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57%of CEOs and CxOs believe their executive team has the capabilities needed to successfully lead their organization in 2025—down from 80% in 2021 Source: RRA (2025) Global Leadership Monitor
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For decades, experience was one of the clearest indicators of executive readiness. Organizations took confidence from leaders who had navigated similar situations, held comparable roles, and accumulated deep functional knowledge.
These indicators served organizations well because they provided tangible, observable evidence. They could be measured, and importantly defended, because many of the challenges leaders were likely to face resembled those they had encountered before.
But that assumption no longer holds true.
Today, many of the problems facing leaders have no obvious precedent. Advancements in AI, geopolitical uncertainty, workforce transformation, changing business models, and new stakeholder expectations require decisions where there is no established playbook and no guarantee that previous experience will provide the right answer.
With leaders now needing to make sense of unfamiliar problems, weigh incomplete or conflicting information, and exercise judgment when there is no obvious answer, leadership success increasingly depends not just on what leaders know, but on how they think.
That changes the capabilities organizations need. It also changes how they identify and develop them. Our research shows that many organizations are still adapting to this reality. Just 57% of CEOs and C-suite leaders agreed their top executives had the right capabilities to lead the organization successfully in 2025, down from 80% in 2021.
Here, we set out the organizational risks of over-indexing on experience, the capabilities that increasingly matter alongside it, and what organizations need to do differently as a result.
Leadership advisor, Social Impact Practice, RRA
Across our research, a consistent pattern is emerging: the demands on leadership are changing faster than many of the structures and practices designed to support it.
57% think their executive team has the capabilities to lead successfully—down from 80% in 2021
32% feel prepared to address geopolitical uncertainty
39% feel ready to address workforce transformation
29% rate their organization's ability to prepare leaders for an uncertain future as excellent
28% say their executive team balances short-term and long-term priorities
29% describe transformation efforts as very or extremely successful
RETHINK LEADERSHIP CAPABILITIES
Issues increasingly stack and interact, compounding complexity. Leaders must navigate multiple interconnected consequences at once.
Disruption is arriving faster as innovation cycles compress. The opportunities for those who move early are growing, as are the risks for those who do not.
Business-critical issues now cut across business units, requiring leaders to solve problems together that no single function can own.
Leaders must deliver short-term performance while making decisions whose impact may take years or decades to materialize.
Leaders face increasingly diverse—and often conflicting—stakeholder expectations. Alignment is rarely possible, while social media can amplify disagreement.
The old model was not a mistake. Experience became the default because it was tangible. Career histories could be verified, and track records could be compared. But the capabilities that increasingly determine success are different. They are less visible and more contextual.
When organizations cannot confidently assess these new qualities, they often fall back on the evidence they know best. Experience becomes the default proxy because it is easier to observe, compare, and defend. This carries significant risk.
Experience has not stopped being useful; it has stopped being sufficient on its own. Increasingly, organizations need to look beyond what leaders know to understand how they think when knowledge and experience no longer provide the answer.
Generative AI will only accelerate this shift. As access to information and specialist knowledge becomes easier, the value leaders add increasingly lies in what they do with it: which questions they ask, which signals they pay attention to, which trade-offs they make, and where they ultimately place their bets.
The leaders who thrive amid uncertainty are sense makers, able to take a situation with no precedent, assess conflicting information, and still make clear strategic choices. They can frame a problem, judge what matters within it, what can be ignored, and decide a clear path forward.
Understanding who can lead this way requires looking beneath experience to the capabilities and mindsets that shape how leaders approach the unfamiliar.
• Curiosity and adaptability: The willingness to approach new situations without assuming the answer is already known; to seek information, challenge assumptions, and change course when new evidence arrives.
• Drive and resilience: The capacity to maintain direction through setbacks and uncertainty, while learning from what has gone wrong rather than simply pushing through it.
• Social intelligence: The ability to read different perspectives, build trust and navigate competing stakeholder needs—particularly when progress depends on influence rather than authority.
• Systems thinking: The ability to step back from the immediate problem, see how its different parts connect and anticipate how a decision in one area will affect the wider enterprise.
• Self-knowledge: A clear understanding of one’s own strengths and limitations, including the conditions in which they are most likely to thrive, grow, or struggle.
• Values and aspirations: Clarity about the values, principles and non-negotiables that guide decisions—particularly when choices are difficult or competing interests cannot all be satisfied.
• Wider impact and legacy: A sense of purpose that extends beyond personal success, including a clear view of the impact they want to have on the organization and wider ecosystem.
ASSESS AND DEVELOP FUTURE-READY LEADERS
Recognizing that leadership success is increasingly dependent on these capabilities is only the starting point. The harder task is ensuring that they carry real weight in the leadership decisions organizations make.
Experience will—and should—remain part of those decisions. But when organizations rely too heavily on familiar career paths, previous roles and accumulated expertise, they risk overlooking leaders who may be better equipped to navigate unfamiliar challenges. They may also miss opportunities to help existing leaders continue building the judgment and adaptability they will need as new challenges emerge.
The reset therefore needs to extend across the leadership lifecycle: who organizations hire, how they assess them, and how they continue to develop them once they are in role.
• Are our leadership criteria identifying the person best equipped for what lies ahead—or the person whose experience feels most familiar?
Look at where “must-have” experience may be unnecessarily narrowing the field, and distinguish what is genuinely essential from what has simply become conventional.
• Do our assessments reveal how leaders think when they don't know the answer?
Past performance remains important evidence, but organizations also need to understand how leaders frame unfamiliar problems, challenge assumptions, navigate incomplete information and adapt when new evidence emerges.
• Are we treating senior leaders as finished products once they are appointed?
Consider whether executives continue to receive the coaching, mentoring, feedback, exposure and challenge they need to keep evolving as the demands around them change.
• Are we giving leaders enough opportunities to operate outside what they already know?
Consider whether stretch assignments, cross-functional exposure and unfamiliar contexts are deliberately being used to build the judgment and adaptability leaders will need when established expertise provides only part of the answer.
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