Advice for Business Leaders in 2025

In addition to this research, Greer is the faculty director of the Sanger Leadership Center and is engaged in bringing innovative best practices to the forefront of business education and industry standards. In the following Q&A, Greer shares some of her insights on challenges, opportunities for growth, and philosophies leaders should adopt in the new year.

Looking back on 2024, what are some of the biggest challenges organizational leaders faced? With rapid changes in the global work environment, what qualities or skills do you believe are most important for leaders to develop in the new year?

Organizational leaders had their hands full in 2024. Political polarization, geopolitical conflicts, stakeholder activism, and rapidly evolving technology — what a year!

In turbulent times, I’d highlight four key categories of skills — which also happen to be the heart of our Michigan Model of Leadership here at Ross:

1. Collaborate - build bridges between different groups and safe spaces for them to interact and show care for the well-being and culture of their organization
2. Drive Results - inspire others to achieve their goals
3. Innovate - embrace different ideas as opportunities for growth, change, creativity, and innovation, and help your teams and organizations to do the same 
4. Provide Structure - clarify roles and goals, optimize structures, processes, and playbooks

Ultimately, the very best leaders are able to adapt which tool, e.g., a tool for collaboration versus a tool for driving results, they deploy in a particular situation based on the needs of their team and organization. Good leaders adapt the leadership toolkits of themselves and their teams by creating a culture of continuous learning, where developing and improving leadership skills is a key priority.

The best leaders also ensure they — and their organizations — can embrace all four categories of skills. They help their organization transcend the inherent tensions between these four key skill types — they foster positive collaboration while still driving results, and they can innovate and change while still providing pillars of structure and stability in the organization. Only by embracing paradox can leaders truly create organizations that can stand the test of our turbulent times.

The Sanger Leadership Center has crafted a suite of resources that leaders can use, including a slideshow with teaching notes, a self-assessment how-to-guide, and several companion tools such as a leadership roadmap.

One area of your research is team dynamics and interpersonal conflict. Particularly in a contentious election year and an upcoming change in administration, how does political polarization affect teams and leaders? What can leaders do to counteract some of these effects?

Leading diverse teams and organizations is never easy, and yet, it’s also the secret to the highest-performing teams and organizations. When leaders can create spaces where different perspectives are shared, heard, respected, and used as input for innovation, companies thrive.

Political polarization makes this difficult skill set all the harder — differences in perspective become value-laden and emotional, making civil conversation, curiosity, humility, integrative win-win thinking, and ultimately innovation very hard to achieve.

To help your teams navigate differences in this coming year, here are a few tips:

• Seek to understand before you seek to be understood. Take the time to truly get curious and understand someone’s view before you jump in. Ask a few follow-up questions to help you understand the basis for their viewpoint. When you do share your viewpoint, share it in a way that connects to something they said — choose words that will help them understand your point — and show your good intent in sharing it. As leaders, also coach your team members on this important skill as well.
• Help your teams understand that civil conflict is caring. All too often, our teams avoid talking about the harder topics, and eventually, when the discussion does come out, it’s emotional and heated after having been suppressed for so long. Healthy and high-performing teams engage in diversity of thought — task conflict, if you will — on a regular basis.
• Reinforce the values that define your organization, values that your employees should all have in common. Organizational culture is the values of the organization made manifest — in rituals, artifacts, and stories. This year is a wonderful time to help your teams remember what they share and how they want to be. Having shared values and a common language can make difficult conversations easier to navigate.

Based on your research and work with the Sanger Leadership Center, what advice would you give leaders looking to learn and grow in the new year?

Embrace a growth mindset — Be open to all the ideas and insights around you. What could you learn from a colleague, mentor, or friend from how they lead?

Make a plan — Learning accelerates when you set a goal and make a specific plan for how to get there. Check out the Sanger Leadership Journey for an easy framework to help yourself make a leadership development plan for yourself for the year.

Find a learning buddy — We’re more likely to stick to a plan when we have a friend to do it with. It motivates us and helps hold us accountable. Is there someone from a past organization, a friend on your team, or a mentor at work that you could share your plan with and who would help you celebrate your growth along the way?