Balance & Beyond

The Leadership Skills No One Taught You (But You Need to Succeed in 2025)

• Jo Stone • Season 3 • Episode 91

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Feeling stretched too thin in your leadership journey? You're not alone. The pace of change in 2025 demands a new approach to success—one that doesn't sacrifice your wellbeing on the altar of achievement.

My deep dive into the three critical leadership skills that ambitious women need right now reveals surprising truths about what's actually holding you back. First, authenticity has become your greatest competitive advantage in an AI-dominated landscape. When everything else can be perfected with technology, your humanity—complete with quirks and vulnerabilities—is what makes you irreplaceable. Yet many workplaces have become coldly transactional, with meaningful connections replaced by robotic interactions. Learning to be strategically vulnerable, especially in those small moments before meetings or during brief exchanges, creates the foundation for genuine leadership influence.

Equally important is visibility—a skill many talented women avoid due to discomfort with self-promotion. Like it or not, your excellent work doesn't speak for itself anymore. While you're heads-down producing exceptional results, others (often men) are actively claiming the spotlight and getting promoted. The truth? Your nervous system needs conditioning to feel safe while being seen, whether you're presenting to senior executives or sharing content online. The most successful leaders aren't necessarily the most capable—they're the ones who've mastered both capability and visibility.

Finally, adaptability separates those who will thrive from those who'll burn out. When you're already running on empty, even small disruptions can cause complete system failure. True adaptability isn't about fragmenting yourself further—it's about creating enough capacity to bend without breaking. This means prioritizing self-care, letting go of perfectionism, and developing the confidence to pivot quickly when circumstances change.

Ready to transform your leadership approach and create sustainable success? These skills aren't just nice-to-haves—they're the foundation of a leadership style that allows you to advance your career while maintaining balance in every area of life. What leadership skill will you focus on developing first?

To view the Transcript from this week's episode, visit our Balance & Beyond Podcast webpage: https://www.balanceinstitute.com/podcast/2025/91

Thank you for joining us today on the Balance and Beyond Podcast. We're so glad you carved out this time for yourself!

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Thanks again for tuning in, and we'll see you next time on the Balance & Beyond Podcast!

Jo:

Welcome to Balance and Beyond, the podcast for ambitious women who refuse to accept burnout as the price of success. Here we're committed to empowering you with the tools and strategies you need to achieve true balance, where your career, relationships and health all thrive and where you have the power to define success on your terms. I honor the space you've created for yourself today. So let's take a breath and dive right in. There are three overlooked leadership skills that are going to define success in 2025. And here's the thing no one is talking about these three things in the way I'm about to share with you today. I don't have to tell you that the world is moving really fast and we are seeing a new paradigm of leadership enter, particularly as it comes to being a female woman who is looking for more in her career, who is looking for that next step up. So today I'm going to share with you what these skills are and, importantly, what's going to happen if you don't cultivate them. So, first up, one of my favorite words is authenticity. This could also be one something like integrity. There is so much power in being strategically vulnerable and learning to lead with authentic presence In an era of AI, when we're seeing this blend and sort of homogenous middle where everything is starting to sound the same and everyone can be perfect and can click a button and get rid of ums and ahs and everything else. What's going to set us apart and make everyone realize that we are not a robot is our humanity us apart. And make everyone realize that we are not a robot is our humanity, it's our authenticity. It's really showing our true selves and in order to not be AI'd, you have to be imperfect. You are going to have to show your weird, quirky, authentic self and if you are drowning in perfectionism, if you are too afraid for people to see the real you, then you won't be able to unleash this side of you. That is going to be an incredible competitive advantage this year and into future years for those who can harness it quickly. This is going to mean learning to make mistakes and apologize for them. Oh my gosh, can you believe it? For people to see us make mistakes, for people to see our emotions, for us to see how we feel and what I am seeing?

Jo:

A really interesting trend as people are working more now in hybrid environments, they just march back to the office. In hybrid environments there's this march back to the office is offices are becoming places that are somewhat sterile. I was doing a consulting presentation recently and this conversation I had with the gentleman was fascinating about. People are coming in you know, on their mandated day in or whatever it is, but they're coming in and they're getting out. They want to come in, they want to do their work, put their heads down, no time for chit chat, no time for anything outside their hours, and then they're back home where they can be their sort of real selves.

Jo:

And there's this almost stone washing. There's a lack of vulnerability, there's a lack of connection with other humans, because it's just head down, bum up, get the job done. Now, I know that that's the reality for many people who are overworked, who are under-resourced. However, it means that without any authenticity or without any vulnerability, all your interactions and relationships start feeling very transactional. It's as if we've lost the art of connecting in a post-COVID world.

Jo:

It's not about getting back to business and getting the job done, because most businesses, most roles, involve humans, unless you're somebody who sits away in a back corner with a computer, an Excel spreadsheet or a piece of code. You have to interact with people. Organizations are full of living beings. You have to change, you have to adapt, you have to collaborate, and if we're all robotic and if we're all transactional, then there's no fun, there's no joy, there's no connection, there's no being able to lean on someone, there's no asking for help, and so we're going to then, because of this fear and because of this transactional nature of all our relationships, we're going to come less and less authentic. We're going to become more and more afraid to show people the truth of who we really are, and that's tragic, because that's what makes work enjoyable when you're working with another human, when you can build a relationship and talk about your family or your hobbies or what happened on the weekend, rather than just being right.

Jo:

Let's get to it. What's the order of the day? You know, trying to tick off this stuff. What's the point of spending 40 hours a week ticking stuff off a list when you don't connect on a real deep way with anyone? Another trend I'm seeing around this authenticity is there's a misconstrued, I would say idea that we have to have, you know, a full day off site, or we need to have this long lunch, or we need to do all these things after hours in order for people to connect and be authentic. But I recognize the reality people don't have that time.

Jo:

But what we've lost the art of is how to have deeper conversations when they're micro-dosed. By that I mean three minutes before a meeting, how do you actually say the thing? Or how do you say the elephant in the room, or how do you call someone out. This lost art of charisma and being able to leave breadcrumbs for people to hook into at a deeper level, rather than having the chit chat. How was your weekend? Oh, it was a bit rainy, wasn't it? Yeah, I know so busy. You know projects coming on, chitty, chitty chatter. We're all robots. No one's actually connecting.

Jo:

if you're the one that says, gosh, you know going through a tricky time right now? Or oh, wow, you know I've got a lot on, but I'm really excited about this. You know renovation I'm working on. Then that person can then say, oh, like, what renovation are you working on? Suddenly, you've got a deeper level. That's just a little bit less than transactional.

Jo:

But to do that, it's going to require authenticity, and authenticity requires vulnerability, which is something that so many people are not prepared to do because they feel it makes them weak. Or if you are vulnerable, well then you're exposing a flank. Someone's going to use that against you. In a meeting, they're going to throw you under the bus by you exposing a softer side of yourself rather than this very sort of I don't know abrupt or, you know, hardened exterior that nobody can actually get through. So to be a human, to be a human-centered leader, you must learn to embrace authenticity and show up as your weird quirky, you know, one-of-a-kind you, because that's who you are, don't pretend that you're not, and the more you can be human, you can be authentic. You give everyone around you permission to do the same Linked to authenticity.

Jo:

But another key skill, particularly if you want to progress in your career, is something that many people are also afraid of, and this is visibility. Yes, that's right, my friends. To be successful right now, you have to be seen. Too many women are stuck on thinking that they're valuable instead of realising that they need to also be visible. Of course, the common argument is Jo, I don't have time to be visible, I don't have time to raise my profile, I've got stuff to do. If you could see my list, and it goes back to this mistaken belief that the work will speak for itself. I don't have to promote myself. I don't have to make myself visible because I'm going to put my head down, bum up, do a good job and then eventually someone's going to notice. I hate to break it to you, my friend, but these days nobody is noticing and if you hadn't realized, there's a whole lot of men who are not putting their heads down and bum up and are promoting themselves out the wazoo and, of course, they're at more senior levels, typically in leadership.

Jo:

A lot of women don't know how to do this and do this well. I mean by being visible with power and presence, with charisma, and deciding that, yes, I am going to be incredibly capable and intelligent and hardworking, all those things, and I am also going to sing my achievements from the rooftop. I am going to share my successes, I'm going to tell other people what I have achieved. That does not make you have a big head, it does not make everybody not like you and it does not make everybody else want to strangle you and push you back down. That, my friend, is all you.

Jo:

Some common ways I see women hide instead of being visible. The biggest ones is standing behind their teams, not wanting to take the spotlight. The team did this thing. The team did this achievement. The team really banded together. Yeah, of course, I don't want you to take all the credit and pretend that you did it all by yourself, because we know those people and we don't tend to like those people. However, there is a point where you have to start claiming the spotlight, whether it makes you uncomfortable or not. You can bring your team with you and say you know, this is what I, as the leader, did, and of course, you know the team all hung in together and we got this thing done and we collaborated. But where were you holding the space for the team? Where were you driving the team? Where were you deciding the team's priorities? We are so often using the we, even in meetings. We did this, we did that. Have you ever started using I? I did this, I led the team to do that.

Jo:

You will notice, when it comes to even development time or performance review time, often men use I, women use we. Who do you think is going to be perceived better in many organizations? Because the man isn't afraid to be visible in his achievements, to be seen in what he does, they do not hesitate to recommend themselves. Now, I know we can have a funny relationship with that like, oh, but they've got a big ego and they've got a big head, but they're getting promoted. They're getting roles and positions that women are just as, if not more, capable of having. So it is time to start taking the spotlight and start commanding the attention that we deserve.

Jo:

One thing we have to recognize is, when we take the spotlight, it can feel a little gnarly and, as someone who had a LinkedIn post in early 2025, my rant about Mick not being able to find a job and nonlinear career paths it went viral. It's been seen by 1.6 million people. There's over 30,000 reactions, over two and, I think, a half thousand comments. I've now got hundreds and hundreds of new connections. So I have had a very raw and recent experience of going from somebody who had thousands of views on my posts but not millions. That's abnormal. I've done media interviews off the back of it. It's been a wild ride and I can tell you that your nervous system has to adjust to visibility.

Jo:

You have to teach yourself to be safe while being seen, because for many of us, if you go back to our childhood, where all of this comes from, it wasn't safe to be seen. It wasn't safe to stand out or to be different, for whatever your own unique reason was, but we tend to have a lot of the same, I would say, coping mechanisms and behaviors. So, whether it's if I'm seen then will, I want to be seen to be perfect. I can't be seen to be flawed because that's not safe. I will be seen, but I will beat myself up the entire way because I'm going to judge myself often about not being perfect. I'm going to judge my appearance or how I wrote that thing or how I said that thing.

Jo:

We want to make sure that as you step into visibility, you have conditioned your nervous system to be seen, to continue to feel safe. Otherwise, every time you reach a new level of visibility, whether that's internal, maybe you've presented to this particular level of stakeholders and now suddenly's internal maybe you know you've presented to this particular level of stakeholders and now suddenly the chairman or somebody more senior walks into the room and you find that you freeze. That's an indication that your nervous system isn't ready for that level of visibility and heads up, you've probably got some hierarchical wounds that you need to deal with if you're going to be able to be visible to those around you. That you need to deal with if you're going to be able to be visible to those around you.

Jo:

It's interesting that this doesn't seem to be a challenge that the younger generation face, so we could definitely learn something from our kids here, in particular our teens. My 15-year-old takes photos of her nostrils, hairs and sends them to her friends, and of tables and of all kinds of weird, crazy angles of her body, and has no qualms about how it looks or what it is. They sing stuff to each other, they talk stuff to each other, they sing and dance in all kinds of places, and I would have been mortified. You couldn't have paid me to go with my friends and dance in the middle of a public shopping center with music blaring and a camera. And yet if anyone's seen TikTok and God knows what else, that is what they're all doing. They don't have this fear of being seen because they've grown up in an era of intense visibility. Now, of course, that comes with plenty of other challenges, but my point here is we have something to learn Just because we didn't grow up in the shadow of social media. We are in that era. We are in an era of being seen.

Jo:

Those who will be seen will stand out and whether that's posting on LinkedIn, enhancing your profile. We found I saw some stats recently less than 1% of all users on LinkedIn publish anything weekly. So if you're writing anything on LinkedIn, you're in the top 1%. If you want to be in the top 1% in your industry, in your profession, what do you think you need to start doing? You need to start being senior. You need to put down all these other things that are holding you back and learn to be visible. This is why we're sharing so much of this information in our free masterclasses that we're having at the moment around leadership, because it is incredible how many women shy away from this, who still hold that. You know, public speaking is a fear worse than death, but they translate that fear of public speaking into anything public social media appearing on group calls, talking on group calls, talking in meetings, you name it. We have to learn to be visible and find our voice in that visibility if we are really going to step up and succeed to the levels that we know we are capable of.

Jo:

And lastly, adaptability. I don't need to tell you things are moving fast politically, socially, economically. But if you are too busy trying to control everything and wanting everything to be perfect, trying to please everybody, keep everybody happy, keeping the peace, looking after everybody else before you look after yourself, running on fumes, then you are not going to be adaptable, you are not going to be flexible. You're going to be like a big hard board and the moment something rocks you, you're going to snap in half or, more likely, snap into a million little pieces and end up in a puddle on the floor.

Jo:

I see so many women who are living life on a knife's edge, trying to hold it all together, everything together life, kids, work, admin, just the works. And all it takes is one little thing to go off kilter, whether that's a sick kid or because they're just so full that there's no capacity. They are running on empty. So if any little thing is asked more of them, that's it, they're done, they fall to pieces, they've got no ability to flex, and this is energetically, this is emotionally, this is to do with their time, this is logistically, usually because their nervous system is so running in the red, they are so full of cortisol that it feels impossible to be adaptable, because I guarantee you, these women already feel like they're split in 10 000 pieces. So the word adaptability they have almost, almost this adverse reaction to it because it's like, well, I'm so adaptable, like, no, no, you're just in a million pieces. This is why your perfectionism can't survive anymore.

Jo:

It's all about speed and rapid change. It's about making decisions and backing yourself, and then that's not quite right. Okay, I've got to pivot now. I've got to change my mindset. Instead of getting things right, instead of doing things correctly, which is something that is trained into us from a young age get it right, don't make a mistake. Be a good girl. You have to start failing. You have to start picking yourself back up. You have to start being resilient and adaptable to the circumstances.

Jo:

Whether or not you've had a project go this way and now suddenly budget's halved, okay. Whether or not you've spent all this time doing planning, and now there's a restructure dumped on you, whether or not you know you've been going in this direction. You've done a whole new campaign for something and the regulations change and you have to can it? There is so much work now that has to be picked up and put down. And pick up and be put down. And if you're holding on so tightly to everything holding on, holding on, pick that up, can't put that down. Yet that's not quite right. Got to finish that one off, got to put a bow on it. You are holding on to 17,000 things and you're exhausted.

Jo:

So this is what adaptability means to me is having the flex and the nervous system capacity so that, no matter what the world throws at you, life throws at you, your kids throw at you, you know that you're going to be okay. And this adaptability starts with fueling yourself, and I don't just mean food and water, I mean sleep, I mean self-care, I mean emotional hygiene, looking after yourself on a different level so that you can be adaptable, because if not, you are going to continue to be a whole stack of pieces shattered on the floor, and I do not want that for you. So now you can see why these three key skills, why ensuring that you're embracing your authenticity and your vulnerability, really owning your profile, being strategic about being visible, being seen by others and maintaining nervous system safety while doing that, and being adaptable, being flexible so that you can thrive in whichever the way the wind is blowing today is going to be key to you stepping up as a leader. These are traits you should be looking for in those around you and, most importantly, traits that you need to be investing time, headspace and money in cultivating so that you can continue to be successful, want you to rise through the ranks, have the impact that you can, and let's ensure that you reach your potential in 2025 and beyond. Some key takeaways today. Look forward to seeing you on the next episode.

Jo:

Thanks for joining us today on the Balance and Beyond podcast. We're so glad you carved out this time for yourself. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend who might need to hear this today and, if you're feeling extra generous, leaving us a review on your podcast platform of choice would mean the world to us. If you're keen to dive deeper into our world, visit balanceinstitutecom to discover more about the toolkit that has helped thousands of women avoid burnout and create a life. Visit balanceinstitutecom to discover more about the toolkit that has helped thousands of women avoid burnout and create a life of balance and beyond. Thanks again for tuning in and we'll see you next time on the Balance and Beyond podcast.

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Jo Stone

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