The rise of empowering leadership training: What it means for 2025 talent strategies

The past year has been marked by turbulence, with businesses of all sizes facing financial challenges, reorganizations, and shifting strategies. Against this backdrop of uncertainty, organizations are making a decisive pivot in their talent development strategies.

Drawing from data analysis of 25,975  learners across 194 industry-leading companies and 148,773 hours of skills practice, Lepaya's The State of Skills 2025 report revealed a dramatic increase in empowering leadership training, surging by 171% from 17,223 hours trained in 2023 to 46,644 hours in 2024.

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This growth reflects organizations' urgent need to develop strong internal guidance during market uncertainty. But what's driving this focus, and what are key trends in leadership development for today's complex business environment?

What is empowering leadership?

Empowering leadership training focuses on developing leaders who inspire, enable, and support their teams to take ownership of their roles, make decisions, and achieve their team’s potential. The training includes capabilities essential for modern business leadership such as building psychological safety within teams, setting and achieving team goals, cultivating leadership mindset and values, or driving talent performance.

While traditional leadership models rely on top-down decision-making, empowering leadership cultivates environments where teams can thrive with autonomy, trust, and shared responsibility. In this framework, leaders evolve from controllers to enablers, becoming facilitators of high-performing workplaces where their teams can confidently tackle challenges and opportunities. They build trust through transparency and consistent support, encourage experimentation while providing safety nets for learning from failure, and actively develop their team members' capabilities to think strategically and act autonomously —reflecting emerging leadership trends that prioritize empowerment and growth.

Empowering leadership development examples

Dr. Makoto Makabe, Director of Corporate Learning & Development at Freudenberg explains how his organization is developing empowering leaders:

"Our programs are designed to engage leaders across Freudenberg in meaningful discussions about doing the right thing. These programs challenge participants to apply concepts within their own contexts, rather than waiting for trainers to provide answers. Leadership isn’t about expecting to be told what to do—that’s following, not leading. True leadership requires courage: taking risks, making decisions despite incomplete information, and staying accountable.”

Driving forces behind the  leadership development trends 

The dramatic increase in empowering leadership development reflects a deeper transformation in how organizations are approaching their growth strategies in uncertain times.

The rapid pace of market shifts and technological disruption has exposed the limitations of traditional organizational hierarchies. As companies face increasingly complex challenges and 82% of professionals believe that workforce demands are developing faster than their skills, conventional top-down models have proven too slow and rigid to compete effectively. In response, organizations are evolving toward flatter structures that enable faster, more flexible workflows.

This evolution demands a new approach to leadership. Rather than just directing from above, companies need empowered leadership that can adapt, inspire, and guide their teams through uncertainty with confidence.

Furthermore, with tighter budgets and increased pressure to deliver results, organizational success now depends on leaders who can boost engagement and productivity, helping their teams achieve more with limited resources. 

As a result, HR and L&D made empowering leadership development their top priority in 2024, recognizing it as their primary defense against market changes. Rather than relying on external solutions like new hires or technology implementations, companies invested in building internal capabilities to drive transformation from within.

"Leadership upskilling became a top priority in 2024 because of the growing demands on managers in today’s leaner, more volatile economic climate," explains Annee Spijkervet, VP Commercial at Lepaya.

“Managers are no longer just team leaders—they are also change agents, mentors, and advocates for their team’s wellbeing, each of which requires a different skill set.”

Looking ahead: Transforming leadership development in 2025 

With leadership development emerging as the top training priority in 2024, organizations are reassessing how they build empowering leadership capabilities at scale.

"For years, organizations have underinvested in leadership development, leading to a critical skills gap that is now directly impacting productivity. For instance, data shows that 80% of change initiatives fail—not because people resist change, but because they resist bad leadership.

Working with over 200 enterprises across industries, we've observed similar challenges. There's an urgent need to onboard new leaders faster so they can become productive in their roles more quickly, while simultaneously equipping existing leaders with better performance management skills to drive results and inspire their teams." - Annee Spijkervet, VP Commercial at Lepaya

Moving beyond traditional one-off training programs, success in 2025 demands creating continuous learning environments that reinforce empowering leadership principles daily.

This means implementing personalized coaching programs that help leaders build psychological safety and trust, establishing feedback systems that reinforce autonomous decision-making, and providing practical tools for guiding teams through complex challenges.

As we examine future trends in leadership development, it's clear that organizations excelling in developing empowered leaders will be better positioned to build agile, high-performing teams needed to capture new opportunities in an unpredictable market. The investment in this leadership approach isn't just about improving individual capabilities, it's about creating organizational cultures where innovation, adaptability, and sustainable growth can flourish.

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