By Leslie Rohonczy, IMC™, PCC
Executive Coach | Leadership Development Expert | Author | Speaker | ©2026 | www.leslierohonczy.com
Imagine being handed the keys to the C-suite today. Congratulations! Now, about that job description. The economy is uncertain. Geopolitics has wandered straight into your strategic plan. Canada’s relationship with its largest trading partner is fractured. AI is changing work faster than many organizations can redesign it. Your people are tired of change, but you need them to get better at it, quickly. And somewhere in the middle of all this, you’re still expected to deliver the quarter. Welcome to the executive team.
This is an interesting time to be a senior leader in Canada.
For many years, I was the Corporate Coach at Export Development Canada, coaching leaders inside an organization devoted to helping Canadian companies grow internationally. One thing I learned from that experience is that moving beyond familiar territory asks something different of leaders. Assumptions get challenged. Relationships work differently. Risk changes. What made you successful somewhere familiar may be surprisingly unhelpful somewhere new. And that feels particularly relevant now more than ever.
EDC just reported (September 2026) that 72% of Canadian exporters plan to pursue new markets over the next two years, up from 65% just five months ago. Europe and Asia-Pacific are attracting particular interest. At the same time, companies are navigating tariffs, geopolitical instability, rapid technological change, productivity pressures and economic uncertainty.
KPMG recently asked Canadian CEOs which leadership capabilities they consider most important for navigating geopolitical instability and sluggish economic growth. Their answers included leading transformation and culture change, faster decision-making under pressure, stronger strategic foresight and scenario planning, and AI understanding and literacy.
The demands of the senior leadership job are changing.
So perhaps the question for boards, CEOs, and executives aspiring to the C-suite is no longer simply, “Who has performed well enough to get there?” We might also ask, “Who has the range to lead from there now?”
What does that kind of range look like in practice? While the answer will vary by organization, industry, and circumstance, some leadership capabilities are becoming increasingly important as the demands on senior executives change. These ten stand out to me, not as a definitive checklist, but as a useful way to examine whether our leadership capabilities are keeping pace with the world we’re being asked to lead in.
Here are ten leadership attributes I believe deserve particular attention.
TOP 10 LEADERSHIP ATTRIBUTES
1. STRATEGIC FORESIGHT
Nobody gets issued a crystal ball with their executive parking pass. Strategic foresight is something more useful anyway. It’s the ability to look beyond the most likely future and consider several plausible ones. What happens if a major market becomes less accessible? Or if a competitor changes your industry's economics? What if AI fundamentally changes the work? Or the assumptions underneath your five-year strategy stop being true?
It’s impossible to accurately predict the future, anyway. The real objective is to become less surprised by it.
STRATEGIC EXECUTIVE QUESTION: What would have to happen for our current strategy to stop making sense?
2. ADAPTIVE DECISIVENESS
Executives have always made difficult decisions. What has changed is how frequently they may have to make them without enough information. Waiting for certainty can feel responsible. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is indecision dressed up in a respectable suit.
Adaptive decisiveness means making a sound decision with the best information available, explaining the reasoning, watching what happens, and being willing to change course when the evidence changes.
Changing your mind because the facts changed isn’t weak leadership. Refusing to change it because your ego is now attached to the decision might be.
STRATEGIC EXECUTIVE QUESTION: Where are we waiting for certainty when what we actually need is a thoughtful decision?
3. GLOBAL AND GEOPOLITICAL CURIOSITY
For Canadian executives, geopolitics can no longer be something that happens somewhere else. Trade policy, currencies, regulation, supply chains, energy, political relationships and cultural differences can affect customers, costs and growth surprisingly quickly. And as more Canadian companies branch out to explore markets beyond the United States, leaders will increasingly encounter places where the familiar rules of business don’t necessarily apply.
That calls for something deceptively simple: curiosity, the willingness to understand before assuming, and occasionally to say, “We don’t know enough about this yet.”
STRATEGIC EXECUTIVE QUESTION: Which assumptions about our markets, customers, and competitors are we treating as facts?
4. ENTERPRISE THINKING
Many executives reach the C-suite because they have become exceptionally good at a specific function: finance, operations, technology, marketing, people, sales. Then the job changes. At the enterprise level, the question is no longer simply, “What is best for my function?” It becomes, “What does the whole organization need?”
A technology decision can create a people problem. A cost reduction can create a customer problem. A growth opportunity can introduce risks another executive sees more clearly than you do.
Strong C-suite leaders gradually loosen their grip on their functional identity and become stewards of the whole enterprise. In my coaching work, I’ve seen how challenging that transition can be, especially when functional expertise has been such an important part of a leader’s success.
STRATEGIC EXECUTIVE QUESTION: When my functional interests and the needs of the enterprise collide, which one wins?
5. TECHNOLOGICAL JUDGMENT
I deliberately haven’t called this AI expertise. Most executives don’t need to become technologists. They need enough understanding to ask good questions and enough judgment to recognize bad answers.
PwC’s 2026 Global CEO Survey found that only 12% of CEOs reported both revenue and cost benefits from AI, while 56% reported neither. That doesn’t argue against AI. It argues for thoughtful leadership around where and how it is being used.
Where does AI genuinely create value? What work should disappear or change? What should remain distinctly human? What risks are being introduced? Who remains accountable for the decisions? I explored another aspect of this question recently in IF AI SAVES TIME, WHO GETS THE TIME BACK? The technology may create capacity. But leadership must still decide what that capacity is for.
STRATEGIC EXECUTIVE QUESTION: Are we using AI because we can, or because we are clear about the value we want it to create?
6. THE ABILITY TO BUILD ADAPTABILITY
Deloitte’s 2026 Global Human Capital Trends research found that 85% of leaders consider building organizational and workforce adaptability critical. Only 7% say they are leading in helping their workforce continuously grow and adapt. That gap should get our attention.
Organizations can’t keep throwing change at people and calling their ability to absorb it “resilience.” Adaptability requires context, priorities, learning, tolerance for experimentation, permission to stop doing some things, and enough stability to innovate. Otherwise, adaptability becomes exhaustion, and exhausted people aren’t particularly strategic or creative.
STRATEGIC EXECUTIVE QUESTION: How are we building our organization’s capacity to adapt, rather than simply asking people to absorb more change?
7. EMOTIONAL SELF-REGULATION
This capability doesn’t appear on a balance sheet, but its consequences sure do. When uncertainty rises, people watch their leaders more closely. An executive who becomes reactive, defensive, or visibly anxious can send that anxiety through an organization faster than a layoff rumour.
Senior leaders don’t need to become emotionless. They need enough self-awareness to recognize what is happening inside themselves, enough social awareness to sense how others are feeling and anticipate how they may respond, and enough self-regulation to consciously choose what they send outward, and how. And remember, the higher the position, the bigger the wake you’ll leave behind you.
STRATEGIC EXECUTIVE QUESTION: Under pressure, what am I transmitting to others, and is it helping them respond at their best?
8. TRUST-BUILDING CANDOUR
I’ve seen uncertainty create an interesting communication problem in organizations. Leaders are often tempted to wait until they have answers before saying anything. And employees are often most hungry for communication when answers don’t exist yet.
Candour means being able to say what we know, what we don’t know, what has changed, what we are considering, and what happens next. It also means creating enough safety for other people to be candid with us. The more senior you become, the more courage it can take for someone else to tell you they think you’re wrong. I explored this more deeply in DO PEOPLE DISAGREE WITH YOU TO YOUR FACE?, because one of the less obvious risks of gaining authority is gradually losing access to the candid disagreement you need most.
If nobody challenges your thinking anymore, it might be worth wondering why.
STRATEGIC EXECUTIVE QUESTION: How am I creating the conditions to discover what people really know, see and believe, especially when it differs from what I want to hear?
9. TALENT MULTIPLICATION
There’s a point in an executive career when your greatest contribution shifts from what you can personally accomplish yourself, to what you can inspire and enable others to accomplish through your leadership.
Your job increasingly becomes creating the conditions for others to think, decide, challenge, experiment, and lead. That means developing successors, giving away meaningful authority, coaching rather than rescuing, and resisting that seductive little voice that says, “It would be faster if I just did it myself.” In truth, yep, it probably would. That’s why the habit is so dangerous.
If too many decisions still need you, eventually you become part of what’s slowing the organization down.
STRATEGIC EXECUTIVE QUESTION: Where am I adding value by being involved, and where has my involvement started preventing someone else from growing?
10. INTELLECTUAL HUMILITY AND COURAGEOUS CURIOSITY
The further people rise in an organization, the easier it can become to confuse experience with certainty. Experience is enormously valuable, until the environment changes enough that some of what we ‘know’ becomes an assumption worth examining.
Curious executives ask what they are missing, whose perspective they haven’t heard, what evidence would cause them to change their minds, and which assumption would be most dangerous if it were wrong.
Perhaps the hardest question is also the shortest: “Could I be wrong about this?”
That doesn’t diminish executive authority. Used well, it strengthens it.
STRATEGIC EXECUTIVE QUESTION: What am I so certain about that I’ve stopped being curious about it?
THE C-SUITE MAY NEED MORE RANGE
Canadian companies are being asked to protect what works while exploring what comes next. The expectation is to maintain U.S. relationships where possible, while building new ones, to invest while managing uncertainty, to leverage the hell out of AI while figuring out where it actually creates real value, and to transform our organizations while keeping people capable of absorbing the transformation.
Those challenges require strategy, capital, and execution. They also require leaders with range.
Perhaps that gives us a different way to think about C-suite readiness. Experience still matters, of course, but experience tells us what worked before. Leadership becomes particularly interesting when the environment stops cooperating with our experience.
The executives who lead Canadian organizations successfully through the next decade may be the ones whose ability to learn, unlearn, decide, and adapt, will help them survive and thrive without losing sight of the people they are asking to come with them.
YOUR COACHING CHALLENGE
Take another look at the ten attributes, but don’t choose the three you’re best at. That’s too easy. Instead, reflect on which one made you slightly uncomfortable.
Reflect on these two questions:
Where is that capability being tested in your leadership right now, and what do you tend to do instead?
If the demands of your role change faster than you do over the next three years, which capability will you wish you had started developing today?