Five leadership trends shaping the future of the public sector
UNSW Sydney
Australian public workplaces are undergoing significant changes as leaders face new challenges in a rapidly evolving business landscape.
Public sector leadership is an increasingly demanding role, driven by greater public expectations, increased focus on diversity and inclusion, and a desire to make the sector an attractive career option for younger employees. With these changes comes a key question: how do we best equip the leaders of tomorrow?
“Modern organisations are increasingly characterised by both high complexity and rapid change, two factors that have huge ramifications for how leadership is framed and conducted,” says Dr Bradley Hastings, Research Associate at the Business Insights Insitute (BII), UNSW Business School.
“For instance, while traditional leadership models placed leaders at the top of the pile, responsible for making decisions, research shows that in complex organisations, shared decision-making leads to better results. This evidence completely shifts the goal posts for leadership development,” he says.
The good news is that leadership science has advanced new understandings of leadership, which are supported by evidence, especially in fast-changing and challenging environments. For aspiring leaders, this shift places more emphasis on concepts such as mindset maturity and relational leadership.
New research from UNSW Business School highlights five emerging trends that are helping us rethink how leadership is understood and practised in the public sector.
“As public sector organisations adapt to changing expectations and evolving work environments, leaders who embrace these approaches are more likely to inspire teams, drive innovation, and achieve lasting impact,” says Dr Hastings. “Public-sector organisations have a choice; they can either try to respond to their challenges with traditional leadership paradigms or proactively embrace the future of leadership.”
1. The rise of ‘We’ leaders
Leadership is no longer about a lone visionary guiding an organisation to success, says Dr Hastings. Instead, effective leadership now hinges on collaboration and relationship-building—what researchers are calling “relational leadership”.
Dr Hastings says that as the complexity of the public sector increases, it becomes impossible for one leader to “know” and “understand” everything needed to be effective. “This shift changes leadership competencies from a focus on “I,” representing individualistic, top-down leadership, to “we,” which emphasises relationships, inclusion, innovation, and group-centred decision-making,” he says.
The BII evidence review supports this trend and found 30 studies showing how “We” leaders consistently outperformed those who relied on traditional, individualistic “I” leadership models.
“The research is clear: leaders who embrace relational approaches consistently outperform those relying on traditional, individualistic models,” says Dr Hastings. “In complex environments, bringing people together from different parts of an organisation to collaborate and innovate is essential.
“Public sector organisations are encouraged to expand their leadership frameworks to include relational capabilities, rather than focusing solely on individual competencies,” he says.
2. Leadership is more mindset than skillset
Modern leadership is no longer defined by what leaders do. Instead, it is how they think. In rapidly changing environments, adaptive, future-focused thinking is essential.
Skillsets are tangible abilities, whereas mindsets reflect underlying beliefs, purpose, values, and attitudes, says Dr Hastings. “Leaders with advanced mindsets are more effective at making sense of and giving sense to complexity in ways that inspires purpose, motivation, and action.
“Leadership is as much about mindset as it is about skillset,” says Dr Hastings. “Our research shows that leaders who take time to advance and mature their mindset are self-aware and adaptive and are better equipped to navigate uncertainty and inspire their teams toward action,” he says.
A growing body of evidence supports this, with one study showing that advanced mindsets explained 43% of the variance between successful and unsuccessful leaders. Despite this knowledge, 95% of post-graduate leadership programs still focus primarily on skillset.
“To stay ahead, leadership development programs should expand their focus to include mindset maturity,” says Dr Hastings.
3. Diversity isn’t an add-on — it’s core to leadership
Diversity and inclusion are often treated as separate from leadership development frameworks. “What we tend to see is that organisations have a leadership framework and a separate diversity and inclusion policy,” says Dr Hastings.
“The problem we have seen with this separation is that inclusion policies say ‘we need a more diverse leadership team’ but the way that translates in practice is that leaders from marginalised cultures can sometimes be placed in leadership roles that represent those same communities.
“From a leadership perspective, this approach helps inclusion but actually reduces the diversity in teams, because we have like-minded people working together,” says Dr Hastings. He goes on to say that another problem is the message this sends to younger, aspirational leaders from these same communities: “They can only ever aspire to a subset of leadership positions.”
Harnessing the benefits of diverse opinions is increasingly understood as a core leadership skill that is essential for driving innovation and performance. What the research shows is that leadership and diversity don’t need to be separate entities, they are closely linked.
Dr Hastings says that when leadership is built on core relational skills – like empathy, trust and communication – leaders are better equipped to bring out the best in diverse teams, meaning the more diverse the team, the better the outcomes.
4. One-size-fits-all leadership development doesn’t work
Traditional leadership models often suggest a straight path from novice leader to expert. “This one-size-fits-all approach fails to account for real-life experience where development is anything but linear roles,” says Dr Hastings.
Recent research suggests leadership is best understood along two dimensions – mindset and skillset – with mindset growth representing vertical development and skill-building representing horizontal development.
“The idea is that as leaders mature, so does their thinking and sense-making, enabling them to better make sense of complexity and lead others when the path is unclear. For skillsets, the horizontal advancement is from individual “I” skills to relational “we” skills. This model supports more personalised development pathways and helps identify a wider range of potential leaders,” he says.
Leaders are not one-dimensional, and neither are their career paths, says Dr Hastings. “People start their leadership journey in different places. Some arrive with natural relational skills, others have a greater command of self-leadership, and people develop at different rates. By considering leadership as a spectrum, organisations can better support leaders in developing their own identities and approaches.”
5. How we measure leadership success needs updating
Dr Christian Criado-Perez, Research Associate at the BII and part of the team behind the new research, says that as relational leadership and mindset maturity gain traction, traditional metrics for leadership success need to be reconsidered. “Measuring outcomes like performance alone can undermine relational leadership goals, such as fostering collaboration and psychological safety,” says Dr Criado-Perez.
The BII review identified scales that effectively measure both relational leadership and mindset maturity. This enables organisations to more accurately assess leadership effectiveness and provide bespoke guidance for individual leaders.
“There’s a disconnect between how we define effective leadership and how we measure it,” says Dr Criado-Perez. “We ought to be relying on metrics that capture relational and mindset-driven leadership to develop them further and assess their impact.
“Overall, and looking forward, one thing is clear: traditional models of leadership have become less effective at describing modern-day leadership. These five evidence-based tips go a long way to helping organisations create fit-for-purpose leaders of the future,” says Dr Criado-Perez.
“These leadership shifts are especially visible in Australia’s public sector, but they’re part of a broader transformation playing out across industries.
“There’s a move away from traditional, top-down models toward leadership that’s more relational, context-aware, and collective. Increasingly, what defines effective leadership is how leaders think, how they connect with others, and how they help build leadership capacity across teams.
“So rather than focusing on the development of individual leaders, it’s about helping groups lead more effectively together,” says Dr Criado-Perez.
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Dr Hastings says that effective leadership today is about collaboration and mindset, with 'We' leaders who embrace relational approaches consistently outperforming those focused on individualistic models. Image: Getty Images
