2026 will be the “Year of Proof” in many organizations.
2025 has created a fractured environment. Budgets have been cut, AI investments have been made, and the geopolitical climate has deepened uncertainty. As we look to 2026, executives are searching for big wins. They need investments to pay off and expect performance regardless of market volatility. Leaders feel this pressure directly. They are being asked to do more, with less energy and less goodwill to draw on.
For this piece, we worked with AI tools to help us analyze more than 300 leading business reports and articles from the past year, with a specific lens: how they will shape leadership development in the year ahead.
Our purpose is not to repeat what is already in every other trend article or to sound the alarm about how transformative 2026 will be. You already know the scale of change you are facing.
Instead, we aim to help L&D teams apply these trends to create pathways to stability in a work world that will feel far from stable. That depends on emotional intelligence.
Emotional intelligence is the capacity that keeps people steady enough to learn, adopt new tools, and execute strategy in this environment. It is also what helps people work through challenges together, instead of retreating into defensive, individual survival.
As we share our view on the top leadership trends of 2026, consider them less as abstract predictions and more as practical design criteria for building emotionally intelligent, performance ready leaders.
Trend 1: Leaner organizations, heavier emotional load on leaders
Many organizations enter 2026 in a very lean state, as layoffs in the U.S. have surged to the highest point in 10 years. Restructuring, automation, and AI investments have streamlined teams in anticipation of efficiency, but the human workload has not disappeared.
Managers carry a disproportionate share of that strain. In fact, Gallup showed a notable dip (from 30% to 27%) in manager engagement in 2025, a rare instance as managers typically remain highly engaged even in tough times. In particular, younger managers (under 35) dropped five percentage points, and female managers were down seven.
Furthermore, Deloitte research shows that 40% of managers said their mental health declined when they took on a leadership position.
In other words, the people you rely on to stabilize your culture are often the least resourced emotionally.
What this means for leadership development
In a lean environment, leaders may intellectually understand feedback models or decision frameworks, yet default to reactivity under pressure. The limiting factor is not knowledge. It is emotional capacity in the moments that matter.
For 2026, leadership development that does not explicitly address stress, reactivity, and emotional self awareness will struggle to stick. The programs that endure will help leaders:
- Notice their stress signals before they bleed into decision making.
- Stay present in difficult conversations instead of rushing to close them.
- Create pockets of psychological safety even when targets are demanding.
How L&D can respond
- Treat emotional regulation as a named leadership capability in your frameworks, not an informal benefit.
- Build simulations that intentionally trigger real pressure, then help leaders practice a more grounded response.
- Partner with HRBPs to connect emotionally intelligent leadership behaviors to outcomes such as retention of key talent and reduction in avoidable mistakes.
Trend 2: An amped-up span of influence for each leader
Several trends are converging at once: Organizations are flattening, assigning more employees to each leader. A recent Gartner-based analysis reported that managers today oversee nearly triple the number of employees than they did in 2017.
Second, the rise of agentic AI means that each employee (and subsequently, their leader) is now overseeing far more decision-making as they add digital employees.
These two trends also mean that leaders - even at the frontline - may also begin leading greater functional diversity, including areas where they have little or no experience.
As a result, each manager’s span of control is rapidly expanding. A single leader’s choices now cascade through more people, more locations, and more algorithms.
What this means for leadership development
When one leader’s habits scale that far, the emotional quality of their leadership becomes a system issue. Leaders are always communicating - often unknowingly, including through their body language and subtext. Because of that, leaders may believe they are masking their emotions, or what some call “surface acting.” But their teams and colleagues say they show through.
As a result, anxious, reactive leaders can create anxious, reactive systems. But steady leaders create conditions where others can think clearly and take ownership.
Traditional leadership development often stops at “my team.” In 2026, the key question for L&D is: What happens when this leader’s default reactions and communication patterns are amplified across the organization?
How L&D can respond
- Add “sphere of influence” mapping exercises to programs, so leaders see where their decisions travel through processes, platforms, and partners.
- Use 360 tools and stakeholder interviews that include cross functional peers and project teams, not only direct reports.
- Integrate self awareness practices that help leaders notice the emotional tone they set in rooms, channels, and written communication.
Trend 3: From “supportive” to accountable, human-centered leadership
After years of disruption, many executive teams are narrowing their focus. They want clear accountability for results. At the same time, there is growing fatigue with leadership styles that feel overly consensus driven or conflict averse.
Yet when organizations push for harder accountability without the right support, leaders often fall back into command and control. Research from McKinsey’s State of Organizations report notes that leaders are trying to organize for speed and resilience while also dealing with declining mental health and rapid technological change.
What this means for leadership development
Many leadership curricula still emphasize being supportive, inclusive, and approachable, with less practice in delivering clear, sometimes unpopular, messages with humanity. Leaders need to learn how to hold firm on standards while staying emotionally connected to the people affected.
Emotional intelligence is central here. Leaders must be able to read the emotional impact of their decisions, acknowledge it honestly, and still follow through.
How L&D can respond
- Reframe empathetic listening as a performance skill. Understanding someone’s perspective helps you set better expectations and support action, not avoid it.
- Build structured practice for high stakes conversations: performance resets, role changes, and resource cuts.
- Give leaders simple language patterns that combine clarity and care, and let them rehearse these until they feel natural.
Trend 4: The middle layer makes a radical leap
Gartner predicts that organizations will have eliminated about half of middle management roles by 2026. Primarily, these layoffs affect managers whose primary value was "coordination"—assigning tasks, checking status, compiling weekly reports, and passing along information from executive meetings.
The surviving managers are being reinvented as "Insight Architects" or "Talent Gardeners". Their role is to look at the data generated by AI and ask: "So what?" They provide the context that AI lacks. They are responsible for connecting dots across silos—a task AI struggles with due to data fragmentation.
According to Deloitte, the greatest skill for middle managers is judgement. This will require them to rely heavily on intuition honed from years of experience to make the right decisions that incorporate technology capability with human and business impact.
What this means for leadership development
Classic “new manager” programs that focus mainly on approvals, task assignment, and compliance are out of step with this reality. Manager capability now rests on three intertwined skills:
- Sensemaking across shifting priorities.
- Coaching and feedback that grow capability, not only correct behavior.
- Emotional steadiness while navigating demands from above and below.
These are fundamentally emotionally intelligent skills.
How L&D can respond
- Rebuild manager curricula around coaching conversations, not just operational checklists.
- Use real cross functional business challenges as the context for practice, so managers learn to weave perspectives rather than escalate everything upward.
- Provide managers with tools that help them consciously and purposefully tap into their leadership intuition, without letting “gut feeling” play too heavy of a role.
Trend 5: A fragile and reluctant leadership pipeline
Leadership pipelines have become vulnerable in a new way. DDI research showed that 71% of leaders are feeling increased stress, and 40% of them are thinking of quitting.
There are few who are ready or even willing to step in to fill leadership gaps, especially among younger generations. Deloitte’s Gen Z and Millennial Survey noted that only 6 percent of Gen Z respondents aspired to senior leadership roles, preferring roles that emphasize meaning, emotional intelligence, and personal growth. Another survey cited in the FT found that half of Gen Z professionals were uninterested in middle management, with nearly 70 percent viewing those roles as “high stress, low reward.”
What this means for leadership development
The leadership experience matters now more than ever. If leadership continues to look like endless meetings, emotional strain, and limited support, it will be tough to retain good leaders - and even harder to convince the next generation to step in.
Leadership development programs need to do a better job teaching leaders how to manage the emotional load of leadership. This not only helps to protect their own wellbeing, but demonstrate a positive path to leadership for younger generations.
How L&D can respond
- Move EQ based capability building earlier in careers. Teach self awareness, influence, and difficult conversations before formal promotion.
- Create structured opportunities for early career talent to lead projects, facilitate discussions, and practice judgment, with real coaching and feedback.
- Work with HR and business leaders to redesign leadership roles so they have clearer boundaries, visible growth paths, and support for the emotional load.
Trend 6: Learning cultures transcend content
Most organizations are facing massive needs to reskill and upskill to meet new technology and market demands. As a result, we’re seeing an uptick in organizations that are trying to build a learning culture.
The good news is that learning ecosystems have never been richer, from traditional content libraries to the most advanced AI coaches and adaptive platforms.
Despite the proliferation of tools one big barrier looms larger than ever: emotional capacity. People are being asked to learn at a time when they are already highly overwhelmed with the demands of their job.
Simultaneously, we’re also seeing a rise in workplace loneliness. This isolation has an impact on learning, given the long-proven research that social reinforcement is crucial to learning.
While AI tools offer incredible advancements in the way people learn, there’s a risk that organizations will rely too heavily on solitary, screen based-experiences.
What this means for leadership development
A learning culture is more than tools and policies; it is a shared emotional experience. When people learn together, they see that others also struggle, experiment, and recover from mistakes. That shared experience lowers defensiveness and increases coachability.
Leaders also need to adapt their emotional responses to support a culture of learning. A leader who responds to bad news with blame or anger shuts down everyone’s learning. But leaders who approach mistakes with curiosity and clarity open up learning, especially when they do so in front of others.
Emotional regulation sits at the heart of that difference. It shapes how leaders show up in group settings, how safe people feel to speak honestly, and how much they are willing to try something new in front of peers.
How L&D can respond
- Create cohort based and team based learning journeys where leaders practice new skills with colleagues, not only through individual digital modules. Use live or virtual sessions that include real dialogue and shared reflection.
- Use group scenarios where leaders practice responding to failures, surprises, and conflicting priorities in ways that keep people engaged. Debrief the emotional dynamics, not only the business outcome.
- Help leaders see the link between their own emotional habits and learning metrics, such as adoption of new tools, speed to proficiency, and engagement scores, and show how group learning accelerates those outcomes.
Trend 7: Trust and authenticity redefined in an AI workplace
AI is now deeply embedded in how work gets done. Yet we don’t always know when it’s happening, which is creating serious breaches of trust.
Many employees use AI tools quietly. A global study by KPMG and the University of Melbourne found that 57 percent of workers admitted to hiding their AI use (known as “shadow AI”) and presenting AI generated work as their own.
Meanwhile, other workers are seething when they spot a co-worker creating “AI workslop,” which is work that initially sounds right but on closer look, is riddled with errors and issues. Consequently, someone else ends up spending more time fixing the work than it would have taken to do it themselves, which breeds resentment.
Without these human checks, AI errors create major issues, as occurred with Deloitte’s report to the Australian government. In other use cases, AI is speeding up the creation of work, but creating more work to understand and correct issues, as is occurring with software coding.
In this environment, people are asking new questions. Who really did this work? Does this person really stand behind the work, or are they even aware of everything that’s here? Whose judgment can I rely on?
What this means for leadership development
Trust and authenticity now depend less on whether people use AI and more on how transparently and responsibly they do so. Many employees worry that their personal value will seem diminished if they admit to using AI, which is why it’s critical that they have psychological safety to talk openly about when and how they are using AI tools.
Likewise, leaders need the emotional intelligence to have honest conversations about AI, to admit what they do not know, address conflict openly, and to stand behind decisions that blend human and machine input.
They also need discernment. Leaders must be able to read the human behind AI polished work, so performance and promotion decisions remain fair.
How L&D can respond
- Build team skills in collaboration and psychological safety, to ensure people are comfortable talking about when and how they use AI, as well as honesty when there are issues with the work.
- Design scenarios where leaders must respond to AI generated work, probe for real understanding, and give feedback that builds both skill and trust.
- Encourage leaders to communicate clearly about when they lean on AI, how they check its outputs, and how they remain accountable for outcomes.
EQ as the steady core of leadership in the Year of Proof
Across these seven trends, the pattern is consistent: every individual from the C-suite to the frontline is carrying a heavier load than before, with higher accountability for producing results in the “Year of Proof.”
What determines whether they succeed is not only strategy, structure, or tools. It is the emotional experience people have as they work through these changes.
Emotional intelligence is the steadying force underneath performance. It gives leaders the inner stability to notice their reactions, stay calm and purposeful in difficult moments, and respond in ways that keep trust and learning alive. That steadiness is what allows teams to adopt AI, deliver against new expectations, and accomplish higher goals together.
For L&D and HR leaders, this is the design challenge for 2026. Every decision about leadership frameworks, programs, and metrics is an opportunity to embed EQ. It won’t be about developing emotional intelligence as a skill separate from everything else, but building it into every leadership skill, from coaching to delegation to performance management and more.
When you treat EQ as essential leadership infrastructure, you are not only supporting wellbeing. You are building the conditions for consistent, reliable performance in a year when proof matters more than ever.
Integrate EQ into leadership development
