Around the Table

What's changed about leadership, and what hasn't

November, 2026. Sara Fife.

Last week we took a day out of the office to attend Recruitment United Live, a full day of panels and talks hosted by Recruitment United, the largest community for recruitment agency leaders in Australia and New Zealand. One of the panel discussions, which included our MD, Matt Sampson, looked at how leading people has changed over the last ten years. It was a good conversation, and a few of the ideas have stayed with me, so I thought I'd share them.

I'm sure the leadership landscape has similar challenges whatever the industry. Whether you're leading a design studio, an engineering team or a project on site, I suspect a lot of this will feel familiar.

The panel spoke a lot about authenticity. Their sense was that the expectation of leaders has shifted away from having all the answers and towards being open and vulnerable, flaws included.

This ties in with something I wrote about in my last article, Around the Table: What HR Leaders in AEC Are Talking About. Gen Z will make up roughly 34% of the workforce by 2030, and research by Suzy Welch at NYU Stern found their top values are wellbeing, authentic self-expression and helping others. It makes sense that a generation who values authenticity in themselves would want to see it in their leaders too.

Pace came up too. With things moving so quickly, plans are getting shorter and changes in direction are more frequent. The panelists talked about how much of their time now goes into explaining those changes to their teams, and into building change agility and adaptability in their people more broadly.

One comment that stuck with me was that leadership feels harder than ever, but it's probably always been hard. It's just different in 2026, and more complex.

On new leaders

The part I found most interesting was how the panel framed stepping into leadership for the first time. They put it around three things:

• Capability: what someone already has, and what still needs to be built
• Capacity: whether there's room to take it on
• Commitment: whether they're really invested in it

Their view was that without all three in spades, it's very hard to deliver.

Another theme was how being great at your job doesn't automatically make you a great leader. It's one that's close to home for us. We once promoted one of our best recruiters into a leadership role, assuming their success would carry over. It didn't, and that was down to us, not them. In hindsight, we rewarded them for one job by giving them a very different one.

For us, it's been a reminder that the people who'll lead well tomorrow aren't always the obvious choices today.