3 Business Leadership Skills You Need to Hire in 2024

In the fast-paced and ever-changing business landscape of 2024, hiring the right leader is critical to organizational success.

As Deloitte found, businesses with a culture led by great leaders were 12 times more likely to have high business performance.

But you’ve got to know what to hire! And that can be difficult to pinpoint. Not a bad place to start though would be looking at the challenges that businesses are having to face up to and working back from there. This will then help with identifying the business leadership skills you need to hire.

So, let’s dive in!

The challenges all businesses face

Every year PwC take a global temperature check of CEOs to see what it is that’s keeping them up at night.

This year, top of mind came changing customer demands and preferences (56% said this was the biggest challenge), followed by changes in regulation (53%), and then changes in needed skills and labour shortages (52%).

With what CEOs are worrying about in mind — as well as using our working knowledge of the senior recruitment market as well as knowledge of what our partner clients need — at Yellow Bricks, we came up with three skills (by no means a conclusive list, but an important one) of what leadership skills and characteristics businesses need to hire in order to drive success.

Read on to find out more about what skills you need to be looking for in your next leadership hires.

Resilient leaders = resilient business

Resilience should be a key leadership trait you’re looking to hire in the next 12 months.

In simple terms, it means leadership hires should be adaptable, goal-focused, have good emotional intelligence, have a positive outlook, and are able to maintain productivity in their teams.

They are likely to be great strategic thinkers effective communicators and have a growth mindset.

On a business landscape defined by change — changes in customer demands, changes in needed skills, changes in regulation — those who are most resilient will be able to drive success.

In fact, a recent study by the University of Pennsylvania found that resilient leaders are more likely to drive better performance outcomes.

As such, hiring leaders who possess personal resilience and can foster resilience in their team members is essential for success in 2024.

Lateral thinking leadership

Lateral thinking, also known as “out of the box” thinking, is also a critical skill for leaders in 2024.

Firstly, it’s important to know what lateral thinking looks like in business leaders. It usually means being able to adapt to business problems, generating innovative solutions to issues to continue to drive business growth, and adapting new models and structures to approach a new situation.

With change the only certainty — at least as the CEOs see it — it will be lateral thinkers who will be able to overcome hurdles presented by rapidly transforming markets, workforces and legislative playing fields.

In fact, so important is lateral thinking that McKinsey found that 70% of executives rated building innovation as one of their top three strategic priorities.

And in a 2023-published Stanford University survey of almost 7,000 global leaders, which looked at companies, leaders and their ability to innovate, found that leaders who were willing to think outside the box, and even reconceive what their company was about, were the ones able to deliver to customers and get market share.

As such, your next leadership hires need to show these lateral thinking and innovative attributes.

Data literacy and capability

With it being 2024, data capabilities are another key leadership skill that cannot be overlooked.

As a recent article in MIT’s Sloan School, one of the biggest business schools in the world, stated: “Leaders need to trust and understand data well enough to make good decisions, and they must also drive literacy efforts throughout the organization and create a culture of trust in data.”

Indeed, if a leader is presented with data on where a market might be evolving, or with employee engagement and skills fade, and what that might mean in terms of talent management strategy options, they’ve got to be able to understand the trends and numbers in front of them.

Whilst this might not mean becoming a data scientist or analytics practitioner in earnest it might mean that a good data-savvy leader is good at creating a strategy from data, are receptive to using data and analytics alongside their own intuition, is able to communicate using data, and is an advocate of good data practices within a business.

The importance of this is born out in the numbers.

Research from IBM

One IBM study found that companies that use data analytics are 2.2 times more likely to outperform their peers whilst a 2023 study of Chief Data Officers at some of the world’s biggest firms found that so important is data that a staggering 94% are planning to increase investments into data this year.

And, one of the biggest areas for improvement, they found, was getting leaders who were ready to drive data cultures.

Meaning it’s a clear place you can get the edge over your competitors if you hire a data whizz in.

Finding 2024-ready leaders

Of course, there are more leadership traits than resilience, lateral thinking, and data capabilities that make up a rounded, effective, 2023-ready leader.

But finding the right hire can be difficult — especially when resources are stretched and HR teams are often firefighting or strategising in several areas at once.

Yellow Bricks hires exceptional temporary and permanent professionals for growth organisations. To find out more, click here.

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