How do I become a great leader? This is probably one of the most asked questions in business management and for all the right reasons. Being the right kind of value-driven, people-focussed and motivational guide for your employees doesn’t come easy, but it’s one of the keys to create a mission-driven business that creates, grows and sustains impact.

Our workforce is changing. Millennials, who will become 75% of the global workforce by 2025, are expecting new ways of their employers. In a changing business environment, the usual doesn’t cut it. We’re faced with altering and implementing new ideas in the workplace, but what comes after? How do we turn the trend into a tangible way of creating a thriving business environment?

By now, we’ve been through masterclasses on the best ways to encourage and we’ve read the best books on the topic. We’ve glanced at the models and theories and had ideas sprung as fast as they faded. But we need to turn fleeting initiatives into a working leadership style.

So if we stray away from the models and writings, what are some of the core values and principles worth keeping in mind? How do you keep yourself and others calm through crisis, challenges and uprooting? Or in essence, how do you not just become a great leader but keep being one?

This is where design comes in. We at The Index Project and Designit believe in the power of using design principles and ideas to reassess our way of thinking. We think listening to the people who’ve been in the game for a while is a great starting point for finding your own way to being a great leader. We know that redesigning the now will make for a better future of business.

For our first instalment of ‘Designing the New Usual’, we talked to business consultants, strategists and leaders, who've been in the field for years. Our panel discussed what meaningful leadership looks like to them and shared their learnings.

The panellists are:

Henriette Divert-Hendricks, Executive Advisor at BCC:, where she helps companies close the gap between what they do and what they would actually like to do. She’s helped executive teams become more efficient executors and shift their own way of doing business as usual.

Jesper Ambrosius, Director & Head of LEGO Workplace Experience, where he aims to create workplace experiences that enable LEGO employees to be and do their best at work, attract and retain world-class talents, and bring them closer to the LEGO values.

Pia Huusfelt, who leads the circular transformation at Ingka Group (IKEA) and has 25 years of leadership and management experience. Today, her work revolves around looking into future business models and re-designing for growth and profit for the future.

Furthermore, we featured an interview with Leadership Strategist Ann Hiatt. She consults with executives and companies across the globe to reverse engineer their moonshot goals and get results. She's known for drawing from the skills she gained while working at Amazon and Google, and at the event, she spoke on future-proofing leadership.

The event, hosted by Content Lead at Designit Phil Hall, was on May 12th at 15:00 CEST and was live-streamed from our studio in BLOX, Copenhagen. Now the event is over, we’ll be updating this article continuously with new ideas, thoughts and sum-ups.

Download the full SUM-UP PDF from the event here!