In today’s leadership landscape, the language of “capability” is familiar and comfortable. For decades, capability frameworks, competency models, and role-based assessments have underpinned how we define, select, and develop leaders. But as the pace of change accelerates, I believe it is time we shift our attention to a more powerful and nuanced concept: capacity.
Capacity, in contrast to capability, is not just about what a leader can do today, it is about their headroom to grow, adapt, and sustain performance over time. From my experience working with executive teams and boards across industries, I see that capacity is emerging as the most critical lever for navigating volatility, uncertainty, and disruption.
“Capability tells us what is possible.
Capacity tells us what is probable.”
– Naomi Fox
I love a good capability framework – they are important tools for being clear about what is important for the organisation and aligning individual and team expectations for performance and development. They also provide a valid and sound basis for measuring what people know, what skills they have developed, and what outcomes they have achieved. But they do not tell us how leaders will respond under new, ambiguous or extreme conditions. And let’s face it, this is the BAU environment for leaders today.
This is why we strongly believe capacity must be overlaid to understand capability.
Capacity is a forward-facing measure. It signals whether a leader can:
- scale their influence beyond their current remit
- metabolise complexity and stay hungry
- maintain energy and wellbeing through challenge
- and continually learn and renew their own, their team’s and organisation’s performance.
As a leader in evidence-based executive insights, I see capacity as the bridge between an individual’s proven performance and their potential to grow with (and ahead of) the role.
Why capacity matters now
Three interconnected trends are making capacity the leadership differentiator:
- Enduring change: Change is no longer episodic; it is continuous. Leaders need the adaptive capacity to navigate shifting strategy, stakeholder priorities, and environmental disruptions.
- Human sustainability: We cannot afford a generation of burnt-out leaders. As psychological safety and mental health become non-negotiable, a leader’s ability to sustain themselves and protect their teams is an essential form of capacity.
- Talent diversity: Boards and executive teams cannot rely on legacy pipelines alone. We need to identify more diverse talent supply – such as overlooked or emerging leaders whose capacity to grow is high, even if their experience is non-traditional – to mitigate succession risk and enhance readiness.
How do we understand and assess capacity?
While capacity can feel intangible, it is absolutely assessable with the right approach. Here’s what I see working in practice:
- Psychometrics and validated assessments: These tools provide us with objective data on cognitive agility, resilience, learning orientation, and even a leader’s comfort with risk and complexity.
- Behavioural interviews: Exploring a leader’s growth stories, failures, and their responses to challenges can reveal rich evidence of capacity.
- 360 feedback: Capacity is often best judged by those who see a leader under stress, in unfamiliar settings, and in their relationships with others.
- Longitudinal tracking: Building capacity is a process. Leaders who reflect, adapt, and recalibrate show higher capacity over time than those who stick rigidly to what worked in the past.
- Developmental Assessments: These assessments measure not just what a leader does, but also how they think, making them especially useful for evaluating how a leader interprets and responds to situations, providing insight into their capacity to lead in complex, ambiguous, and transformational contexts.
Building capacity, not just measuring it
At Future Leadership, we believe that capacity can, and should, be developed. A robust leadership development program needs to go beyond skill-building and embed:
- structured stretch opportunities to encourage perspective taking.
- diverse views to disrupt old patterns, assumptions and mental models.
- psychological safety for experimentation and support systems to maintain wellbeing.
- coaching that holds tension to support growth, facilitate new insights and transformation.
We need to create the conditions for leaders to expand their capacity, evolve, and grow stronger. Across my career supporting executive teams, I have seen again and again that leaders with access to these conditions build not just better capabilities, but fundamentally stronger and more future-fit leadership identities.
A new lens for the future
If we are serious about equipping organisations for the future, we must reframe the conversation from “Are they capable?” to “And, what is their capacity?”
Capacity is about energy. It is about learning. It is about adapting and being resilient. And ultimately, it is about the sustainable growth of both leaders and the organisations they serve.
As we stand on the edge of technological, geopolitical, and environmental shifts, I believe this is the conversation we must have, because the future will reward those who can adapt, grow, and sustain themselves far beyond what they were ever taught to do.
