For much of Colin James’ career, leaders have been rewarded for having answers.
Today, that expectation is becoming harder to sustain.
Artificial intelligence can analyse information, identify patterns and produce answers at a speed no executive can realistically match. At the same time, organisations are navigating technological change, economic uncertainty and shifting expectations from employees and customers. The question facing leaders is increasingly less about how much they know and more about what they can do that technology cannot easily replicate.
For James, Co-Founder and Lead Facilitator at CJM, that brings leadership back to something fundamentally human: the ability to communicate an idea clearly enough that other people understand it, trust it, and choose to move with it.
It is a subject he has spent nearly four decades exploring.
From Communication Skills to Leadership Capability
James established the business now known as CJM in 1988. Since then, his career has taken him into boardrooms, leadership programs and conference halls around the world.
As a keynote speaker, he has presented in 47 countries to audiences of up to 10,000 people. Professional Speakers Australia named him Australian Keynote Speaker of the Year in 2019, following his recognition as Australian Educator of the Year in 2008.
Yet keynote speaking represents only one part of his work.
James has spent decades educating leaders in communication and leadership effectiveness, facilitating executive teams through questions of strategy and alignment, and coaching CEOs and C-suite executives. His current coaching work spans Australia, the UK, the US, Singapore, the Netherlands and Ireland, while CJM’s broader facilitator network has delivered programs this year across Australia, the US, France, Poland, the UK, Singapore, China and Turkey.
That breadth has given James a close view of how leadership expectations have changed.
The fundamentals of human communication may remain remarkably consistent. The environment in which leaders are expected to apply them does not.
Leadership in the Agentic Age
The latest shift is perhaps the most significant.
CJM describes its current area of focus as “human value in the agentic age”: understanding which human capabilities become more important as AI assumes a greater share of analytical and knowledge-based work.
James argues that analytical intelligence is only one dimension of intelligence. Leadership also draws on emotional, somatic and collective intelligence, alongside qualities such as curiosity, intuition, vision, connection, values and the ability to make meaning from uncertainty.
This changes the leadership question.
Rather than competing with AI on what machines increasingly do well, leaders need to become better at integrating technological capability with distinctly human judgement and communication.
As Harmeem Mehta, Chief Digital and Innovation Officer at Equinix, has put it: “AI has killed best practice.” In a rapidly changing environment, yesterday’s accepted approach can quickly become irrelevant.
Clear communication, trust and the ability to bring people together around a direction become harder to automate.
Why Storytelling Still Matters
One of James’ central ideas is deceptively simple: people need more than information to move. They need meaning.
It is why storytelling has remained such an important part of his work. A strategy can be analytically sound and still fail if employees cannot understand what it means for them, while organisational change can be carefully planned and still stall when leaders cannot build confidence around where the organisation is heading.
James’ own presentation style reflects that philosophy.
In January 2024, he walked onto a stage at London’s ExCeL Centre for a Google event attended by approximately 4,000 people. There was no slide deck or autocue. Instead, the stage contained two flipcharts and a chair.
Over the following 50 minutes, James used storytelling, humour and live drawings to explore the scale of the changes confronting leaders and the human capabilities required to navigate them.
The format is characteristic of his approach. Ideas are not simply explained; they are made visible and memorable, often through cartoons created as the conversation unfolds.
That emphasis on communication as something experienced rather than merely understood also carries into CJM’s development programs.
Learning That Survives the Training Room
Leadership development has long faced a practical problem: people can understand a concept during a workshop and return to work without changing how they behave.
CJM’s response has been to centre its programs on practice and application.
Its work spans leadership communication, influence, executive alignment and customer conversations, with participants applying methods rather than simply discussing them. AI-supported tools are also being incorporated to help reinforce learning after formal programs end.
In sales-focused work such as *Mastering the Customer Conversation*, the business points to outcomes including changes in conversion rates, deal size and sales-cycle length. Across its broader programs, CJM reports an average Net Promoter Score of 95, while approximately 90 per cent of new clients come through referrals.
Perhaps more telling are the relationships that have persisted across decades.
The Google executive who invited James to speak in 2024 had first participated in one of his programs in 1998 and has continued working with him each year since. At an ANZ masterclass in Melbourne, an executive introducing James recalled attending a CJM program in 2014 and continuing to use its methods more than a decade later.
For a business concerned with behavioural change, longevity of application is a meaningful measure.
Creating Leaders Others Follow
James’ career has moved through several eras of business: from a world before email and smartphones became ubiquitous workplace tools to one in which generative and agentic AI are beginning to reshape the work of knowledge itself.
What has remained consistent is his interest in the mechanics of human influence.
CJM now works through a global facilitator network, supporting executives and organisations with communication, leadership effectiveness, strategic alignment and coaching. But underneath those different services sits a relatively focused mission.
James is interested in creating leaders others actually want to follow.
That distinction matters. A job title can give someone authority, but it cannot guarantee trust, engagement or belief. Those are earned through behaviour: how a leader listens, explains, responds under pressure, tells a story about the future and makes other people feel part of what happens next.
James often captures the developmental mindset behind that work through a comment made by one program participant: “I realised I am not a good leader; I am a leader getting better.”
After 38 years working with leaders, that idea may also explain the longevity of James’ own career.
Leadership is never really finished. The context changes, expectations move and new technology rewrites what organisations need from the people running them.
The task is to keep getting better at the parts that remain deeply human.
If you want to learn more about the CJM approach, visit the CJM website or book a meeting with the CJM team.
