Framing the Landscape for Balancing Modern Leadership
Modern leadership comes in all shapes and sizes. Management can be taught, leadership needs to be practiced. A founder leader builds something unique to them and then has to share the joy and burden of that uniqueness with their team. A family business leader has a collective ‘family’ uniqueness that has to move with the times. In todays world, both these types of leaders evolve personally and as business leaders at a rate of change that more supported corporate leaders would not understand. That is why we believe BALANCE iT is so important. As leaders you are vital to our economy, our social fabric and to the very essence of the places we live in.
As a leader you are constantly refining a skill as old as humanity itself. It is not easy and it will never be perfect. We are here to support your journey and we are developing BALANCE iT as a model to support leaders into their future landscape.
Enormous statements can be made : “A modern leader doesn’t provide good answers, they enable great questions.” But, how do you create your leadership style and balance all that you want from your business, your family and your life?
Here is how we are working on an answer for you:
Leadership challenges from our survey
To capture leadership challenges we shared a short online survey. We put the responses from our survey through AI and it identified the pressure points and growth levers the leaders were facing:
Pressure Points
💼 Overwhelming workload and competing priorities
💰 Rising costs, inflation, and profit margin squeeze
🔄 Constant adaptation and limited recovery time
🧍♂️ Talent gaps, recruitment, and retention issues
🧘♀️ Limited space for personal wellbeing and reflection
🗣️ Cultural transformation and top-down role-modelling
🧾 Compliance pressures, underdeveloped infrastructure
🏛️ Minimal government support or policy frustration
Growth Levers
🤹 Strategic prioritisation and resource meetings
🧪 Pricing agility, product innovation
🚀 Small enterprise flexibility and rapid decision-making
🏗️ Building capability and succession pipelines
🕰️ Intentional work/life balance and breathing room
💬 Team empowerment and engagement
📈 Efficiency upgrades and pragmatic trade-offs
How many of these are you balancing?
Leadership challenges from the taster day
Building on the survey, in July we gathered a brilliant group of businesses to taste part of BALANCE iT at the wonderful Halcyon Club. The challenges that were front of their minds were:
- Finding additional income streams
- Developing leaders who deliver through other people, not doing it themselves, keeping focused on the long term
- Improving cash flow
- Developing the role at the top
- Making a decision on tech
- Ensuring my people are productive & not ‘busy’
- I enjoy been in the ‘weeds’, so I need to get better at passing on responsibilities, trust people to make decisions
- My business partner and I are diverging from where we were 10 plus years ago
- We have a good new team, now need to pass down knowledge. Need to develop training protocols.
- Find a difference between managing and motivating engineers to office staff
- Want to maintain momentum, (don’t screw it up), keep a steady ship (don’t let an important cog jump off)
- Decide if we should be be on the front foot or reactive?
- Decide when to innovate, which includes the way we see competition
- Creating time, prioritising the need to ‘offshore time’ and balancing it with the constant thought that the team needs to see me
- Priorities & capacities: balancing resources and confidence to make decisions
- Managing change of staff development, managerial level, pass buck (avoid grey decision areas)
- Relationships (small village community)
- The transition of a friend becoming a manager with loyalty to us as directors
These translated the survey challenges into what leaders are doing to relieve pressure points and embrace growth levers.
Leadership support trends from the experts
We have been scanning papers from Google Scholar, Harvard Business Review and McKinsey to gather the expert view on how leadership is developing across the business world. Many of these we share in 5 minute reads. Some of the key headlines are noted here:
Balancing the four leadership capacities
Harvard’s framework of leadership fitness, name four leadership dimensions of balance, endurance, strength, and flexibility, which is what we are using to fine tune our leadership program.
UK Business challenges
2024 was challenging for business leaders. The ERC report, The State of Small Business Britain 2024, highlighted four themes around leadership for private businesses. They covered inclusivity, wellbeing, new ways of working and changing mindsets. These were Inclusive and Diverse Leadership Drives Innovation ; The ‘Attitude to Action’ Gap in Workplace Well‑being; Challenges in Adapting to New Ways of Working and a Call to Reassess Leadership Mindsets
Strategic Pragmatism
One emerging concept from Ricarda B. Bouncken and Sascha Kraus is ‘Strategic Pragmatism Orientation’ a framework that helps businesses balance stability with adaptability, ensuring resilience in uncertain times. The the full paper “Bouncken, R.B., Kraus, S. Strategic pragmatism orientation: a framework for navigating recurring crises and the ‘zeitenwende’ with stability and agility. Rev Manag Sci (2025)” makes interesting reading. Think of it like steering a ship. Some parts of your business your values, core operations, and long-term strategies need to ‘act as the sturdy keel’, providing essential stability. Meanwhile, other areas like innovation, digital adoption, and reactive decision-making must remain ‘fluid and adaptable’, helping the business adjust to changing winds.
Age of Outrage
Today, leaders face a stream of crisis. Most of which are not of our making. Insights from Harvard’s Leadership Fitness Model & Karthik Ramanna’s “Managing in the Age of Outrage” show this era where outrage spreads at lightning speed, leaders face relentless challenges in managing polarized debates, stakeholder expectations, and organizational resilience. Harvard’s Leadership Fitness Model highlights four capacities: endurance, flexibility, strength, and resilience, two of which align especially well with Ramanna’s strategies for navigating the modern landscape: endurance and flexibility.
Inner Balance
Great leaders manage to balance apparently opposing forces. In a thought provoking McKinsey insight, Aalia Ratani ,
Carolyn Dewar and Johanne Lavoie explore how female CEOs harness this human centric skill. It’s not just balance it’s about inner balance.
Flexibility
McKinsey’s June 2025 ‘A new operating model for a new world‘ speaks less like a rallying cry and more like a systems-level nudge: If your strategy still feels right, but performance is lagging, maybe it’s time to redesign how you’re business is built to deliver that performance.
Delivery challenges from talking to the experts
In shaping BALANCE iT, we are speaking with experts across the UK. From policy labs to creative studios, boardrooms to community initiatives. These weren’t program participants. They were active contributors helping us decode what leadership needs to look like now. Many of them are already delivering brilliant programmes for our UK Leaders.
Their insights are helping refine the scaffolding for BALANCE iT’s ethos:
- Challenge is central Leadership development thrives on ambiguity, tension, and disruption, it’s no longer about simplifying complexity, but engaging with it.
- Reflection must be built in Strategic pause came up again and again, not as a luxury, but as a necessity in cultivating clarity and self-awareness.
- Leadership agility matters Effective leaders now span boundaries. They speak across sectors, blend disciplines, and adapt dynamically to changing contexts.
This chorus of perspectives didn’t just inform our content. It influenced our tone: curious, grounded, and provocatively practical.
Our thanks go out to Dom Doig, Kerry Doig, Haydon Boocock, Lesley Robinson, Ben Hickman, Dan Jackson, Diane Richardson, David Black, Sheena McDermott, Anthony Impey, Nigel Lockett, Luke Jackson, Alexander Scott, John Berry, Nigel Mills, Elaine Stroud, Lorna Edwards, Barry Leahey, Jerry Marwood, Stephen McCullough, Helen Atherton and Joe Sanders (who asked really good questions for our podcast!).
It’s time to talk
If you have got this far then it’s time for us to talk. We are launching a programme that will work for you. Call us or email us now. No obligation, just be part of the future of leadership for yourself and those like you. Ring Jacqui on 07460034551 or Keith on 07460 034499 or email Hello@thomasjardineandco.co.uk
