Future Skills: Rethinking Leadership

How can we lead successfully when change becomes the new normal? As the business event at The Circle showed, “future skills” no longer mean leadership in the traditional sense, but rather a new kind of leadership.

The demands on executives are growing: AI is transforming business models, skilled workers are becoming scarcer, and geopolitical and economic uncertainties are on the rise. Interest in the topic “Future Skills for Success” was correspondingly high: The event sold out very quickly, and nearly 120 people attended the event hosted by memox at the Novu Campus at The Circle at Zurich Airport. It was one of nine business events organized by the ZRH Community this year, held in collaboration with HR Today and FRZ Flughafenregion Zürich.

Future-of-Work strategist Eva Pauline Bossow, founder of the strategy consulting firm BOSSOW Strategy.Transfer. Impact. GmbH, kicked off the program with her keynote address on the skills leaders need in this environment. She then discussed her ideas with Markus Gfeller, Managing Director of gategroup Switzerland and Austria; Jan Jacob, Managing Director of Randstad Switzerland; and Moritz Marti, CEO of HR Campus. The panel discussion was moderated by Florian Inhauser, anchor of the “Tagesschau” news program on SRF.

When Change Becomes the New Normal

Bossow began her keynote with some thought-provoking statistics: 71 percent of executives report a significant increase in their stress levels, and more than half are worried about burnout. A key reason for this is the simultaneous nature of the challenges: management must rethink their value chains in light of changing market conditions, adapt their own IT infrastructure to technical developments, and address the transfer of knowledge between the outgoing and incoming generations - to name just a few. All of this is happening not in isolation, but simultaneously. “Transformation is no longer a project with a start and end date,” Bossow made clear, “but a permanent state of affairs.” Leadership must therefore learn to deal with this “shift” and integrate it into the organization.

Three Dimensions of Modern Leadership

“Future skills” do not necessarily refer to new abilities. Rather, the emphasis on existing competencies is shifting. Bossow distinguishes three dimensions: Business Leadership, People Leadership, and Tech Leadership.

Leaders must understand their own business, translate strategies, and set priorities. At the same time, they must empower people to take on responsibility. And they need sufficient technological understanding to assess how, for example, AI is changing their own business model. “You can’t delegate that,” Bossow emphasized.

The key point here is that it’s not about burdening leaders with even more tasks. They should delegate operational responsibilities in a more targeted manner, thereby creating space for strategy, transformation, and leadership.

Soft skills are becoming hard currency

Jan Jacob highlighted just how relevant cross-functional skills already are today. Labor market analyses clearly show a growing demand for emotional intelligence, social skills, and leadership.

Technical skills remained important but were changing at an ever-faster pace. This made skills that enable people to cope with change all the more valuable. These included curiosity, communication, self-reflection, the ability to learn, and the ability to provide guidance to others, according to

Moritz Marti. He also emphasized the importance of having the freedom to learn.

Companies must create “training grounds” where employees can take on responsibility, experiment, and even make mistakes.

From Job Description to Talent Pool

The panel discussion made it particularly clear that skills-based thinking is also transforming recruiting and talent development. Instead of evaluating people solely on the basis of a resume or a rigid job description, companies should understand which skills are already present within their own organization and which are not.

That’s why Markus Gfeller deliberately looks for “hidden skills” in applicants. For example, he discovered that a candidate for a supply chain position had experience as an ice hockey captain - and thus leadership qualities that would never have appeared in a traditional job description.

For Bossow, this represents a significant step toward a skills-based organization: making talent visible, developing employees in a targeted manner, and deploying them where their skills can be most effective.

Employees are becoming a “scarce resource”

Gfeller illustrated just how much leadership has already changed using an example from gategroup’s private jet catering operation in Geneva. There, early turnover among chefs at times reached 50 percent. Following fundamental changes, it was possible to significantly reduce the division while simultaneously making it profitable.

The team leader in charge later summed up the transformation in a single sentence: “A few years ago, my biggest fear was losing a customer. Today, my biggest fear is losing an employee.”

In doing so, he captured a key insight from the evening: Sustainable companies need more than just the right technology and good processes. They need leaders who develop people, share responsibility, and provide direction.

And perhaps, above all, this requires a skill that Jan Jacob described at the end as his personal “superpower”: “I want to stay curious.”

During the networking reception that followed, the ideas from the keynote and panel discussion were further explored in lively conversations. Combined with the event selling out very quickly and the nearly 120 participants, this demonstrated once again just how intensely the business world - including at Zurich Airport and in the airport region - is currently grappling with the question of the right skills for the future.

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