Hi there,
I’ve been sitting with a question for a few weeks now. I’ve asked it in workshops, in coaching sessions, in boardrooms, and over too many cold coffees.
How are our leaders actually going?
Not the polished answer we give in performance reviews. The real one.
The honest answer is “tired.” Stretched. Doing their best in conditions that keep shifting under their feet. Many are quietly wondering whether they’re any good at this and whether anyone would notice if they weren’t.
So this edition is a bit different. I want to be honest about where leadership is right now and then share why, despite all of it, I’ve never been more hopeful about where it’s going.
Leadership today: what I’m seeing
I work with leaders across government, construction, the arts, healthcare, professional services, and more. The sectors differ, but the patterns are remarkably similar.
Middle managers are carrying the weight. They’re translating strategy from above and absorbing pressure from below, often with very little support in either direction. Most were promoted because they were brilliant at their job, not because anyone taught them how to lead people. One week they’re a high-performing specialist; the next they’re managing their former peers, handling conflict, running performance conversations, and being told to “drive culture.” Nobody hands them a manual. Many never get the development they deserve.
Leadership teams often aren’t teams. They’re groups of capable, well-intentioned individuals sitting around a table, each protecting their patch. The meetings are about updates rather than decisions. The conversations that really matter happen in the corridor afterwards, if they happen at all. Trust is assumed rather than built. And the organisation below feels every crack in that table.
Development has become a luxury. When budgets tighten, leadership programs are among the first things cut. It makes sense on a spreadsheet and no sense in real life. So people learn by trial and error, and their teams pay the price in disengagement, turnover, and avoidable conflict.
The pace hasn’t slowed down. Restructures, hybrid work, cost pressures, new technology, changing expectations from a multi-generational workforce. Leaders are asked to be strategic and hands-on, empathetic and decisive, available and focused. All at once. All the time.
Everyone’s talking about AI, and plenty are anxious about it. Will it replace us? Will it make work more human or less? Should I be using it, and if so, how? Leaders are being asked to guide their people through something they’re still making sense of themselves.
And underneath all of it, people are burnt out. Leaders included. Especially leaders. Because leaders often feel they can’t show it. They hold the space for everyone else and have nowhere to put their own weight down.
The cost of getting this wrong
We know that people don’t leave organisations; they leave managers. We know that the relationship with your direct leader shapes how you feel about Monday morning, whether you speak up, whether you stay, and whether you bring your best or just your badge.
When we under-invest in leaders, we don’t save money. We just pay for it somewhere else: in sick leave, in resignations, in projects that stall because nobody felt safe enough to say, “This isn’t working.”
And we pay for it in human terms too. The leader who lies awake at 2am replaying a conversation they didn’t know how to have. The team member who stops contributing because they’ve learnt it’s not worth the risk. The talented person who never puts their hand up for leadership because they’ve watched what it did to their boss.
That’s the part that keeps me in this work.
Why I’m still hopeful
This might surprise you, but I’ve never been more optimistic about leadership than I am right now.
Because the conversation has genuinely shifted.
Ten years ago, if I talked about emotional intelligence, courage, vulnerability or kindness in a boardroom, I’d get polite nods and glazed eyes. People wanted “the hard stuff.” Today, leaders are asking for it by name. They know command-and-control is done. They know people want to be led by humans who actually see them. They know the so-called soft skills are the hardest ones and the ones that matter most.
I’m seeing CEOs admit they don’t have all the answers. I’m seeing leadership teams willing to sit in an uncomfortable room and do the real work of becoming a team. I’m seeing first-time managers who are hungry to learn, not just to get ahead, but because they genuinely care about their people.
That gives me enormous hope.
The future I’m working towards
Here’s the future of leadership I’m hoping for and building towards every day.
1. Leadership development for everyone, not just the executive floor. The team leader on the night shift, the site supervisor, and the new manager in a regional office deserve great coaching just as much as the CEO does. Arguably more, because they’re closest to the people doing the work. Access to development shouldn’t depend on your title or your budget.
2. Support in the moment, not once a year. Leadership doesn’t happen at the annual offsite. It happens at 4:45 pm on a Thursday when a difficult conversation lands on your desk. It happens when a team member is struggling and you’re not sure what to say. Leaders need support at the moment of need, not three months later in a workshop.
3. Learning that sticks. We’ve all been to the brilliant program where we left inspired, then went back to 200 emails and forgot all of it by Friday. Real growth comes from practice, reflection, and repetition, little and often, applied to real situations.
4. Technology that makes us more human, not less. I don’t believe AI should replace leaders. I believe it can help them lead better. Used well, it can give people the confidence, language, and practice space to show up better for their teams. It can be a thinking partner at 10pm when there’s no one else to ask. The human stays at the centre. The technology supports them.
5. Leaders who look after themselves too. You can’t pour from an empty cup. I learned that one the hard way, more than once. The future of leadership has to include leaders who rest, reflect, ask for help, and model that it’s okay to be human.
6. Courage as the new baseline. Courage to have the honest conversation. Courage to say “I got that wrong.” Courage to back your people when it’s not popular. First comes courage. Everything else follows.
A bit of my story
I built LeadershipHQ from scratch in 2008 after about 40 job rejections, as a sole parent with more determination than certainty. I didn’t have a big network or a safety net. What I had was a deep belief that leadership could be done better and that people deserved better leaders.
Nearly two decades later, having worked with thousands of leaders, I believe it more than ever. And what I’ve learnt is simple: leadership is learnable. It’s not a personality type or a job title. It’s a set of skills, habits and choices. And everyone deserves the chance to learn them.
The problem has never been that people can’t learn to lead. It’s that great leadership development has been too expensive, too slow and too out of reach for most of the people who need it.
Which is why I built Worksparks.
Worksparks is our answer to one question: “How do we make great leadership coaching available to every leader, every day?”
It’s an AI-powered leadership coach built on the frameworks, tools and approaches I’ve developed and refined with leaders over nearly two decades. It isn’t generic advice pulled from the internet. It’s grounded in what actually works in real workplaces with real people.
Worksparks is there when you need to:
- Prepare for a tough conversation, whether it’s feedback, performance or conflict
- Work through a team challenge and think about it from different angles
- Build your confidence and skills in small, practical steps between meetings
- Reflect on your own leadership and where you want to grow
- Develop your whole team with the Team tier and team dashboard, so leaders across your organisation are building capability together
It’s real-time leadership support, whenever you need it, for less than the cost of a weekly coffee habit.
Try it free for 7 days. After that, it’s just A$29 a month.
đŸ‘‰ https://worksparks.com/pricing/
If you’re leading a team or an organisation and want to bring Worksparks to your people, just hit reply. I’d love to talk about what that could look like for you.
Something to try this week
Whether or not you jump into Worksparks, here’s a small challenge for you this week:
Ask one person on your team, “What’s one thing I could do that would make your work easier?”
Then listen. Don’t defend, don’t explain, and don’t fix it on the spot. Just listen, say thank you, and come back to them within a week with what you’ve done about it.
It’s a small moment. But leadership is built in small moments.
One last thing
The future of leadership isn’t going to be decided in a boardroom or a strategy document. It’ll be decided in thousands of small moments, every day, in every workplace: when a leader chooses to listen instead of react, to back their people, to have the brave conversation, and to look after themselves so they can keep showing up.
I’m betting on those moments. And I’m betting on you.
Lead boldly, lead kindly, Sonia
Sonia McDonald, Founder & CEO, LeadershipHQ | Creator of Worksparks