The Skills Emerging Leaders Need to Develop

Technical expertise gets people promoted. But technical expertise doesn't make them effective leaders.

The skills that drive individual contribution — deep domain knowledge, personal productivity, being the one with the answers — often work against new managers. Leadership requires a different set of capabilities. And most emerging leaders have never been formally taught them.

Source: Center for Creative Leadership

They're expected to figure it out on the job. Many don't.

This article covers the skills that matter most for emerging leaders, organised into four categories: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. For each skill, we'll share what the research says, what leaders actually experience when they try to develop it, and how to build it deliberately.

The Four Skill Categories

Leadership skills fall into four categories, building on each other:

1. Self-awareness — Understanding your own emotions, triggers, and impact
2. Self-management — Regulating your responses and behaviours
3. Social awareness — Reading others and understanding their perspectives
4. Relationship management — Working effectively with and through others

You can't manage others if you can't manage yourself. You can't manage yourself if you don't understand yourself. This is why development starts with self-awareness and builds outward.

Self-Awareness

Self-awareness is the foundation everything else is built on. It's understanding your emotions, reactions, strengths, and weaknesses — and how they affect the people around you.

Why It Matters

Source: DDI Global Leadership Forecast 2025

One of the key drivers: managers who lack awareness of their impact on others.

Leaders who aren't self-aware don't realise when they're creating stress for their team. They don't see how their mood affects the room. They don't notice when their behaviour contradicts their words.

Self-aware people tend to be self-deprecating without being self-judgemental. They acknowledge their limitations without being paralysed by them. They know what triggers them and can prepare for those situations.

What Leaders Experience

In our data, leaders often start by describing their emotions in vague terms: "fine," "busy," "stressed." As they develop self-awareness, they become more specific: "frustrated because I feel unheard," "anxious about the deadline but confident in the approach."

This specificity matters. You can't manage an emotion you can't name.

Where Leaders Get Stuck

Many leaders intellectualise their emotions rather than feeling them. They can analyse why they might be stressed without actually noticing the physical sensations of stress in their body — the tight chest, the shallow breathing, the clenched jaw.

The leaders who develop self-awareness fastest are those who build a regular practice: checking in with themselves throughout the day, noticing physical sensations, and connecting those sensations to emotions and triggers.

Skills to Develop

• Emotional self-awareness: Understanding your emotions as they happen and recognising their impact on your thoughts and behaviour.
• Accurate self-assessment: Knowing your strengths and limitations. Being open to feedback. Learning from experience.

Self-Management

Self-management is what you do with the awareness you've built. It's regulating your emotions, adapting to circumstances, and maintaining effectiveness under pressure.

Why It Matters

Source: DDI Global Leadership Forecast 2025

Of those, 54% are concerned about burnout. And 40% have considered leaving leadership entirely because of stress.

The leaders who survive — and thrive — aren't the ones who avoid stress. They're the ones who manage their response to it.

Gallup research shows that managers experience more negative daily emotions than non-managers. Despite higher pay and status, they're more likely to be stressed, angry, sad, and lonely. Self-management is what prevents those emotions from derailing performance and relationships.

What Leaders Experience

In our data, leaders consistently describe stress as contagious. When they're stressed, they snap at people. They make poor decisions. They create stress for their team, which creates more problems, which creates more stress.

Breaking this cycle requires catching the stress response early — before it hijacks your behaviour.

The Mindshifting Framework

Leda's Mindshifting framework gives leaders a four-step process for managing their stress response:

1. Catch — Notice the rising stress response. Physical sensations, thoughts, behaviours.
2. Calm — Three deep breaths to signal safety to the amygdala and re-engage the prefrontal cortex.
3. Choose — Reframe the situation as a challenge or opportunity rather than a threat.
4. Connect — Share the experience with others to strengthen the learning.

Where Leaders Get Stuck

Many leaders think self-management means suppressing emotions. It doesn't. Suppression is exhausting and unsustainable. Self-management means acknowledging the emotion and choosing how to respond to it.

The other common trap: leaders try to manage stress through willpower alone, without addressing the underlying habits that deplete their capacity. Sleep, exercise, nutrition, and social support all affect your ability to regulate emotions. Neglect them and no amount of deep breathing will help.

Skills to Develop

• Emotional self-control: Managing emotions and impulses under pressure. Staying calm and clear-headed in difficult situations.
• Growth mindset: Seeing challenges as opportunities to learn rather than threats to your identity. Treating failure as feedback.
• Resilience: The ability to recover from setbacks. Built through both internal practices (mindset, values, positive emotions) and external habits (sleep, exercise, nutrition, social support).
• Focus: Controlling attention in a world of distractions. Understanding that multitasking is a myth and that deep work requires protected time.

Social Awareness

Social awareness is turning the lens outward. It's understanding other people — their emotions, perspectives, needs, and concerns.

Why It Matters

Source: DDI Global Leadership Forecast 2025

Employees who receive feedback are 9 times more likely to trust. Employees with managers who coach effectively are 9 times more likely to trust.

These multipliers are remarkable. And they all depend on social awareness — the ability to understand what's happening for the other person.

McKinsey research on psychological safety found that positive team climate is the most important driver of safety. That climate depends on leaders who understand what their team members are experiencing.

What Leaders Experience

In our data, the shift to social awareness often surprises leaders. They realise how much they'd been assuming about other people's motivations and experiences. When they actually ask and listen, they discover the reality is different from their assumptions.

The Empathy Framework

Empathy involves three core skills:

1. Connection — Building trust and rapport. Feeling a little of what another person is feeling.
2. Perspective-taking — Seeing someone else's point of view. Understanding why it might be different from yours.
3. Compassion — Genuinely caring about others as human beings. Wanting to help.

Where Leaders Get Stuck

The biggest barrier to social awareness is the assumption that you already understand. Leaders who think they know what their team is experiencing don't ask. And because they don't ask, they never discover they're wrong.

Active listening — really focusing on the other person rather than preparing your response — is the skill leaders most need to develop. It requires putting your own agenda aside, which feels inefficient in the moment even when it saves time later.

Skills to Develop

• Empathy: Understanding others' emotions and perspectives. Built through active listening, perspective-taking, and genuine curiosity about other people's experiences.

Relationship Management

Relationship management is where leadership happens. It's working effectively with and through others to achieve results.

This is where most emerging leaders spend their time — and where most struggle. The challenges of leading former peers, giving feedback, managing conflict, and building team culture all sit here.

Why It Matters

Source: Gallup

The single biggest factor in whether employees are engaged or disengaged is their direct manager.

CCL research on derailment found that problems with interpersonal relationships are the most common cause of leadership failure — mentioned in 50-64% of derailment cases. Every derailed manager had relationship problems.

The skills in this category aren't nice-to-haves. They're the core of the job.

The Six Relationship Management Skills

1. Team Building

Creating the conditions for a group of people to work together effectively. Establishing psychological safety, clear expectations, and shared ways of working.

In our data, leaders often underestimate how much their behaviour shapes team culture. The team watches everything: how the leader responds to failure, who gets credit, what gets tolerated. Culture is built in these small moments.

Key capabilities: Understanding diverse team dynamics, building psychological safety, setting ground rules and expectations, running productive meetings, delegating effectively, making decisions as a group.

2. Developing Others

Helping each team member grow. Setting goals, coaching performance, giving praise, conducting reviews, and addressing problems.

In our data, developing others is often the skill emerging leaders find most rewarding — once they learn how to do it. The shift from doing the work yourself to enabling others is the core identity shift of leadership.

Key capabilities: Setting SMART performance goals, one-on-one coaching conversations (GROW model), giving praise with impact, conducting performance reviews, addressing troubling behaviour.

3. Giving Feedback

Communicating about actions or behaviours that affect performance. Both confirming (positive) and corrective (constructive) feedback.

In our data, feedback is consistently cited as one of the hardest parts of leadership. Leaders avoid it because they fear damaging relationships. But avoiding feedback damages relationships too — it just does it slowly.

Key capabilities: Building "connection credits" through daily positive interactions, using the FECA model (Frame, Evidence, Consequences, Action), reducing threat responses by addressing SCARF concerns (Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, Fairness).

4. Communication

Exchanging information effectively. Listening actively, adapting messages for different audiences, and using different conversation types strategically.

In our data, communication problems are rarely about clarity. They're about listening. Leaders who think they're communicating well are often just broadcasting. Real communication requires understanding how the other person is receiving the message.

Key capabilities: Active listening with empathy and mindfulness, discovery conversations (to understand), delivery conversations (to inform), adapting communication style for different people and contexts.

5. Conflict Management

Addressing disagreements and tensions productively. Preventing small issues from becoming large ones. Having difficult conversations that strengthen rather than damage relationships.

In our data, conflict avoidance is more common than conflict mismanagement. Leaders let issues fester because they don't want to have the difficult conversation. By the time they act, the problem is much bigger.

Key capabilities: Understanding your own conflict style, defusing rising conflicts in the moment, the Learning Conversations framework, framing difficult conversations to reduce threat responses, understanding your own biases and stories.

6. Building Team Culture

Shaping the environment in which work happens. Building accountability, trust, respect, and shared purpose.

In our data, leaders often think culture is about perks and policies. It isn't. Culture is the accumulated effect of thousands of small leadership moments: how you respond to failure, how you treat people under pressure, what you tolerate and what you don't.

Key capabilities: Building individual and team accountability, developing trust and respect, understanding what culture actually is (and isn't), the role of emotional contagion, building emotional intelligence across the team.

How These Skills Are Built

These skills share something in common: none of them can be installed in a workshop.

The forgetting curve shows that learners forget 50-70% of new material within 24 hours. After a week, retention drops to 10-20%. You cannot build lasting capability in a single session.

Source: DDI Global Leadership Forecast 2025

The approaches that work:

• Spaced practice — Daily application, not one-off events
• Coaching and mentoring — Guidance from experienced leaders
• Feedback loops — Regular reflection and adjustment
• Cohort learning — Peer support and shared experience
• Manager involvement — Reinforcement in day-to-day work

The leaders who build these skills develop them over months, not days. They practice daily. They reflect on what's working and what isn't. They receive feedback and adjust.

What This Looks Like in Practice

The skills can be developed. But development requires sustained effort, not a single intervention.

Continue Reading

What Is an Emerging Leader? →

The 12 Challenges Emerging Leaders Face →

Emerging Leader Characteristics: How to Identify Future Leaders →

How to Develop Emerging Leaders →