When we consider the challenges we know to be true of leadership and the roadblocks we face in meeting them head on, how should we act?
Welcome to Part One of this series, where we understand the leadership practices solving the challenges of tomorrow.
Summary by Dr Matt Beard
Director of the Vincent Fairfax Fellowship
Our 2025 research into the challenges leaders are up against and the underlying factors that risk their ability to address them, unearthed a new way of thinking about leadership.
The example in focus, leaders as bridge-builders and navigators, is 1/4 practices identified as the how behind the way leaders act when faced with what; the ethical challenges of their lifetimes.
Acting as a bridge-builder and navigator looks like building connection and curiosity across ethical differences. It’s leading with patience and empathy and encouraging others to do the same.
Understanding why we need leaders to be bridge-builders
A survey of Australian leaders from the last 30 years, coming from across sectors, roles, experience and expertise, revealed 5 distinct themes when asked, ‘what do you consider the most critical challenge that will require ethical leadership for leaders, today?’
Whether leaders confront them equally or experience some disproportionately over others, we recognise the following as a representation of the areas where ethical leadership matters most:
1. Emerging technologies
2. System reform
3. Fraying social fabric
4. Climate change
5. Space for ethics.
- Emerging technologies
Given the wide-scale disruption and change that AI and large language models caused this year, it is perhaps unsurprising that Fellows see a need for ethical leadership around new technology. How should such systems be governed? Where should they be deployed? What impact will they have on the way we think, relate and govern ourselves? - System reform
Whether due to economic pressures driving short-term action, geopolitical pressures that prohibit information sharing and collaboration between nation-states, or workplace and hiring policies that prioritise targets and quotas over genuine diversity and inclusion, leaders saw an urgent need to reform systems that were no longer fit for purpose. - Fraying social fabric
Fellows expressed concern that today there is more that divides us than unites us. A breakdown in trust, community and civility – driven variously by political polarisation, wealth inequality, entrenched prejudice and the outrage-fuelled chambers of social media – is something that Fellows feel requires urgent attention. - Climate change
For 16% of the surveyed, the need for meaningful action to address the harmful effects of climate change was a critical issue. In particular, several responses focused on the challenge of responding to climate change in an environment that incentivises short-term thinking. - Space for ethics
The pressing societal need to actively support people, organisations and communities to better engage in reflection, give effect to their values and commitments, and create space for dialogue and disagreement.
Given the multiplicity of factors that can make these challenges more or less relevant over time, the true value of the research was discovered one layer deeper.
The investigation revealed a sub-strata of deeper tendencies that are standing between Australia’s leaders addressing and solving for the 5 areas where morally ambitious and responsible leadership is most needed.
Named as Ethical Roadblocks, the following tendencies combine to erode the very things that enable an ethical form of leadership:
Me over we
Addressing some of the major challenges we face as a society requires some people to give up benefits that they have previously enjoyed. However, leaders are confronting wide-spread refusal to make these kinds of sacrifices; making a range of problems almost impossible to address.
Distrust by default
Leaders are acutely aware of the diminishing trust people have in institutions. They are also aware that if people do not trust them, it is extremely difficult for them to meet their ethical responsibilities.
A crisis of hope
The current moment is sometimes described as a ‘polycrisis’ – where the interrelated and overlapping nature of different crises make them all the more difficult to address. Moreover, these intersecting challenges are deeply embedded within multi-layered systems which are highly resistant to change. The ethical case for change has never been stronger, but the barriers to transformation can feel insurmountable.
Rules of the game
Many major industries, sectors and institutions seem to have lost focus on their foundational purpose. Instead, other instrumental goals – profits, customer satisfaction scores, share price, market shares, membership growth – receive the greatest attention, causing a gradual disconnection from their ethical core.
Moral absolutism
The inevitable end point of long-standing culture wars has been the politicisation of everything. People believe their deepest ethical values and convictions are tested and revealed in every decision they make. As a result, it is very difficult for there to be productive or respectful disagreement, debate or dialogue across difference.
Finding ‘your people’ online has never been easier and yet, paradoxically, these echo chambers have amplified division. Working with 17 and 18 year olds, on the cusp of adulthood, is a great privilege. My hope is that they leave me to walk out into the world with the ability to ask better questions; to be curious and not judgemental; to realise that certainty is so rarely possible. If they can learn to think clearly in a world that increasingly obfuscates the truth, then they can walk into the future being part of the solution.”
Sarah Walker
International Baccalaureate Diploma Coordinator, Senior Literature and Theory of Knowledge Teacher
Ethical leaders are
bridge-builders and navigators.
Whilst addressing each of the ethical roadblocks presents a substantial challenge in its own right, there is good news to be found here.
During recorded roundtables like the above and with further interviews and analysis, we heard leader after leader describe the creative and resolute ways they are working to address the ethical roadblocks that exist for them.
These behaviours, surfaced through open dialogue and reflection on the leadership experience, are posed as four ways of being.
The art of doing: how do we recognise bridge-builders and navigators?
Today’s leaders are often confronted by high-stakes ethical challenges, about which people may stridently disagree, and which demand immediate action.
Moreover, the growing awareness leaders have of the ethical failings of the past coincides with the inevitable end point of long-standing culture wars: the politicisation of everything.
People believe their deepest ethical values and convictions are tested and revealed in every decision they make. Silence is violence, and complicity is corruption. In this environment, it is very difficult for there to be productive – or even respectful – engagement across difference.
Building bridges between tensions and impossible choices
In response to the tense, heated and morally laden choices they face, Fellows are avoiding false binaries and resisting the urge to ‘choose a side’ in the face of divisive and contested issues.
The art of bridge-building in leadership can be understood as a practice of facilitating connection when differences arise. It’s exemplified when we see leadership that is curious as it is courageous, even when competing forces like those captured by the moral absolutism and rules of the game roadblocks make it difficult.
We begin this series exploring bridge-builders and navigators because it’s the behaviour that underpins facilitation of ethicality in leadership. It represents a way of being for leaders that unlocks collective shift and power in numbers, disrupting isolation created in vacuums.
It’s a response to the urgent call from one of the areas where ethical leadership can make a difference: the fraying fabric of our society.
Do you identify with the art of being a bridge-builder and navigator?
What does it look like in your work, your conversations and other expressions of your leadership?
Discover more by reading the (at) the intersection anthology, a digital magazine capturing the impact and people of 30 years of the Vincent Fairfax Fellowship. A new approach for leadership:
