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Illustration Credit:  Carolyn Geason-Beissel/MIT SMR | Getty Images,

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In the early days of the Industrial Revolution, factory floors used to spontaneously catch fire. Many industrial operations generated enough sawdust during the working day to make the whole place flammable at the slightest spark.

Why does this matter now? Well, you might say we’re living in an electronically enabled version of that world today. Work is messy and volatile. While things are (generally) not physically on fire, they sure can feel like it.

Leadership Skills to Prioritize in 2025

If you’re a leader trudging over those virtual sawdust piles, edgily waiting for a spark, you need a very particular tool kit. There are many, many terrific lists of leadership skills, and given infinite time, it would be great to review them all. But as we kick off 2025, what are the handful of skills you absolutely must have to navigate a tricky moment in the history of human work? And what does research tell us about how to go build those skills?

Let’s explore the nonnegotiable leadership skills you should prioritize — and how to strengthen them.

[Here is the first of three skills.]

1. The Baseline: Fairness

Workforces are grumpy right now. Engagement is trending down as disengagement trends up; people are polarized in their political beliefs; and 70% of workers are dissatisfied with their pay, a troubling low.

Good luck turning all those Oscar the Grouches into cheery Big Birds. But you do have a secret weapon for keeping sentiment from turning too dark: fairness. Now, when I say fairness, I don’t mean the many ways in which employers are legally mandated to be fair. Take that as a given.

Rather, I’m referring to interpersonal fairness. When a piece of information is given to you, do you judge the information on its merits or solely evaluate it based on who it came from? Do you talk and listen equally in meetings or cut some folks off? Have you ever been accused of playing favorites, and, if so, did the statement have the sting of truth?

To be fair (to you, the reader), fairness of this type can be tough to implement. The most common pushback to this approach: “I shouldn’t treat high and low performers the same.” And … fair enough! It would be folly to act thrilled when wrong things happen; even Big Bird isn’t that much of a Pollyanna. But it’s worth taking a quick inventory of your day-to-day actions and assessing whether various folks could reasonably say they got short shrift.

After all, research suggests that fairness is a bit of fairy dust. Studies on populations as seemingly disparate as police officers and academics show that leaders behaving fairly protects against burnout — and, conversely, that a perceived lack of fairness causes people to burn out faster. It’s intuitive when you stop and think about it: If you don’t feel like you’re going to get a fair shake, why try at all? It’s exhausting just to contemplate it.

Fairness can be a tricky skill to build because it sits so deep within people’s psyches. A great place to start is understanding relationship justice, task justice, and distributive justice — the dimensions of fairness in leadership behavior, as identified by academics. Relationship justice is about treating people in a just manner: showing professionalism, dignity, respect, and ethics. Task justice is about doing things fairly: keeping promises, making decisions properly, and communicating about those decisions transparently. Distributive justice is a bit different: That dimension strives to match people’s outcomes to the effort they put in (effectively, do you recognize your team members properly for the work they do?)

Depending on the dimension on which you feel like you might be falling short, your strategy to build that muscle might be different. Feedback loops help build skills in relationship justice; focus on figuring out whether people feel treated fairly when they interact with you. To get better at task justice, formal decision-making frameworks or even quick heuristics can be quite useful. Any structure around decision-making pushes your brain to be more fair. Finally, to improve your skills at distributive justice, take a “small data” approach. Did you use enough words in an email to thank someone? Are you giving people the same number of opportunities after they do good work?

When it comes to being fair, the little things are the big things.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.