Although we love to assume that leadership must change from one year to the next—prompting us to reimagine or reinvent it on a regular basis—the reality is far more mundane.

Whatever you lead and whenever you lead, the essence of the leadership challenge remains fundamentally unchanged: Can you turn a group of people into a high-performing team? Can you convince a group of people to set aside their individualistic, selfish agendas to be part of a cohesive, coordinated unit? Can you persuade people to cooperate to get ahead of competing teams? Can you find ways to help people trade in comfort in the present to help produce a desired result in the future? And perhaps most diagnostic of all the questions: What will happen in the group, team, or organization you are responsible for that would not have happened if you were not there?

Unsurprisingly, leaders are more likely to accomplish these critical goals when they are smart, socially skilled, and honest, so they can elicit trust and earn a positive reputation. These are some of the ingredients that get others to want to follow them. To be sure, context can change the specifics of what good leadership looks like. For instance, in the AI age, leaders must be particularly good at staying calm, projecting confidence, enabling people to have hope in the future, thereby inspiring a willingness to change.

Transformational leadership qualities thus become more central than in more predictable and less complex times.

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