Four leadership skills for 2026
Today’s column gets a bit more spicy than my usual. If you stay to the end, please let me know what you think.
Your board wants results. Your employees are exhausted. And in the background, a parade of CEOs is telling Wall Street that the path to performance is making people a little more afraid.
The “tough leader” playbook has real momentum right now. Layoffs as a badge of honor, DEI programs axed as a signal of fiscal seriousness, and fear of AI deployed as a motivator are all in vogue. Tech CEOs who like to position themselves as iconoclasts have largely fallen in line to stay in the good graces of a capricious President.
It’s working, in the sense that it generates headlines and short-term stock reactions. What it doesn’t consistently generate is the thing leaders actually need: teams willing to take the risks required for real innovation, including the transformational change AI could bring.
My bet: the leaders who will look smart at the end of 2026 aren’t the ones who sounded toughest in 2025. They’re the quieter leaders who are focused on building organizations where people can do their best work, even amid genuine uncertainty.
That requires four things that aren’t getting enough airtime right now: empathy, presence, product thinking, and courage. Not soft skills, but hard work: putting in the reps, investing in understanding how teams are working, taking risks and daring to see through someone else’s eyes.
Empathy
Empathy isn’t about using your heart, it’s about using your head. And right now, command-and-control leadership is making a comeback, dressed up as discipline. “Tough” CEOs mistake empathy for weakness. That’s an expensive mistake: organizations where people trust their leaders are 11 times more likely to be high performers.
The connection to AI transformation is direct. In one BCG study, generative AI use increased 89% when managers adjusted their training approaches to account for how differently their team members were adopting new tools. That requires understanding what people are thinking and feeling, not just what they’re producing. Managers rated as empathetic by their teams are rated as high performers by senior leaders. Whether that’s correlation or causality, it’s not a coincidence.
Empathetic leaders build environments where people can ask questions, suggest ideas, and ask for help when overloaded. That matters more than ever now that heavy AI users are developing better relationships with AI than with human colleagues. Leaders who nurture belonging and human connection build competitive advantage through capabilities that fear only destroys.
Presence
When Brian Chesky started talking about “Founder Mode” at Airbnb, a lot of people took it to extremes, often as code for “just do it the way I told you to.” What he was actually getting at was more fundamental: the need for a leader to get into the details alongside her team.
The challenge in large organizations is that leadership gets distant from the work, both literally and figuratively. CEOs who haven’t ever set foot in a warehouse. CTOs who aren’t in the tools and code. CMOs who aren’t writing their own content. And maybe more importantly, leaders who are too far removed from how genuinely difficult daily existence is for the teams inside their organizations.
Ron Heifetz’s dance floor and balcony framework captures this well. As a frontline manager, you’re down on the dance floor, in the mix, hearing the music. As a senior leader, you climb to the balcony to see patterns, rhythms, and whether the whole thing is working. The mistake is staying up there. You have to go back down, regularly, to realize how badly people are stepping on one another’s toes, and to hear that the music and the lights aren’t in sync the way you thought.
The rise of AI makes this even more critical. You can’t address AI “workslop” if you’re not showing what good quality looks like. You can’t demand an AI-powered transformation of how work gets done if you have no idea how the work is actually being done.
Product thinking
Organizations invest $142 billion annually understanding customers but under $11 billion on employee experience, despite clear evidence linking employee engagement to business results. If you treated customers the way most companies treat employees during a technology transition, you’d be out of business.
The fix is bringing that external discipline in-house: think of work as a product and treat employees as your customer, not a replaceable widget. Many AI initiatives fail because leaders announce efficiency targets without understanding actual friction: what tasks create toil, where teams get stuck, what problems genuinely need solving. Great product managers invest deeply in understanding how customers actually use products, step by step, mapping engagement to outcomes. The same approach works with employees.
BCG research shows reducing toil drives higher odds of AI success and improves retention. Companies like Zapier judge AI success not just on efficiency gains but on work quality improvements and whether employees feel more engaged and energized. Want a successful transformation effort? Pair people with product management skills with subject matter experts to identify problems worth solving for teams and the business.
Courage
It shouldn’t surprise Work Forward readers that I have no time for the Elon Musk and Donald Trump school of leadership: outright fabrications, falsehoods, and behavior that would get most executives, let alone any frontline employee, fired on the spot. The racism, the sexism, the rampant profiteering. None of it creates conditions for a high-performance culture.
What Musk and Trump have done is shift the Overton window. The implicit logic: I might be a jerk, but at least I’m not that bad.
Telling your international employees to stand up at a company gathering and then joking that ICE is waiting for them at the back of the room isn’t edgy comedy, it’s a threat. The uproar that followed at Salesforce was understandable, appropriate, and bad for business.
A close friend recently shared the script they were handed to terminate a peer, their department head too cowardly to deliver the news personally. The firm was eliminating roles before AI had actually proven out, and conveniently before bonus checks were cut. I’d dare anyone to read this sentence aloud to a colleague:
“We’re restructuring [x team] and moving to a hybrid model, blending a focused internal team with flexible external resources for specialized expertise as our AI needs evolve. As a result, your role is being eliminated.”
Not delivering bad news yourself tells your team everything they need to know about your spine. Punching down at all All Hands or on Twitter/X degrades people and team performance. And quietly falling in line while privately disagreeing is just the CEO version of quiet quitting. Each of these signals the same thing to everyone watching: this is a place where you keep your head down and do the minimum to get by.
Fall in line, or dare to be different
Plenty of CEOs quietly disagree with the current climate. Most are staying quiet because they don’t want to be in the crosshairs of a vindictive administration, or be seen as soft.
People aren’t asking for virtue signaling, and they’re not expecting a return to 2020’s excesses. They’re looking for leaders with the courage of their convictions and a genuine read on what their teams are living through. Acknowledging the chaos around your employees isn’t weakness, it’s the job.
The alignment around tough-talking leadership creates real opportunity for leaders willing to go a different direction. One that holds people accountable without making them afraid. That combination — empathy, presence, product thinking, and spine — will separate out leaders who build something lasting.
Your turn
What would you add to the list? More importantly, where did I go wrong? Leave a comment or drop me a private note at brian@workforward.com — I read everything.
Thanks to the Great Place to Work team, who asked me to name my top leadership skill for 2026 and inspired this column. Many great leaders contributed: Check them all out. Today’s column, and any resulting arguments, are entirely my own.
ICYMI
Will accelerating AI capabilities lead to accelerated job loss? You might have read Otherside AI CEO Matt Shumer’s essay, or the Atlantic cover story by Josh Tyrangiel about the potential for a massive wave of job losses—pretty dire stuff. I’m a big fan of Charter’s Jacob Clemente, who delivered a much more balanced perspective.
I hope that many people read Matt, Jacob and Josh’s work, and that they spark a deeper conversation among leaders and policymakers. Even a more modest 1-2% increase in unemployment is 2-4 million people in the US alone out of jobs. A recession starts, the impact snowballs. The time to start acting isn’t once we’re off the edge of a cliff, it’s now.
I’ll be covering the latest data in my column for Charter next Tuesday—stay tuned.
Brian, again, thank you for your work on this balanced and very grounded way to tackle these challenging times. To answer your question - the one I will add - Accountability. Not the old-fashioned "hold people accountable" and not support them. True "teaming" (thank you, Amy Edmondson) is when an exec takes 100% ownership for decisions. For example, when an enterprise ventures on a specific AI Agents path, who owns the outcomes? Who decides what "excellence" looks like vs. AI workslop (thank you, BetterUp and Stanford Media Lab). That's my top call-to-action of execs globally.
The product thinking point is the one I'd double down on. I work with professional services founders — consultancies, accountancy firms, MSPs — in the £500K-£5M range. The ones who scale successfully are invariably the ones who stop treating their team as a cost centre and start treating the internal experience as a product worth investing in. The data you cite is striking: $142 billion understanding customers vs $11 billion on employee experience. In service businesses, the gap is even more extreme because the employee IS the product. Every hour a frustrated team member spends fighting broken internal processes is an hour of diminished client delivery. I'd add one skill to your four: subtraction. The leaders I've seen break through aren't the ones who add more initiatives, more tools, more meetings. They're the ones with the discipline to remove the things that no longer serve the business. It's harder than it sounds — most founders built their success by adding. Learning to subtract is the leadership shift that nobody prepares you for.