The New Leadership: A Mindset and a Protocol to Implement – an article by Ivan Reusse, Director of the Leadership Development Activity at Grant Alexander Switzerland, for Le Monde Economique
24.07.2025
For the past decade, companies have faced an unprecedented acceleration of technological, organizational, geopolitical, and human changes. This dynamic forces employers to rethink their approach to leadership in depth. This reflection takes place in a context where recent societal crises have profoundly shaken employees’ expectations. They now question more than ever the meaning of their professional engagement and seek a new balance between personal life and work life.
This upheaval only reinforces the need to rethink managerial postures. While the skills expected of today’s leaders are well-known — emotional intelligence, steering capacity, agility, creativity, sense of dialogue and engagement — their implementation too often remains theoretical. It is no longer simply a matter of training managers in these skills but of integrating them into a genuine managerial transformation protocol.
The real question: where does your organization stand in this transition?
Many companies claim to consult their teams on possible areas for improvement. Logically — and even without mentioning ethics — if the answer is “yes,” this should result in the implementation of internal surveys or social barometers. Yet, the problem does not lie in conducting these surveys or even analyzing the results. It is the subsequent steps that raise real questions: the implementation and follow-up of action plans derived from this feedback.
In practice, and after several years of field missions in French-speaking Switzerland, one observation stands out: too often, actions supposedly stemming from diagnostics are only partially applied, or even ignored. Worse, the key actors who should drive these transformations — notably senior managers — are not always included in the improvement initiatives they should embody.