THE causes of job strain, burnout, and poor mental health at work are well understood — and so are the solutions. Workload can be managed. Jobs can be designed with autonomy and voice. Leaders can be trained to create psychological safety. Systems can be built that reward recovery and fairness, not just output. Which means harm to our workers isn’t inevitable — it’s a design choice.

Organizations that fail to design for good work will pay for it in absenteeism, turnover and disengagement. But the deeper cost is borne by the workers.

People don’t thrive when they’re confused, unsupported, or underused. They thrive when they feel capable and valued. Research by organizational psychologist Arnold Bakker shows that when employees have structural resources (such as autonomy), social resources (such as support), and challenging demands (such as growth tasks), they experience more flow and less burnout.

If organizations are serious about sustainable performance, they need to design for it. That means pacing workloads instead of treating every week like quarter-end.

Well-designed work provides energy. Poorly designed work sucks it out. Designing roles that are sustainable, setting realistic expectations, and creating cultures where people feel safe and valued are central to worker’s mental health and sustainable high performance. They also fuel innovation and pay dividends in productivity.

The pathway for enabling a fully functioning and committed workforce is through designing the way that people work. Every role has an architecture — the tasks, responsibilities, and demands that make up a day. Too often, that architecture grows by accident: jobs are patched together over time, loaded with new tasks but rarely redesigned with intention. The result? Roles that look efficient on paper but leave people feeling like crap.

The alternative is positive job design — treating the structure of roles as a wellbeing lever, not just an operational one. Done well, it turns work into a source of energy rather than depletion.

Being intentional about work design means stepping back and asking: What are we really trying to achieve here, and how can this role be structured so it fuels rather than drains energy? From there, it’s about making deliberate choices. That might mean:

• Stripping away tasks that no longer add value
• Redesigning workflows so people can focus on the most meaningful parts of their role
• Checking whether decision rights actually match responsibilities

To make work contribute to worker wellbeing, job design needs to be embedded into the systems of work — shaping the policies, structures and rhythms that govern how people work. This involves:

1. Building it into strategy, not side projects — Treat work design as a lever for performance and wellbeing, not just a P&C responsibility. Ask in strategy reviews: Are our roles structured tofuel human energy as well as output?

2. Using a SMART check in decision-making — When restructuring, allocating resources, or introducing new technology, run a SMART check. For each decision, ask: Will this increase stimulation, mas tery, agency, relationships, and tolerable d emands or undermine them?

3. Making job audits routine — Every couple of years, or after major change, review roles and workflows. Look for where tasks have piled up, where decision rights are mismatched, or where demands outstrip resources. Don’t wait for burnout data or turnover to tell you.

4. Empowering leaders to co-design with their teams — Encourage managers to have regular design conversations with their people: What’s energizing? What’s draining? What could we shift?

5. Embedding work design into leadership development — Treat work design as a core leadership skill, not a niche topic. Teach leaders how to analyze jobs through the SMART lens, how to run role-redesign conversations, and how to balance demands with resources.

6. Tracking energy, not just output — Alongside KPIs and dashboards, measure how energizing jobs are. Pulse surveys can include questions about variety, agency, and connection. Imagine if leaders were held accountable not just for results, but for how they structured jobs to unleash energy?

When leaders and teams take these small, deliberate steps, they contribute to worker wellbeing in ways that are practical and immediate.

Keep in mind that good work design isn’t a policy or even a program. It’s a practice that’s shaped and reshaped with people over time. Think of it less like drawing up blueprints for a house and more like tending a garden. You don’t plant once and walk away. You prune, water and replant depending on the season.

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IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with:

Nicole Vignola on learning as default thinking:

“The first major underpinning of a growth mindset is that people with this mindset understand that learning is a valuable opportunity in the face of adversity. When people believe that they can improve and grow from failure and setbacks, they are more likely to engage in challenging tasks and persist through difficulty. When people know and understand that the brain is malleable and are willing to adapt to circumstance, they are more likely to persist in the face of obstacles. This perseverance can enhance pathways in the brain that are associated with learning, which strengthens the notion that learning is a dynamic process that’s forever evolving.”

Source: Rewire: Break the Cycle, Alter Your Thoughts and Create Lasting Change (Your Neurotoolkit for Everyday Life)

Morgan Housel on happiness:

“Your happiness depends on your expectations more than anything else. So in a world that tends to get better for most people most of the time, an important life skill is getting the goalpost to stop moving. It’s also one of the hardest. A common storyline of history goes like this: Things get better, wealth increases, technology brings new efficiencies, and medicine saves lives. The quality of life goes up. But people’s expectations then rise by just as much, if not more, because those improvements also benefit other people around you, whose circumstances you anchor to. Happiness is little changed despite the world improving.”

Source: Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index.

MOST leaders reach a point where they can see exactly where their company needs to go. The vision is clear — more sophisticated, more scalable, more aligned with the leader they’ve become. They didn’t get to this point by accident. The clarity they have now is the product of a commitment to transformation expressed through years of building, learning, and evolving.

But the company is still organized around an earlier version of their leadership. The revenue is real. The clients are happy. On paper, it works. But the routines, the roles, the decision-making patterns were designed for a different stage. Maybe a different strategy entirely.

As the founder, every day pulls you back into the same patterns: the firefighting, the decisions only you can make, the sense that if you stop moving, everything stops.

This is the tension between where you’re going and what got you here, and it’s one of the most common inflection points in a founder’s journey. At this stage, part of your responsibility as a leader is to transform the company along with you.

New Goals Demand New Thinking

A founder I worked with ran a specialized professional services firm. Over a few years, he had made an important leap from transactional operator to strategic advisor. He built a new framework, renamed his practice, and reimagined his value proposition to create a market segment he could own — higher-trust, higher-fee, more durable client relationships.

He knew where he was going. But the company was still organized around what had gotten him here.

The team’s routines were built for the old model: high volume, fast turnaround, lots of reactive work. The systems rewarded output, not depth. His top producer embodied the old approach perfectly, earning seven figures doing it the traditional way.

There was no reason for that person to change. Because they were successful, challenging the model felt like challenging results.

The founder said it plainly: I can see it. My challenge has been to get there.

He wasn’t confused about the destination. He was caught in the tension between the leader he had become and the organization that was still designed to produce something else.

This is the principle most founders eventually collide with: personal transformation enables organizational transformation, but it doesn’t happen automatically. You have to redesign the organization to match the leader you’re becoming.

Creating that alignment is the hardest part of leadership. But there is a way through it, and it starts with seeing clearly.

Stepping Back to Move Ahead

Rose, a co-founder I worked with, ran a predictive-maintenance startup. In a single hour-long meeting about one of her strategic priorities, she got interrupted eight times; every decision, every customer question, every call was routed through her. She was the bottleneck and she knew it.

The conventional answer would have been to delegate more. However, delegation wasn't the issue. As we worked together, Rose started to recognize that she was actively choosing urgency.

Once she could see what urgency gave her (a feeling of being essential and in control) and what made strategic focus so easy to avoid (it felt boring and lacked immediate payoffs), she recognized that her own choices were keeping her stuck as the bottleneck.

Her dedication to urgency had built a system where her team had no way to make decisions without her, not because they lacked capability, but because she had never designed the conditions for them to use it.

As she changed her relationship to urgency, her team’s relationship to it started to shift as well. Instead of answering questions, she started designing what her team needed to move ahead on their own: clear context, clear constraints, clear freedoms. The company didn't change because she hired new people. It changed because she became a different kind of leader — a designer instead of a doer.

And once she made that shift, she could actually spend her time on strategy instead of being drowned in the urgent. That shift didn't just free up her calendar, it changed what the company was capable of without her in the room.

This kind of transformation starts with three moves:

1. See the tensions you’ve been avoiding: Where loyalty to what built this company conflicts with what the company needs next. Where your habits serve comfort instead of progress. Where good enough has become the ceiling. These aren’t problems to solve. They’re tensions to navigate.
2. Own your contribution to the pattern: Acknowledge that you designed this system and it’s doing exactly what it was built to do. The meeting cadence, the decision flow, the hiring bar, the standards you enforce and the ones you work around are living expressions of your leadership. The company is a mirror.
3. Shift from doer to designer: Stop solving problems and start redesigning the processes, roles, and culture of accountability that align better with the future you've envisioned, not the past you’re coming from. Finally, curtail your instinct to intervene so your team learns to trust themselves and stops gravitating toward old habits.

The next phase of growth is a different kind of growth. Not more effort, not better systems, not another hire who’ll finally take things off your plate. It’s the work of closing the gap between where you’re going and what got you here so that growth stops being a grind and starts feeling like momentum.

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IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with:

Carey Nieuwhof on large and loud opponents to change:

“The loudest people affected by a proposed change are those who are most opposed. The more opposed people are, the louder they tend to become. The problem arises because the noise of opponents to any change will make you a bad mathematician.

“You will confuse loud with large. And you will confuse volume with velocity. You will begin to believe that because opponents are loud, they are many, and because they have volume, they have momentum. Those are the two traps almost every leader falls into at some point. We simply assume loud means large, and that volume signals velocity. But loud does not equal large. And volume does not equal velocity. Just because a voice is loud doesn’t mean you should listen to it most.”

Source: Leading Change without Losing It: Five Strategies That Can Revolutionize How You Lead Change When Facing Opposition

Julia Dhar, Kristy Ellmer and Philip Jameson on leading change:

“Leaders of successful change do more than follow a checklist; they draw on a nuanced understanding of human nature to respond to unique challenges every day. For this reason, we sometimes say that change leadership is a rough-water sport. Every four years, you may watch some footage of an Olympic event called canoe slalom, in which competitors crash down a course of surging whitewater—reading the currents ahead of them, positioning their boat in the right spots at the right moment, and getting back on course when the unexpected occurs. Just like these competitors, change leaders need to predict and respond to the changing currents of human behavior, emotion, and thought across their organizations. Like canoe slalom, leading change is messy and tough—and there is no such thing as a perfect run.”

Source: How Change Really Works: Seven Science-Based Principles for Transforming Your Organization

Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index.

THERE’S a phrase that seems to be everywhere in the business world right now, but it is likely missing from most companies’ crisis management plans: Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Crack open any decent crisis planning playbook, and you’ll find detailed roadmaps for navigating natural disasters, system failures, and traditional cyberattacks. These risks are well understood, and crisis management planners have often seen how other organizations have handled these setbacks or even dealt with them themselves.

Although AI now touches on great swaths of our professional and personal lives, it is still a very young technology. And while most people vaguely understand that AI introduces some new level of risk, these dangers largely have yet to materialize in the sorts of public disasters that make headlines and get business leaders to take notice.

Although no one can predict exactly how AI-related risks will unfold in the years to come, businesses should start incorporating the technology into their crisis management plans now. Bad actors are already using (and misusing) the technology, and some of the vulnerabilities in early AI deployments are starting to reveal themselves. Armed with this knowledge, organizations can prepare for AI-driven incidents before these events cause full-blown crises.

How AI Is Reshaping Cyber Threats

Unfortunately, AI is already making cyber attackers faster and more effective. Attacks that once required ample time, expertise, and manual effort to carry out can now be automated and scaled. The technology is also opening organizations to new attack types meant to leverage the vulnerabilities of AI systems.

Consider phishing attacks - a form of social engineering in which users are tricked into clicking a malicious link, downloading an infected file, or providing sensitive information such as passwords or banking information. With the help of AI, attackers can generate countless highly personalized messages, tailoring their tone, language, and details to specific targets. This makes fraudulent communications more difficult for employees to identify, increasing the likelihood of a successful breach.

At the same time, AI is introducing entirely new categories of risk. Many businesses are deploying the technology for processes such as customer service, which involve troves of sensitive information. Emerging cyber-attacks such as prompt injection, data poisoning, and model manipulation can be used to expose this information, or to manipulate AI outputs in ways that harm the business.

Finally, AI is blurring the line between fact and fiction. With deepfake video or audio messages, attackers have impersonated executives or colleagues, creating the trust needed to convince employees to take potentially disastrous actions.

Bringing a Crisis Planning Lens to AI

Perhaps understandably, many organizations still treat AI as a mostly technical capability aimed at transforming business outcomes. However, leaders must also carefully consider the risks of the technology. Looking at AI through a crisis planning lens means considering it with the same seriousness that teams bring when planning for a potential natural disaster, a system outage, or a data breach that exposes customer payment information.

Crisis management teams must think through how they would respond if an operations or management system were compromised by external AI. For instance: What is the role of legal, public relations, and product teams if a company’s chatbot begins providing users harmful or biased responses? What steps will the organization take if an attacker impersonates the CEO with a deepfake video that leads to a large fraudulent transaction or jeopardizes the company’s reputation? And what happens if a previously unknown vulnerability in an AI tool makes confidential human resources data available to users across the company or, worse, external bad actors?

AI is evolving quickly; crisis plans must be revisited frequently. It’s important that these conversations include cross-functional teams, because that is who will be responding to virtually any crisis involving AI. IT Security teams may be the first to detect an issue, but legal departments, communications professionals, and executive leadership will all likely play critical roles in determining how the organization responds. Aligning these groups ahead of time will avoid delays and confusion when the time comes to act.

Although all the risks surrounding AI may not yet be fully understood, we can say with certainty that the technology will play a role in future high-profile crises. Organizations that wait for an incident to force action will find themselves making critical, on-the-spot decisions under extraordinary pressure. But those that begin integrating AI into their crisis planning now will be able to respond from a position of preparedness rather than panic.

HERE'S A LOOK at some of the best leadership books to be released in May 2026 curated just for you. Be sure to check out the other great titles being offered this month.

Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better by David Epstein

We live in a world that gives us seemingly infinite choices and prizes freedom above all else. We have an unprecedented number of options regarding what to do, who to be, and how to spend our time. All that choice is wonderful; it is also overwhelming. The irony is that total freedom can be paralyzing, and unlimited resources don’t necessarily lead to the biggest breakthroughs. In fact, overvaluing complete freedom can be disastrous for everything from starting a company to harnessing creativity to finding personal satisfaction. David Epstein argues that all of us—individuals, businesses, institutions, even societies—can benefit from narrowing our options.

Valuable and Visible: Redefining Personal Branding by Leading with Impact Over Image by Vanessa Errecarte

You’ve built real skill. You’ve solved real problems. But in a world that rewards visibility, doing meaningful work isn’t enough. Recognition matters. Yet the modern version of “personal branding” feels exhausting. Somewhere along the way, personal branding became synonymous with self-promotion, follower counts, and algorithm-chasing. For thoughtful professionals and students like you, that version feels performative at best and misaligned at worst. And yet invisibility is no longer neutral. If your work is going to matter, your ideas have to travel. In Valuable & Visible: Redefining Personal Branding by Leading with Impact Over Image, award-winning marketing lecturer Vanessa Errecarte offers a different path: a service-first approach designed for professionals who want credibility, not clout.

Why Start-Ups Fail: Avoiding the Traps on the Path to Commercial Success by Bernie Bulkin

A shocking 90% of start-ups fail. Many of these failures are preventable, but you need to understand the causes and how to avoid them – both as an entrepreneur and an investor. From technology to the market, from leadership to money, there are numerous reasons why your start-up will fail. Bernie Bulkin guides you through the six major reasons why start-ups fail, and how to avoid them. Instead of accepting failure as inevitable, this book breaks down the main reasons why start-ups fail and how to turn them on their head. Whether you're a founder or an investor, if you're going to put in the time, money, and effort to ensure a company succeeds, you should go in with your eyes open. Bernie's common-sense approach offers the experience of a venture capitalist who has been there and done that. Leadership at all levels makes a difference.

How Change Really Works: Seven Science-Based Principles for Transforming Your Organization by Julia Dhar, Kristy Ellmer and Philip Jameson

Companies have never invested more in transformation—or wasted more on failed attempts. Finally, a science-based, practical guide to making change stick. Market volatility. AI. Regulatory uncertainty. Geopolitical risk. Leaders know they must adapt faster than ever—yet most transformation programs still fail to deliver their expected outcomes, with enormous costs to companies, shareholders, and the broader economy. But some companies do succeed. In How Change Really Works, Boston Consulting Group experts Dhar, Ellmer, and Jameson show that these successes aren't random—they're connected by a common set of principles and practices. The authors offer seven principles that form the core of a truly human-centered approach to successful organizational change.

Enlightened Bottom Line: Exploring the Intersection of Spirituality, Business, and Investing by Jenna Nicholas

What if business and investing could be rooted in the deepest values of the human spirit? In Enlightened Bottom Line, Nicholas explores the powerful intersection of spirituality, business, and investing—an intersection too often overlooked in a world driven by profit alone. Drawing on moving stories of entrepreneurs, investors, and leaders who are living out this integration, along with cutting-edge research, Nicholas reveals how spiritual wisdom can guide ethical choices in finance and business. Unlike other books on business or investing, Enlightened Bottom Line is not just about strategies, numbers, or policies. It is about reimagining what wealth, success, and leadership can truly mean when guided by purpose, compassion, and integrity. It offers readers concrete frameworks and real-world examples to align their financial decisions with their deepest beliefs.

Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad... and How Great Companies Stay Great by Eric Ries

For decades, we've explained corporate corruption as a problem of bad actors, moral weakness, or isolated scandals. But that story doesn't match reality. Again and again, companies founded with strong ideals drift toward short-term thinking, extractive behavior, and mission abandonment—often despite the best intentions of the people inside them. Incorruptible argues that this failure is not primarily ethical. It is structural. As organizations grow, the systems that govern them—ownership, incentives, charters, accountability, and decision-making—quietly reshape behavior. When those systems are poorly designed, even principled leaders are pushed toward outcomes they never wanted. Success itself becomes a form of financial gravity, bending companies away from their original purpose. Ries shows how these failures arise predictably—and how they can be prevented. He reframes corporate governance not as bureaucracy or compliance, but as a creative and strategic act at the heart of building enduring, mission-controlled companies.

IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with:

Paul Ingram on values:

“When you know your values-really know them-you unlock something vital. You get clarity when things are uncertain. You gain confidence when decisions get hard. You find resilience when life throws something unexpected your way. And you create deeper connections with others because you’re leading from a place that’s honest and grounded.”

Source: What Do You Really Stand For? The One Question That Will Transform Your Work and Life

Stanley McCrystal on the ends justify the means:

“It is the ‘end justifies the means’ conundrum. We often can’t be all we want to be without departing from the character we aspire to cultivate. The choice is rarely binary, although we often wish it were. But, if we choose an inflexible adherence to certain values, this can prove difficult to pull off within the complexities of the real world. On the other hand, once we depart from our core character, we join the legions of those who have abandoned what matters most.”

Source: On Character: Choices That Define a Life

Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index.

Here is a selection of Posts from April 2026 that you will want to check out:

• VIDEO: AI Is Replacing Leaders Who Can't Do This One Thing by @cnieuwhof Worth watching!
• If You Get the Chance by @tedlamade via @collabfund
• Comfort in the Chaos? via @LBBOnline In periods of instability - economic pressure, cultural fragmentation, a constant sense of flux - people look for grounding.
• Lincoln Leadership Failure | Succession Planning by @jamesstrock
• 6 Reasons People Pleasing Hurts Your Leadership by @DanReiland
• What Hollywood Taught Me About Getting Ahead by @PhilCooke
• 5 Hidden Forces That Will Undermine Your Leadership Decisions by @WScottCochrane
• Why designers make better entrepreneurs than they think by @vcastillo630 The same orientation that made them uncomfortable to manage makes them deeply competent at building something of their own.
• Owning Your Creative Model by Bulandundonnelly It is no longer simply: Can you make this? It becomes: Do you know what is worth making? That is a very different kind of creative problem.
• Long-Term Money by @morganhousel
• The Cost of Misalignment by @samchand
• Get Unstuck by @James_Albright
• 3 Questions Great Leaders Ask Before It’s Too Late by @BrianKDodd
• Why Emotion Drives Effectiveness More Than We Might Like to Admit by @jacquesburger LBBOnline
• Great Company Culture Is More Than Creating a Nice Place to Work | Stanford Graduate School of Business
• An Institutional Reckoning via @commentmag A series of essays on the need for renewal of our institutions
• What The Astronauts Of Artemis II Know About Teamwork - 7 Traits of Elite, High-Functioning Teams by @BrianKDodd
• Don't reinvent your career — Remix it by @artpetty
• The Illusion of Clarity by @neuranne Anne-Laure Le Cunff
• Time Isn’t the Problem — Your Choices Are by @FSonnenberg
• To Grow, Businesses Should Look to Family Firms for Inspiration via @KelloggSchool
• The Allure of Magic: Discovering Joy in the Inexplicable via @templeton_fdn by Adam Waytz

See more on Twitter.

MY go-to definition of leadership is “helping others do better.” I use it because it is simple, inclusive, and focused on the practical impact leaders have.

Leadership is ultimately about having a positive effect on other people, teams, and organizations. But my best advice for achieving that starts by looking inward. By leading oneself—what I call ‘personal leadership’—a leader is better able to affect others positively.

In more than three decades of research and teaching on leadership, the most powerful tool for personal leadership that I have come across is to leverage the leader’s own values. Doing this requires an upfront investment by the leader in work to clarify their top values, and an ongoing effort to keep those values salient and accessible, so they can be recalled at key leadership moments.

Below, I offer concise advice on how to build this tool by clarifying your own values. But first, I’ll share some of my favorite evidence that the tool works.

How Do You “Be Authentic?”

Authenticity has been called the gold standard of leadership. Everybody wants it in themselves and in the people they follow. But just how do you ‘be authentic?’ If I asked you to be authentic, what should you do?

I found one answer to this question through an experiment with my colleagues Yoonjin Choi and Sheena Iyengar. We studied how mid-career managers communicated with their teams by asking them to write and deliver a motivational speech to a camera.

For half of the leaders, randomly selected, we presented them with a summary they had previously created in a workshop of their own top values. We asked them to keep their values in mind when they wrote their speech; we emphasized that they did not need to talk about their values unless they chose to.

After the subjects recorded their speech, we asked them how they felt. Those who had been reminded of their own values reported feeling more authentic. Feeling authentic is nice, but does it translate into more effective leadership? It does, as we learned when we had the speeches evaluated by other managers and by communications experts.

Those audience members did not know that some speakers had been asked to think about their values. Nevertheless, the audience rated the values-alert speakers as being more authentic. And they reported higher trust in those speakers. Would you like to be viewed as more authentic and more trustworthy by others? Keep your values top of mind. Here’s how to do it.

Clarify Your Values

I’ve taken more than ten thousand leaders from around the world through interactive workshops to help them clarify their top values. At the heart of the process is a simple truth: values are principles of evaluation. Through them, we decide whether a person, an idea, or a project is good, bad, or important.

If you reflect on something you view as good and important and ask why, your answers will point to your values. Try this: Think of someone you view as an outstanding leader. Now ask yourself what about that person’s leadership best explains why you view them so positively. Try to identify a single word (such as “empathy”), but if you need a couple of words (such as “good communication”), that is OK.

If you see this person as a truly outstanding leader, there will be more than one positive quality you attribute to them, so ask yourself what else makes them outstanding in your view. Repeat that question two more times, until you have four answers.

These answers point to values you hold. You can refine them further and make them more useful as a tool, with one more step that aims to zero in more precisely on the exact words that best describe your values.

For each of your four values, identify some synonyms. A chatbot can be useful for this step; if one of your answers to the reflection was “excellence,” you might ask it to give you six synonyms for excellence. Say one of the synonyms is ‘quality.’ Ask yourself: If I had to choose between ‘excellence’ and ‘quality,’ which would I choose? If your answer is excellence, ask the question again, replacing quality with the next synonym. If your answer is ‘quality,’ treat it as the better expression of your value and compare it with the next synonym.

Go through this process for each of your four values. You’ll finish with a list of four values that are each very important to you.

Put Your Values Within Reach

Now you have a list of your top values, like the ones the leaders in our experiment used to tap into their authenticity and build trust. To turn that list into a tool, make it concrete in a form you can consult at key leadership moments.

Many leaders who have gone through my values workshop keep their values on a card in their wallet. Others save them as a picture or note on their phone. Still others put them on a handy object, like a coffee mug.

The key is to keep your values close at hand, so you can consult them when you want to be at your best as a leader. Beyond authenticity and trust, evidence suggests that thinking about your values can also make you happier, more ethical, more resilient, more open, and more motivated.

When your values are clear and close at hand, leading yourself becomes the first step in helping others do better.

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While Companies Race to Adopt AI, Many Lack the Skills to Make It Work

AI isn’t the top workplace advantage, human skills are. TalentSmartEQ, the world’s premier provider of emotional intelligence (EQ) solutions, has released its 2026 State of EQ Report, examining how leaders and organizations navigate rising economic uncertainty, rapid change and the acceleration of AI adoption. The report reveals that the human skills required to make technology effective are now the strongest predictor of organizational performance in an AI-driven world.

Drawing insights from nearly 700 leadership, HR and L&D professionals and EQ data from more than 23,000 individuals, this year’s report shows a widening gap between companies’ technological ambition and their human readiness to execute.

“Technology has dominated the workplace conversation, but data continues to show that technology doesn’t create performance, people do,” said Howard Farfel, TalentSmartEQ CEO. “As AI adoption accelerates, the organizations coming out ahead in 2026 are deliberately building the people skills that allow leaders and teams to think clearly, stay steady under pressure and execute when conditions are uncertain.”

Four themes that will define a company’s performance in the next three to five years:

Build the “Human Skills Stack”

When asked which skills will matter most in the years ahead, the top response was keeping up with technology, followed closely by adaptability to change, critical thinking, emotional intelligence and communication. Together, these capabilities form an integrated “human skills stack” that enables technology to deliver results. EQ sits at the center, shaping how leaders respond when priorities collide, feedback is difficult, customers are frustrated and decisions must be made with incomplete information. Technical capability only creates an advantage when human capability keeps pace.

Rising Uncertainty and Change are Testing Leaders

Economic uncertainty is now the top factor expected to impact businesses in the coming years. Organizational change is no longer occasional: 54% of organizations report experiencing frequent or constant change, up from 45% in 2025. However, only 41% say they are well-prepared to handle changes or disruption. How leaders manage this constant pressure is emerging as a key performance differentiator.

Internal Alignment is the Hidden Performance Constraint

While external forces dominate headlines, the report finds that the most significant barrier to execution is internal alignment. Misalignment is a natural consequence of sustained change, ongoing uncertainty and the quality and consistency of communication. When alignment breaks down, teams slow decision-making, execution falters and trust erodes.

Leaders are Working on the Wrong Things

TalentsmartEQ’s 2026 State of EQ Report reveals a disconnect between leadership intent and real-world impact. Data from TalentSmartEQ’s multi-rater assessment shows fewer than 5% of leaders share the same top three development priorities as their raters, and 45% show no overlap between the behaviors they want to improve and the behaviors that their teams say limit their effectiveness. As a result, well-intentioned development investments often fail to produce measurable performance gains.

To gain additional insights into challenges and strategies shaping organizations, download the free 2026 State of EQ.