’ve developed with some C-Suite leaders that I’ve been working with for a significant period of time, and discuss whether they might offer a ray of light in the gloom

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Dr Richard Claydon is the co-founder of EQ Lab, and the designer of the Future of Leadership module at Macquarie Business School’s Global MBA Program (ranked #6 globally by CEO Magazine).

He was awarded the highest achievable marks for a Ph.D in behavioural science. A Harvard Top-200 Management expert and business columnists for the Guardian newspaper have described this research as “a touchstone for the future work in management and organisation”, “outstanding in daring imagination” and “at the forefront of modern discussion and debate.”

Richard is a tier one tennis player, have coached tennis professionally, and also designed the tactics creator for the multi award-winning and world-leading management simulation, Football Manager.