Our inaugural Business Leader Group of 2025 took place on 25 February and explored leadership in a changing world order, with the question “Will what got us here in 2024 still take us there in 2025?”
Self diagnosis of your performance level as a business leader in 2025
Ahead of the February BLG session, we asked all the attendees to explore their leadership performance level with our latest diagnostic (Click here to access the diagnostic) crucial to setting 2025 personal goals.
A 2024 retrospective to 2025 leadership performance
In last year’s BLG sessions we talked about ‘what to adopt and abandon’. Out went toxic team members and strategic thinking without implementation, and in came contrarian thought, customer centricity and a real focus on operational excellence. Much of this revolved around the role of a positive mindset – it won’t always guarantee you a win, but a negative mindset will almost certainly guarantee you always loose.
Strategic thinking, change implementation and continuous improvement all remained top focus areas. From embracing practical suggestions for improvement to driving transformational change to crafting a comprehensive strategy and communicating a unifying vision to a workforce where it said only around a third employee’s perceive you as demonstrating any form of human leadership.
Musk the Napoleonic motivator
In 2025 America is clearly moving towards a new world order that many of us are finding difficult to comprehend – and in the middle of this it would appear that their very own version of Jim Hacker from the Ministry of Administrative Affairs, appears to have scant regard for many the top 2030 trends highlighted in our Mindshop Thriving in 2025 Business Leader report:
- Embracing changing workforce dynamics
- An increased emphasis on your EQ (Emotional Intelligence)
- Proactive agile leadership that fosters collaboration
While 46% of business leaders are looking to scale up in 2025, in a steadily evolving fashion, economic and margin pressures coupled with cashflow mean that 54% think that 2025 will be a more challenging year than 2024.
A lack of strategy still features when it is paramount that businesses have a clear understanding of what differentiates them and can verbalise their competitive advantage.
With our Daffernomics hat on – It is said that Musk brings military history to the workplace. Like Napoleon, if they see their General in the battlefield, he believes they will more motivated. Historically battlefields where physical places, business generals today are fighting the motivational battle across multiple home locations. With a whopping 86% of leaders see attracting and retaining good people as challenging, your motivational modus operandi has never been questioned more.
AI – like collaborating with an alien?
Artificial Intelligence remains a huge priority for many UK businesses in 2025, but it still feels alien. While early adopters may ultimately win, in reality, only a third of British business leaders are willing to trust AI and so far uptake is patchy.
Where it is being used is in information summarisation, data analysis and content creation. The automation of basic tasks today could soon morph into augmented experiences tomorrow, as it is forecast that 96% of customer interactions will be AI assisted boosting businesses knowledge workforce and speed to market. 78% of marketers will be automating tasks, you will be segmented, scored as good customer (or not), your level of demand forecast and can expect a hyper-personalised approach in your favourite font.
Two-thirds of top performing companies value AI in cutting the development lifecycle, making it faster to market and delivering customer value sooner, with quality risk and compliance apparently being dealt with along the journey.
Small businesses are three times more likely to face cyber criminals, reportedly 60% of SME’s go out of business within six months of a data breach. With around 40% lacking in the cyber security department, is now the time to fight AI with AI!
Simon Cossey is Dafferns’ Business Development Consultant and part of our Strategic Advisory team.
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