Leadership has reached breaking point

Over time, the leadership job description has expanded almost without challenge. Managers are asked to set strategy and deliver performance while coaching employees, sustaining engagement, managing change, communicating clearly and responding to emerging issues such as AI adoption and navigating multigenerational workforces.

This is what the TruthWorks Leadership on the Edge white paper calls responsibility inflation: every new organisational challenge becomes another responsibility for the manager.

“The environment leaders are operating in has evolved faster than the way that we have designed and developed leadership. Perhaps this isn’t simply a question of leadership capability; it’s actually a question of leadership design.”
— Rhiannon Stroud, Co-founder, TruthWorks

The result is often overload, isolation and declining confidence. Leaders can feel expected to have answers on topics they are still learning themselves, while their teams may have deeper knowledge in areas such as technology or AI. The gap between expectations and real support is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.

As Antoine put it:

“We are still writing job descriptions for unicorn profiles… and heroes don’t scale.”
— Antoine Brossard, Senior Director of Talent, Leadership and Culture, Philips

The problem is not that organisations need better leaders in the abstract. It is that too many still design leadership around the myth of the all-rounder: someone who is strategically sharp, emotionally intelligent, culturally credible, technologically fluent, a great coach and an expert in their function…all at once.

That is not a scalable system. Nor is it fair to the individual leader, their team or the organisation.

The system has to change too

Responsibility inflation is not only a workload problem. It is a design problem.

If organisations continue to add responsibilities to leadership roles without reviewing spans of control, decision rights, career structures, supporting capability or the work leaders are expected to stop doing, overwhelm is inevitable. It is unrealistic to expect managers to be strategic, emotionally available, technologically fluent, culturally credible, performance-focused and constantly adaptive while leaving the role, and the system around it, unchanged.

The task is not to lower expectations of leadership. It is to design more realistic conditions for leadership to work.

Move from controllers to multipliers

For Philips, the answer has not been to give leaders a more prescriptive rulebook. It has been to create greater clarity of direction while allowing more judgement in context.

Antoine described a shift from leaders as controllers to leaders as multipliers. In uncertain periods, organisations naturally centralise decisions, tighten controls and seek to reduce risk. That can make sense in survival mode. But when the business needs to grow, innovate and move faster, control becomes a bottleneck.

In a global organisation with thousands of leaders operating across different functions, countries and environments, it is neither realistic nor useful to prescribe exactly how every leader should act in every situation.

“A compass is about direction, not a script.”
— Antoine Brossard, Senior Director of Talent, Leadership and Culture, Philips

Rather than a detailed manual of behaviours, Philips has developed a leadership compass: a shared set of standards that helps leaders make sound decisions in their own context. It sets a common direction around how leaders show up, how they multiply capability in their teams, and how they create value beyond their immediate area.

This matters because a factory shift leader and a software leader do not operate in the same reality. A universal script is unlikely to work for either. A clear compass, grounded in strategy and culture, gives them the latitude to apply judgement without losing coherence.

From fixed identity to adaptive capability

Leadership is increasingly less about holding a fixed set of traits, and more about reading the context, using sound judgement and adapting in real time.

TruthWorks’ model - the adaptive leadership lens - captures this shift: from anchor to adapter; from strategic messenger to credible voice; from cultural role model to culture shaper; from coach to AI-augmented developer; and from team protector to team designer.

“I see it as less of a fixed identity of leadership and more of a continuous capability.”
— Rhiannon Stroud, Co-founder, TruthWorks

This does not mean leaders must become experts in every issue that emerges. It means organisations must help them build the capacity to interpret change, make credible decisions and create the conditions in which their teams can respond.

For example, the future-oriented leader is not only responsible for protecting their team from excessive workload and burnout. They must increasingly help design work, workflows and team conditions so that burnout is less likely to become an outcome in the first place.

Stop treating people leadership as a promotion prize

One of the most important challenges raised in the conversation was the assumption that career progression must mean managing people.

Too often, brilliant scientists, engineers, designers and specialists are promoted into management because it is the only route upwards. In doing so, organisations can move talented experts away from the work they are best at and into a leadership role they may not want, have time for or be equipped to carry.

The cost is high:

• Experts can lose the opportunity to deepen their craft.
• Teams may inherit reluctant or underconfident managers.
• People leadership becomes a side activity rather than a deliberate professional role.
• Organisations weaken both technical expertise and leadership quality.

A more sustainable alternative is a genuine dual career ladder: one in which deep experts can progress with equal status, influence and reward, without having to manage others. People leadership should be a deliberate choice, not “the tax you pay” to advance.

That also creates room for more varied leadership archetypes. Some roles may need player-coaches who retain a close connection to technical work. Others may need dedicated people leaders whose primary work is creating the conditions for people and teams to perform.

Culture is the enabling system

The discussion also reinforced that leadership, culture and change cannot be separated. If organisations want leaders to exercise judgement, build adaptive teams and use AI responsibly, they need a culture that enables those behaviours.

At Philips, the culture was refreshed before the leadership framework was further developed. Rather than introducing a complex manual, the organisation focused on a simple, visible and memorable articulation of its culture. The goal was to let people understand and absorb it through everyday communication, hiring and organisational life before adding further leadership detail.

This sequencing matters. Leaders cannot credibly bring a culture to life if they have not had the chance to understand it as employees themselves.

The test, Antoine explained, is simple: put the culture and leadership expectations side by side. Is the connection so explicit that people can understand, almost immediately, how one reinforces the other?

If not, there is more work to do.

Clear leadership expectations are not simplistic. They are an act of care. When expectations are unclear, people spend energy second-guessing priorities, permissions and performance standards. When direction is clear, they are better able to act with confidence.

Leadership development is a business issue

Perhaps the strongest message from the webinar was that leadership development cannot sit solely within L&D.

Courses, portals and programmes have their place. But they are not enough if the organisation’s structures, career pathways, decision-making norms and culture are working against the behaviours those interventions aim to develop.

Leadership support needs to show up in the flow of work: in how decisions are made, how teams are designed, how promotions happen, how leaders are measured and how senior stakeholders model the change.

As Antoine said:

“Leadership development is not an L&D initiative. It has to be a strategic shift owned by the business.”
— Antoine Brossard, Senior Director of Talent, Leadership and Culture, Philips

That means involving senior leaders in the design, not simply asking them to sponsor a finished solution. It means combining external insight with a deep understanding of the organisation’s strategy, culture and operating context. And it means giving stakeholders meaningful opportunities to shape the outcome so that they own it.

The leadership challenge ahead is not to produce more heroic individuals. It is to create an operating environment where ordinary leaders can do consistently good work: with clearer priorities, realistic expectations, better structures and the confidence to adapt.

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