The Leadership Styles That Inspire Today's Workforce
Modern leadership is less about categories like transformational or servant leadership and more about how leaders show up in day-to-day moments that shape trust, communication and culture. Research consistently shows that employees respond to specific behaviors rather than labels, and these behaviors directly influence engagement, retention and performance.
Key takeaways
Leadership effectiveness is determined more by everyday behaviors than by leadership style labels.
Employees value leaders who demonstrate empathy, transparency, accountability, and consistent communication.
Hybrid work and changing workforce expectations require leaders to be more intentional about building trust and connection.
Strong leadership has a direct impact on employee engagement, retention, and overall business performance.
Organizational culture is shaped by leaders' actions and decisions, not by the leadership framework they identify with.
Modern leadership succeeds when leaders focus on how their behavior is experienced by employees.
Search “leadership styles,” and you’ll find no shortage of frameworks, taxonomies and explainers breaking down every variation from transformational to servant to situational. There’s an abundance of content, but it’s harder to find a conversation about what actually matters to the people being led.
Employees don’t evaluate leaders by category. They pay attention to how their manager shows up on a difficult Tuesday afternoon, how the executive team communicates during uncertainty and whether people in charge demonstrate that they value the people doing the work. That analysis doesn’t fit neatly into a labeled framework.
This is a conversation worth having. Rather than cataloging leadership styles, let’s focus on the specific traits and behaviors talent responds to most.
Why traditional leadership style content falls short
Leadership frameworks have genuine value. Transformational, transactional and servant leadership models give organizations a shared vocabulary and help new managers orient themselves.
The limitation is what these models leave out. Most style-based content focuses on categorization rather than application. A leader can study every framework and still fail to build trust with their team, communicate effectively during a period of change or recognize when they need to shift their approach. There’s a gap between knowing your leadership style and actually leading well. That gap is where employees form opinions about the people managing them.
A study from the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) confirmed the workplace adage that employees leave bad managers, not companies. In the study, 84% of workers say poorly trained managers create a lot of unnecessary work and stress.
Whether a leader leans more toward transformational or transactional leadership doesn’t factor into an employee’s decision to leave. Employees consider whether their manager listens, follows through, advocates for their team and creates an environment where people can do their best work.
Style labels describe how leaders see themselves. Behavior is what employees experience. Modern leadership development must focus on closing the distance between the two.
Learn how to create positive employee experiences for better business outcomes
Putting leadership in context for today’s workplace
The workplace has changed in the past several years and will continue to do so. Expectations change alongside it. Hybrid and remote work arrangements alter how managers and employees interact, how companies evaluate performance and how teams build trust in the absence of physical proximity.
For a long time, being seen at work meant being in the office. Visibility was currency. Showing up early, staying late and being present in the room where decisions got made demonstrated productivity and engagement. Managers could pick up on informal cues and address issues in real time.
That model hasn’t disappeared entirely, but it’s not a primary measure of engagement or performance. Now, leaders have to be more deliberate about communicating frequently, checking in without micromanaging and building connections with people they may rarely see in person.
Communication norms are different, as well. Employees expect more transparency than they once did, and they have more options to learn about what’s missing. Social media and workplace review platforms make internal culture visible in ways previous generations of leaders never had to reckon with. What happens inside an organization has a way of getting out. This raises the stakes for how leaders communicate, make decisions and treat people.
The employee-manager relationship itself has also evolved. Younger workers bring different expectations to that dynamic. They’re less likely to be deferential to hierarchy, are more interested in purpose and growth and are less tolerant of leaders who are inconsistent or performative. That’s useful pressure that can push organizations toward better leadership practices.
The leadership traits employees value most
Ask employees what they value in a leader, and the answers tend to cluster around the same themes, regardless of industry or company size. These practical behaviors show up (or fail to show up) in daily interactions.
Empathy
Empathy means acknowledging employees are whole people with lives and pressures that have nothing to do with their job. The manager who notices when someone is struggling and says something, adjusts a deadline without being asked or listens without immediately jumping into problem-solving mode builds the kind of loyalty that a benefits package can’t touch.
Transparency
Transparency builds trust. Employees feel respected when leaders communicate honestly about challenges, changes and decisions, even when the news is tough to hear. Employees notice immediately when leaders withhold information or soften it beyond recognition. Speculation fills the gaps and erodes confidence.
Resilience
Resilience matters because organizations face disruption constantly. Technology, restructuring, leadership changes and economic pressures mean something is always in motion. Employees look to their leaders for stability during uncertain times. A leader who stays composed and keeps the team focused on what they can control gives people solid ground to stand on when the ground feels unsteady.
There’s a business case for resilience, too. Research from McKinsey Health Institute found that employees who scored high in resilience and adaptability were three times more likely to report high engagement and four times more likely to report innovative behaviors than their peers.
Leaders who model and cultivate resilience actively build the conditions for stronger performance on the other side.
Adaptability
Adaptability shows a leader is paying attention. Rigid approaches applied regardless of context communicate the opposite. Genuine leadership maturity means being able to read a situation and adjust, whether that involves shifting a process, reconsidering a decision or meeting an employee where they are.
It also means resisting the pull toward speed for its own sake. Rahaf Harfoush, digital anthropologist and featured speaker at ADP's 2026 Women@Work summit said, "Is it worth rushing if in the process you're making mistakes, producing less high quality work and actually damaging your people's ability to focus, think and reflect?"
An adaptable leader knows when to slow down and understands that protecting their ability to do good work is itself a strategic decision.
Read, AI in HR: How Human-Centered Leadership Can Close the Influence Gap at Work
Communication
Communication helps make all other leadership qualities visible. A leader can be deeply empathetic and resilient, but none of that registers if it doesn't come through in how they speak, write and show up in conversation. Effective leaders are deliberate communicators. They share what they need from their teams and why it matters. They don’t leave people guessing.
Consistency
Consistency may be the most underrated quality on this list. People are remarkably good at reading their environment, and they adjust accordingly.
When a manager’s expectations or mood shifts without explanation, it creates an environment where people spend energy managing uncertainty rather than doing their best work. Consistency is reliability, and reliability allows trust to compound over time.
Accountability
Accountability sets the tone for everything else, and leaders establish accountability through their own behaviors.
As Harfoush noted, "Through your actions, not just your words, you send very clear signals to your team about what is acceptable."
Leaders who hold themselves to the same standards they set for their teams send a message that the rules apply to everyone. When something goes wrong, accountable leaders own their part in it and focus on what comes next. That behavior gives employees permission to do the same. That’s how you build a culture where people work on solving problems rather than hiding them.
The ripple effect of real leadership
Leadership behaviors ripple outward to shape how teams function, how culture develops and ultimately, whether employees stay.
There’s a direct connection between leadership and engagement. Recent workforce research shows engagement is now at historically low levels, with only about 30–31% of U.S. employees engaged. At the same time, engagement is strongly shaped by the immediate manager and team environment, with Gallup finding that managers account for a majority of the variation in team engagement outcomes.
In other words, engagement is not evenly distributed across organizations. Instead, it’s “local” and highly dependent on leadership quality. When managers are disengaged, engagement at the team level drops sharply, while stronger leadership correlates with significantly higher engagement and performance outcomes.
The same research consistently links engagement to retention. Gallup’s findings show that lower engagement is strongly associated with higher turnover risk, making disengagement one of the most reliable early indicators of voluntary attrition.
The financial implications are well established. Broader workforce research consistently estimates that replacing an employee can cost roughly one-half to two times their annual salary, depending on role complexity and seniority, meaning even modest improvements in retention driven by better leadership can have material business impact.
These behaviors matter in good times, but they’re critical during periods of disruption. Restructuring, rapid growth, and economic pressure test every team. Leaders who establish credibility through consistent, empathetic actions better position themselves to guide their teams through disruption without losing momentum or morale.
A conversation worth having
The conversation around modern leadership is expanding beyond the boardroom, and that’s a good thing. ADP’s sixth annual Women@Work virtual summit brought together HR professionals, people leaders, and workplace experts to explore what it means to lead with intention in a world shaped by AI, hybrid work, and shifting employee expectations.
Harfoush closed her session with a challenge for leaders. "Culture is built by choice and not by chance. You as the leader get to decide how it unfolds."
The leadership behaviors we've explored in this article are decisions, not aspirational traits. And they're available to any leader willing to make them.
Leading in a way that lands
The most important shift in modern leadership is a change in orientation, away from how leaders categorize themselves and toward how their behavior lands with the people they lead.
Employees notice whether leaders acknowledge their work and handle difficult conversations honestly. They notice whether the people in charge follow through. Those daily moments accumulated into something much larger than any single management style could produce: a culture where people feel valued and motivated to do their best work.
When organizations invest in the people side of leadership, the results show up everywhere that matters, including engagement scores and retention rates.
If you weren’t able to join Women@Work 2026, you can launch the recording anytime.
