Strengths-based leadership starts with a different question: not “What should a good leader look like?”, but “What becomes possible when you lead from what you already do well?”
Much leadership advice focuses on external models of success. It tells leaders how to communicate, behave, and perform. Far less attention is given to what happens when leaders stop trying to imitate a generic ideal and start leading from their own strengths, values, and sense of purpose.
In episode 3 of Talent Trailblazers, James Brook is joined by Terri McNerney, Senior Executive Coach and TalentPredix™ Practitioner, to explore how leaders can reconnect with who they are and lead with greater confidence and authenticity.
Drawing on her book, Dive Deep to Rise Higher: Realign with Purpose, Power and Presence, Terri shares coaching stories about confidence, burnout, and authentic leadership. She also explains the Purpose, Power and Presence framework at the heart of the book, including why she pictures strengths as the roots that keep a leader standing under pressure.
Strengths-based leadership is about understanding and intentionally applying the natural qualities that help leaders create impact, build trust, and remain grounded under pressure.
It does not mean ignoring development areas or pretending leadership is easy. It means starting with what is already strong, energizing, and authentic, then building the skills and capabilities needed to lead more effectively.
When leaders understand their strengths, they are better equipped to:
The goal is not to become a completely different kind of leader. It is to become more intentional and effective in how you lead as yourself.
Terri explores what can happen when leaders lose connection with themselves, particularly during periods of pressure, transition, or burnout.
She explains why confidence is not simply about becoming more visible or assertive. Sustainable confidence comes from deeper self-awareness, clarity of purpose, and the ability to lead in a way that feels honest and aligned.
James and Terri discuss:
Terri’s Purpose, Power and Presence framework gives leaders a practical way to realign with who they are and how they want to lead.
Purpose helps leaders understand what matters to them, what they want to contribute, and where they can create meaningful impact.
Power is about recognizing and using influence in a grounded, responsible, and confident way.
Presence is the ability to show up with clarity, calm, and genuine connection, particularly when circumstances become difficult.
Together, these three areas support a more authentic and sustainable approach to strengths-based leadership. They help leaders move beyond simply performing a role and lead with a stronger understanding of who they are, what they stand for, and how they affect others.
Terri describes strengths as the roots of a tree: the foundation that enables a leader to remain standing when conditions become difficult.
This does not mean strengths eliminate pressure. Instead, knowing and trusting your strengths can provide greater stability when expectations change, confidence drops, or familiar ways of working no longer feel effective.
Strengths-based leadership also requires understanding how strengths can be overused. A strength that creates value in one situation may become less effective when applied too intensely or without awareness of what the situation requires.
The objective is therefore not simply to identify strengths. It is to use them consciously, flexibly, and in ways that create the intended impact.
Get the Book
Terri’s book, Dive Deep to Rise Higher: Realign with Purpose, Power and Presence, expands on the framework explored in this conversation.
It offers practical insight for leaders who want to reconnect with their strengths, clarify their purpose, and develop a more authentic leadership presence.
Get the book: Dive Deep to Rise Higher
Terri also offers Leadership Insights sessions for leaders who want to explore their strengths, purpose, and leadership impact in greater depth.
The session includes a TalentPredix™ profile and dedicated coaching conversation with Terri, helping leaders make sense of their insights and translate them into practical actions for how they lead.
Explore Terri’s Leadership Insights sessions →
Terri’s book draws on the TalentPredix™ Wheel of Strengths, and the conversation closely reflects our own approach: strengths are not an optional addition to leadership development. They are an essential foundation for it.
As AI changes work and reshapes what organizations need from leaders, distinctly human capabilities such as self-awareness, resilience, resourcefulness, communication, adaptability, and sound judgement are becoming more important, not less.
Leaders need more than technical capability. They need the insight to understand themselves, the confidence to navigate uncertainty, and the human judgement to bring out the best in others.
This is where strengths-based leadership creates real value.
For organizations, leaders, and coaches looking to apply strengths-based development more broadly, TalentPredix™ provides deeper insight into the human factors that shape performance and potential.
TalentPredix™ helps leaders understand their Strengths, Motivations, Values, Limiters, and Critical Human Skills, enabling them to lead with greater clarity, confidence, and impact.
Request your free trial or book a short conversation.
Global employee engagement has fallen for two years running, dropping to just 20% in 2025. This is the first back-to-back decline Gallup has recorded since 2009, costing an estimated $438 billion in lost productivity in 2024 alone.
That’s not a blip: it’s a major structural problem which can be traced to several underlying causes.
Management style is now one of the leading causes of workplace stress according to the CIPD. Manager engagement itself fell from 30% to 27% between 2024 and 2025, with younger and female managers hit hardest as they absorb restructuring, tighter budgets, bigger workloads, and the early disruption of AI.
Traditional performance reviews are backfiring. A landmark review of 131 studies found that more than a third of the time, performance feedback actually decreased subsequent performance, feeling more like a deficit-based, confrontational meeting than development.
AI-driven job insecurity is real, not just perceived. AI was cited in over 101,000 U.S. job cuts in the first half of 2026 alone.
Employees worried about AI displacing their role are nearly twice as likely to say extra effort feels pointless: 49% versus 27% of those who aren’t worried.
Trust in leadership is eroding. Global trust in employers fell to around 75% in 2025 (Edelman), with 68% of employees now worried business leaders intentionally mislead them, up 12 points since 2021, linked to layoffs and continuous, poorly managed change.
Workload and burnout. DHR Global’s 2026 report found engagement dropping from 88% to 64% in a single year while burnout stayed near 83%, and only 42% of burned-out employees had even told their manager.
The evidence in the article points to six practical shifts:
| Shift | What It Changes |
|---|---|
| Coach to strengths | Moves development away from a deficit-only focus |
| Build weekly check-ins | Creates more frequent manager connection and support |
| Invest in career development | Makes employee growth an ongoing priority |
| Move beyond annual surveys | Picks up changing engagement signals earlier |
| Co-design AI and reorganization | Gives employees greater involvement in change |
| Listen and involve people | Builds more participative, empathetic leadership |
ADP Research Institute data on 50,000+ employees found using your strengths daily predicts engagement, performance, and retention better than pay, colleagues, or company mission.
Way back in 1967, Peter Drucker made a version of the same case in The Effective Executive: the weakness-focused appraisal was, in his words, the wrong tool for the job, and effective managers build on strength rather than focusing on trying to correct what someone isn’t good at.
Research from the ADP Research Institute on four simple questions, what did you love about last week, what did you loathe, what are your priorities, how can I help, found managers who run this consistently raise team engagement scores by 77% and cut six-month voluntary turnover by 67%, whether in person, by phone, or through an app.
94% of employees would stay longer at a company that invested in their growth (LinkedIn), and learning opportunities are the single biggest happiness driver for Gen Z and Millennial employees specifically, ahead of every other factor measured.
Most organizations still treat career conversations as a once-a-year afterthought rather than a core priority to enhance employee experience and engagement.
Engagement is shaped by real-time events, including layoffs, restructuring, and shifting team demographics, that annual engagement scores can’t explain.
Culture Amp found measurable engagement drops after layoffs at 146 companies, and separate research found 74% of retained employees report lower productivity afterward.
Quarterly pulse surveys or stay interviews catch shifts early; tracking whether manager conversations are actually happening adds a leading indicator; and pairing standardized questions with genuine, individual conversation matters because what motivates one person rarely explains the next.
Trust follows when employees help co-design AI and restructuring changes, rather than have them announced after the fact.
Research from the University of Queensland and separate academic work on AI policy both link early involvement to higher trust and less resistance.
Supervisors’ active-empathetic listening has a direct link to work engagement, and DDI names listening and genuine empathy a top trust-rebuilding behaviour.
82% of people say a real voice is essential to trusting institutions through change; participative and empathetic leadership practised regularly is what closes that gap.
None of this requires a total culture overhaul to start reversing.
It starts with equipping managers with the right leadership capabilities, involving people in the changes that affect them, building genuinely listening and participative leadership, taking career development seriously, and helping people build resilience and effective wellbeing practices to deal with constant change and pressure.
If your engagement data is telling you what is wrong but not what to do next, TalentPredix™ can help you understand the Strengths, Motivations, and Values behind performance and engagement, then turn that insight into better development, leadership, and career conversations.
Start by experiencing the assessment yourself and exploring how it could support your organization’s engagement and talent priorities.
Request Your TalentPredix™ Demo
Leadership storytelling helps people make sense of struggle, change, and the destination ahead. This article explores what Homer’s Odyssey, Joseph Campbell’s work on the hero’s journey, and Christopher Nolan’s new film can teach leaders about building meaning, hope, and a strong culture.
I visited Troy in my twenties, on a tour taking in some of Turkey’s best-known archaeological sites. There is not much left to see: a wooden horse replica at the entrance, some crumbling walls, and a stunning location. But it did not matter.
Archaeology and Greek mythology have long fascinated me, and listening to the guide tell the story of the ten-year siege only deepened that interest.
So, when I watched Christopher Nolan’s new adaptation of The Odyssey this week, I was reminded not just of principles of leadership we have let slip, but of how rarely leaders use storytelling to create meaning at work. The film opened in cinemas on 17 July 2026, bringing Homer’s story of struggle, uncertainty, and the long journey home to a new audience.
| Leadership Storytelling Lesson | What It Means at Work |
|---|---|
| Give difficulty a meaningful journey | Help people understand why the struggle matters and where it is leading |
| Shape culture through repeated stories | Reinforce the values, behaviours, and identity the organization wants to sustain |
| Communicate with courage and clarity | Replace lifeless updates with a direction people can understand and believe in |
Joseph Campbell spent decades studying stories like this one. His work on the hero’s journey mapped out a pattern that turns up in myths across every culture you care to look at: a call to adventure, trials that test and ultimately transform the hero, and a return home that leaves them, and everyone around them, changed.
Campbell described the central structure as separation, initiation, and return. He presented it as a recurring pattern through which people and cultures make sense of difficulty, transformation, and renewal.
Campbell’s real insight was not about narrative structure. It was about why we need these stories in the first place.
We use them to:
You can see the same instinct at work in very different contemporary leaders.
Richard Branson built an entire business empire on it, wrapping Virgin’s ventures in the language of adventure, challenge, and disruption rather than product and margin. It is no accident that he is as famous for balloon crossings and round-the-world attempts as he is for any single company he has founded.
Satya Nadella did something quieter but just as deliberate at Microsoft, opening his tenure not with a five-year plan but with a personal story about his son’s cerebral palsy and what it had taught him about empathy. He used that same story to turn a culture that had grown arrogant and defensive back into one willing to learn again.
Oprah Winfrey has spent 40 years proving that the story itself can be the entire business model, building a media empire not on facts and figures but on the simple, repeated act of getting people to tell the truth about their lives and finding meaning in the telling.
The contexts are different, but the principle is consistent: people remember a human story long after they forget a strategy slide.
Effective leadership storytelling does more than communicate information. It helps people understand why the journey matters and where they fit within it.
Every strategy update, every town hall, and every difficult conversation about change is an opportunity either to create meaning or drain it from the room.
The best leaders I have worked with over 30 years understand this instinctively, even if they would never put it in those terms. They do not simply announce a restructure or a new direction and expect people to fall in line behind it.
They frame it as part of a journey their people are already on, with a purpose worth the disruption and a destination worth the effort of getting there. That is exactly what kept Odysseus’s crew rowing, and it is what keeps a team going when the numbers are declining and the outcome is genuinely uncertain.
Recent research into narrative-based relational leadership identifies storytelling, visioning, acting, and influencing as processes through which leaders construct meaning and direction with other people.
This matters particularly when organizations are leading through sustained change. People need more than a project plan. They need to understand what the change means, what role they play, and what remains worth protecting along the way.
Culture is not built by policy documents. It is built by the stories a leader chooses to tell and the values they convey, until they become how people understand who they are and why they are there.
This is also central to strengths-based leadership in uncertain conditions. Leaders create greater trust and commitment when they communicate authentically, understand what they uniquely bring, and connect individual contributions to shared purpose.
Walk into many organizations today and you will find communication that is data-heavy, competent, and almost entirely lifeless: bullet points where there should be meaning, jargon where there should be a call to adventure, and change programmes explained in the passive voice with all hope and humanity edited out before anyone sees them.
This is the epidemic of bland, boring leadership communication, and it is quietly corrosive.
When people cannot locate themselves inside a story worth believing, they stop committing and start merely complying. Nobody rows harder for a spreadsheet.
Getting from bland to bold does not take a bigger budget, AI, or a clever slide deck. It takes courage, clarity, and a story people genuinely want to follow.
A real story takes a position and admits the difficulty rather than smoothing it away. Plenty of leaders would rather hide behind a safe form of words than risk saying something that could be disagreed with.
Odysseus never doubted where home was, even when the route there kept changing. People can tolerate disruption and uncertainty more effectively when the destination remains clear.
A story must be compelling, not in the sense of clever phrasing, but in the sense of being something people actually want to follow. It needs enough at stake that the audience leans in rather than switches off.
In the UK, we have just watched a live example of what happens without it. Keir Starmer was a capable enough politician by most measures, but he was undone in no small part by language so cautious and lawyerly that neither the public nor his own backbenches could ever quite see the story and vision he hoped to share.
The wider lesson is relevant well beyond politics. A strategy that cannot be understood, remembered, or repeated by others is unlikely to shape a strong organizational culture.
Odysseus took ten years to get home, and most leaders I know are navigating something that feels every bit as long, challenging, and uncertain right now.
If your people are your crew, what story are you telling them about where you are headed, and is it one that actually gives them a reason to keep rowing hard?
Do your leaders communicate strategy clearly but struggle to make it meaningful?
TalentPredix™ helps organizations develop leaders who understand their strengths, communicate with greater clarity and authenticity, and build cultures where people can see how their contribution connects to a shared purpose.
Through strengths-based assessment, leadership coaching, and practical development, leaders can move beyond competent communication and create the direction, trust, and commitment that sustained change requires.
Explore Strengths-Based Leadership Development
Middle managers are carrying heavier workloads, relentless change, and growing responsibility for the development and wellbeing of their teams. Here are five practical ways HR and L&D can tackle manager burnout before sustained pressure becomes lasting damage.
Many middle managers are quietly cracking.
They are being squeezed from every direction: asked to do more with less, while implementing relentless change and rising pressure from above at a pace few have experienced before.
On top of delivering increasingly tough results in difficult economic conditions, they are expected to support the development, motivation, and wellbeing of ever-larger teams.
The result is a wave of manager burnout that most organizations are not tracking, let alone addressing.
‘Quiet cracking’ is the manager equivalent of quiet quitting. It is not dramatic. There is no resignation letter or public breakdown. It is managers showing up, doing the job, and slowly losing the capacity, confidence, and energy to lead well.
The data backs this up.
Gallup’s latest State of the Global Workplace report found that manager engagement has fallen nine percentage points since 2022, with the steepest single-year drop, from 27% to 22%, happening between 2024 and 2025.
Managers used to hold a clear engagement premium over the people they lead. That premium has now disappeared: managers are, on average, no more engaged than their own teams.
Never before have so many managers been at risk of burning out completely.
This is not a resilience problem you can fix with a wellbeing training workshop or employee assistance programme. It needs a different response.
Here are five ways HR and L&D can genuinely help.
| What HR and L&D Can Do | What It Addresses |
|---|---|
| Use individual and team strengths | Depleted confidence, energy, and capacity |
| Build change leadership and critical human skills | Uncertainty, complexity, and sustained change |
| Lead from the top by listening first | Hidden workload, limited control, and unspoken concerns |
| Recognize and appreciate managers | Invisible effort and low perceived reward |
| Encourage self-care and create a wellbeing safety net | Recovery, early support, and escalation when needed |
Most managers have never been taught to identify their strengths, let alone use them deliberately under pressure.
When they do, research into strengths-based leadership is clear: confidence rises, resourcefulness improves, and engagement and performance follow.
Strengths are not a nice-to-have. They are the fastest route back to capacity, resilience, and agility when the load does not let up.
This is where strengths-based coaching for managers can help turn personal insight into practical changes in how work is approached, prioritized, and delegated.
Most managers know how to run a project and lead a team in normal conditions.
But AI transformation and economic uncertainty have created a change load most have never had to carry.
What they need now is not more technical training. It is the critical human skills needed in the Age of AI: emotional agility, resourcefulness, self-discipline, and the ability to communicate with impact when nobody has certainty to offer.
These skills help managers respond thoughtfully, remain effective under pressure, and create greater confidence and stability for the people they lead.
Top leadership needs to listen to managers, not just talk at them.
That means actively inviting feedback and taking it seriously.
What managers need more than anything right now is listening leadership: leaders who understand their capacity, constraints, and concerns, and who build genuine psychological safety around raising them.
The UK Health and Safety Executive identifies demands, control, support, relationships, role clarity, and change as central work-design factors that organizations should examine when managing workplace stress.
Senior leaders can prevent middle manager burnout simply by asking better questions and genuinely listening to the answers.
Here are seven worth building into every one-to-one:
Asking the questions is only the start. Leaders also need to show managers that honest answers will lead to considered action, rather than judgement or another task being added to their list.
It sounds obvious, and it is routinely missed.
Managers absorb ever greater pressure from above and below and rarely get thanked for it.
According to recent studies, this is one reason that many Gen Zs are increasingly reluctant to take on managerial roles.
Recognition does not need to be expensive. It needs to be consistent, specific, and visible.
As Gallup’s employee engagement guidance emphasizes, meaningful recognition should be personal and connected to an individual’s real contribution.
Do not simply tell managers they are doing a good job.
Recognize what they handled, the judgement they showed, the pressure they absorbed, or the difference they made to their team.
Prevention matters more than intervention, but you need both.
Managers who are already struggling need a genuine safety net, not just a reminder to take a walk.
Build the habits before the crisis, and build the support for when prevention is not enough.
That means treating self-care at work as a critical human skill, while also providing clear access to appropriate professional support, manageable workloads, recovery time, and safe escalation routes.
Manager burnout is not inevitable. It is a symptom of systems that have not caught up with the pace of change.
Strengths and critical human skills give managers a way to lead through the load rather than be crushed by it.
The organizations that get this right now will keep their best managers. The ones that do not will lose them.
Are your managers being asked to carry more change than their current support systems can absorb?
Another generic wellbeing intervention will not address the underlying problem. TalentPredix™ 360 combines strengths insight with feedback on Self-Mastery or Leadership skills, helping managers understand how they work under pressure and where targeted development could make the greatest difference.
Explore TalentPredix™ 360 for managers and leaders
Nine lessons from the 2026 Football World Cup about how high-performance teams build purpose, play to their strengths, and respond under pressure.
As a young lad, I supported Brighton. Having grown up in Hove, it was the team my dad loved, so it became mine too, which, for years, meant learning to love disappointment before you learned to love the game itself.
Relegation battles were the norm, not the exception. But somewhere between the mid-table scraps and the occasional giant-killing, I fell for football properly, not for Brighton’s results, but for the magical moments and what the game reveals about human performance under pressure.
This summer’s World Cup gave us the clearest case study in years. Spain lifted the trophy, England found their best form since 1966, and France, Norway, and a cast of teams all had something to teach us about what makes a team perform when it matters most.
The tournament reinforced nine important principles:
Norway hadn’t reached a World Cup in 28 years, and it showed in something money can’t buy: belief that spread beyond the squad.
Captain Martin Ødegaard and Erling Haaland turned the ‘Viking Row’, fans sitting in formation, rowing imaginary oars to a drumbeat and chanting ‘Ro!’, into a ritual that roused team and country.
It travelled from Ullevaal Stadion to Boston escalators and Times Square. By the time Norway had won their first-ever World Cup knockout match, beating Ivory Coast in the Round of 32, the King’s family and the Norwegian Parliament were rowing along with them.
So, in spirit if not in practice, were millions of non-Norwegians around the world.
When a team is playing for something much bigger than the scoreline, the crowd stops being spectators and becomes crew.
A nation was rediscovering its footballing identity. That’s a different kind of fuel entirely.
Spain won this World Cup without ever forcing Lamine Yamal or Pedri to carry the team.
De la Fuente built a high-performance system:
Each player executed their role exceptionally well inside it.
The result: fourteen goals scored, one conceded in the entire knockout stage.
That’s what happens when a team is built around strengths in structure, not superstars in isolation.
Argentina deservedly attracted heavy criticism for their post-match conduct in the final. The ugly scenes involving Leandro Paredes and others were indefensible, and FIFA is right to review it.
But strip that away, and there’s real credit due for how they got there.
They reached the final by repeatedly coming from behind. Against Cape Verde, Egypt, Switzerland, and England, they were dragged into a fight and found a way through it every time.
Rigid game plans don’t survive a World Cup knockout draw.
Teams that can restructure on the pitch and stay agile in real time are the ones still standing in week four, even when, in Argentina’s case, they can’t always find that same discipline once the final whistle blows.
The final itself was goalless deep into extra time before Ferran Torres, introduced from the bench, scored in the 106th minute.
Ninety minutes of world-class opposition hadn’t broken Spain’s discipline.
That’s not luck. That’s a team that had rehearsed staying focused and committed under pressure.
They remained disciplined long after most sides start hoping for penalties.
Kylian Mbappé became the tournament’s all-time leading scorer and retained the Golden Boot, in a France side that didn’t even reach the final.
Individual determination doesn’t guarantee the World Cup trophy.
But it can be the difference between:
France turned up to the third-place play-off against England and were nowhere in the first half. They were 4-0 down at the break before a Saka hat-trick sealed a stunning 6-4 finish.
A team stacked with talent switched off for 45 minutes and very nearly paid for it with total embarrassment.
Complacency doesn’t announce itself. It just quietly switches the team off.
Spain went into the tournament unbeaten in 37 matches and played like it.
Self-belief that’s earned through results, not manufactured through bravado, changes how a team plays the final ten minutes of a knockout game:
The strongest self-belief is built through repeated preparation and performance.
For workplace leaders, this principle is explored further in Why Strengths-Based Leadership Is the Key to Navigating Today’s Turbulent World.
Argentina’s whole run was adversity, match after match.
Rather than avoiding it, they treated coming from behind as a familiar scenario rather than a crisis.
England did the same in reverse against France. They built a four-goal cushion, then had to grind out the closing stages as France roared back to 4-5.
Neither team panicked because both had already lived through worse.
Struggle had become part of the journey, not evidence that the journey was failing.
De la Fuente handed teenagers Lamine Yamal and Pau Cubarsi genuine responsibility on the biggest stage in the sport, and Cubarsi was named the tournament’s Best Young Player.
That’s not sentiment.
That’s a manager who trusts potential before it’s fully proven and gets a competitive edge because of it.
| World Cup Lesson | What It Shows About High-Performance Teams |
|---|---|
| Find a deeper purpose | People contribute more when they feel part of something meaningful. |
| Play to your strengths | Collective performance depends on people applying their talents within a clear system. |
| Build resilience and agility | Teams must adjust quickly when the original plan stops working. |
| Persevere under pressure | Preparation supports focus when fatigue and pressure increase. |
| Perform with determination | Strong performers keep contributing even when the larger prize changes. |
| Guard against complacency | Talent alone cannot compensate for lost focus or discipline. |
| Build earned self-belief | Confidence becomes stronger when it is supported by preparation and results. |
| Embrace the struggle | Adversity becomes easier to manage when teams treat it as part of the process. |
| Trust emerging talent | Giving people meaningful responsibility can accelerate development and performance. |
The Seagulls taught me patience and perseverance.
This World Cup reminded me of the age-old principles and practices that underpin peak team performance, live and in real time.
Together, they’ve shaped how I think about building teams that don’t just compete, but thrive and stand out when it matters most.
A group of talented individuals does not automatically become a high-performing team.
Teams need a shared purpose, clear roles, mutual trust, adaptability, and a better understanding of what each person naturally contributes.
TalentPredix™ Team brings together insight from across the team to reveal its collective Strengths, Motivations, shared Values, energy drains, and potential performance Limiters.
It gives teams a practical foundation to:
Your team already has talent. The real question is whether you are creating the conditions for that talent to work together.
Every leader I speak to right now is somewhere on the same spectrum: either cautiously optimistic about AI, quietly overwhelmed by it, or both simultaneously. And that tension – that contradictory experience of feeling more capable and more exhausted at the same time – turns out to be exactly what the research is uncovering.
We’ve been told the story of AI as relief. Less admin. Faster decisions. More time for the strategic, human work that matters. It’s a compelling narrative. But a growing body of evidence suggests it’s an incomplete one – and for leaders in particular, the gap between the promise and the reality deserves serious attention.
A landmark study published in Harvard Business Review by Aruna Ranganathan and Xingqi Maggie Ye found something striking: when a 200-person tech company gave employees access to generative AI tools, they didn’t work less. They worked more – at a faster pace, across a broader range of tasks, and deeper into their evenings. Nobody asked them to. They just did, because AI made doing more feel possible.
“You had thought that maybe, because you could be more productive with AI, you save some time, you can work less. But then really, you don’t work less. You just work the same amount or even more.”
— Engineer, quoted in HBR study on AI and work intensification
The study identified three distinct patterns: task expansion (people absorbing work that would previously have gone to others), blurred work-life boundaries (AI made starting a task so frictionless that workers slipped prompts into lunch breaks and late evenings), and constant multitasking (managing multiple AI threads simultaneously, creating cognitive load even as it felt productive). The result was a self-reinforcing cycle: AI accelerated tasks, which raised expectations for speed, which created greater reliance on AI, which widened scope further.
This lands on leaders who were already struggling. Research by Oracle cited in a second HBR study found that 85% of business leaders have experienced decision stress, with three-quarters reporting a tenfold increase in daily decisions over the previous three years. Poor decision-making is estimated to cost firms at least 3% of profits annually – and that’s before we factor in the reputational costs of a single poorly handled crisis.
There’s a deeper paradox at work here. AI gives leaders access to more data, more analysis, and more options than ever before. But more isn’t always better. In practice, the cognitive load of processing vast amounts of information – much of it beyond what you actually need to make a sound decision – is itself a significant source of pressure. Research consistently shows that decision quality degrades as the volume of information increases past a certain threshold.
AI can surface fifty data points where five would suffice, and the effort required to evaluate, filter, and contextualise all of it quietly drains the very capacity leaders need for clear-headed judgment. The result is what researchers call decision fatigue: the more choices and information you process, the poorer your subsequent decisions become. AI, paradoxically, can intensify exactly the problem it promises to solve.
DDI’s Global Leadership Forecast 2025 found that 71% of nearly 11,000 leaders reported rising stress levels since taking on their current role – up from 63% in 2022. Successfully leveraging AI was cited as a top stressor by 29% of respondents. In other words, the very tool meant to relieve pressure is now a source of it.
“AI doesn’t just give you more information – it gives you more than you can act on. And more data without better judgement doesn’t improve decisions; it just makes poor ones feel more justified. The leaders who get the most from AI aren’t the ones who use it most. They’re the ones who know what question they’re trying to answer before they ask it – and who bring the human judgement to know what the answer actually means.”
— James Brook, TalentPredix™
What makes this particularly tricky for leaders is that the overload is largely invisible – to themselves and to their organizations. Because employees are expanding their workloads voluntarily, and framing it as energising experimentation, it rarely registers as a problem until it becomes one. A 2026 ActivTrak analysis confirmed the pattern: after AI adoption, task volume and multitasking rose while focused work fell. Burnout isn’t just driven by hours worked – it’s driven by fragmentation, decision fatigue, and lack of recovery time.
Meanwhile, the DHR Global Workforce Trends Report 2026 found 83% of workers reporting at least some degree of burnout, with burnout’s influence on engagement growing sharply – 52% of workers now say burnout drags down engagement, up from 34% in 2025. At the same time, ManpowerGroup’s Global Talent Barometer 2026 found AI adoption jumped 13% while confidence in using AI fell 18%. The tools are spreading faster than the support structures around them.
The HBR research on decision-making under pressure makes clear that AI genuinely can help – as a sounding board, a co-pilot for synthesising complex risk data, a tool for stress-testing decisions before you commit. The question is whether it’s being deployed intentionally, or just absorbed into the existing pressure. Here’s what the research, and hard-won experience, suggests good leadership looks like in practice.
Not slow-downs, but structured moments to check alignment and absorb information before pressing forward. AI removes friction, which is mostly good, but friction sometimes served a purpose. A quick decision pause before a major commitment – one counterargument, one explicit link to your strategic goals – can prevent the kind of drift that only becomes visible in hindsight.
The blurring of work and non-work is one of the most consistent findings across the research. Because AI makes it so easy to start a task, people stop stopping. Leaders need to model clear boundaries – no prompting during lunch, no ‘quick last query’ at 10pm – and build team norms that make it safe to switch off. Deloitte’s 2025 Workforce Intelligence Report identified cognitive strain and decision friction as the leading indicators of burnout, ahead of workload volume for the first time. Boundaries aren’t soft; they’re structural and vital for effective performance.
There’s a subtle but important shift that happens when AI moves from tool to authority – when its outputs stop being inputs to your thinking and start being the answer. Leaders need to actively resist this. AI works best when it serves the human agenda, not the other way around. That means using it to interrogate your assumptions, not validate them; to widen your options, not close them down. As one expert framed it in the HBR decision-making research: AI functions best as a teammate that challenges your thinking – not an oracle that ends it. The moment your team stops questioning AI outputs is the moment the risk quietly rises.
AI gives you one synthesised perspective. It draws on patterns in data; it doesn’t draw on lived experience, organizational context, or the kind of judgment that comes from genuinely knowing your people. The 2025 Wiley Workplace Intelligence research found that the traits most predictive of high-performing teams were emotional intelligence, psychological safety, and trust – none of which AI can replicate or replace. The leaders who are getting this right are those who use AI to free up time for human connection, not replace it. Short check-ins, shared reflection, real dialogue – these aren’t soft extras. They’re what makes the rest of it work.
Good leaders have always known when to stop gathering data and start deciding. AI makes that discipline harder to maintain, because the next analysis is always only a prompt away. Build the habit of asking: what information do I actually need to make this call? More often than not, you already have it. The rest is noise that costs you focus.
The question facing leaders isn’t whether AI will change how you work. It already has. The question is whether you’re actively shaping that change – or letting it quietly shape you. The data suggests most of us are closer to the latter than we’d like to admit. That’s not a criticism; it’s an invitation.
Feeling the pressure to make faster, better people decisions with less room for error?
The answer is not more data for the sake of it. It is better insight into what helps people perform, adapt, and thrive.
TalentPredix™ helps organizations understand the strengths, motivations, values, and human capabilities their people need to lead well through constant change.
If you want to build more human, future-ready leadership in the Age of AI, book a demo or get in touch with TalentPredix™.
AI Doesn’t Reduce Work – It Intensifies It – HBR, February 2026
How AI Can Help Leaders Make Better Decisions Under Pressure – HBR, October 2023
Why Leaders Need to Build Resilience to Avoid AI Burnout – IT Pro, March 2026
Is AI Helping Burnout or Quietly Making It Worse? – HRD Connect, March 2026
Workforce Trends 2026: Leaders Confront Burnout, Disengagement and AI-Driven Change – DHR Global / Hunt Scanlon, November 2025
Takeaways for 2026: About Stress, Change, People and Performance – Wiley Workplace Intelligence, 2025
Most leadership development was built for a more stable world.
That world no longer exists.
AI, constant change, hybrid work, and rising workforce expectations are reshaping what great leadership requires. Leaders now need the human skills, self-mastery, adaptability, and strengths-based insight to help people perform, adapt, and thrive through uncertainty.
This TalentPredix™ White Paper explores what makes a great leader in the Age of AI – and what organizations need to assess, develop, and measure to build future-ready leadership capability.
Inside, you’ll discover:
For HR, Talent, L&D, OD, and People leaders, this is a practical guide to developing leaders who can unlock potential, strengthen culture, and drive lasting performance.
The world of work has always demanded capable leaders. What has changed – dramatically, and permanently – is the nature of the water they are navigating.
It is no longer a steady river with the occasional rapid. It is white water: relentless, unpredictable, and flowing from multiple directions at once. AI transformation, multi-generational workforces, conflicting demands, hybrid working, geopolitical instability and stakeholder expectations that would have seemed extraordinary a decade ago are now the simultaneous daily reality of leadership.
And yet the global leadership development industry – valued at $370 billion – continues, in the main, to prepare leaders for calmer conditions. One-size-fits-all programmes. Deficit-based competency frameworks. Development that tells leaders what they are getting wrong but rarely builds the inner resources they need to keep performing when everything around them keeps shifting.
Here is what navigating white water actually demands – of leaders, and of the organizations that develop them.
Transformation is no longer a project with a start and an end date. It is a permanent condition. The leaders who will thrive in it are not those who manage change most efficiently – they are those who adapt most effectively, and who draw the best from the people around them as conditions shift.
That requires a different kind of leadership development. Not one that identifies what is broken and tries to fix it. One that uncovers what is distinctive in each leader – their specific combination of strengths, motivators and values – and builds from that foundation.
Positive, adaptive leadership is not a style. It is a set of capabilities: the ability to inspire purpose under uncertainty, to model learning agility, to empower others with genuine autonomy, and to align diverse strengths toward shared goals. These cannot be downloaded from a generic competency framework. They emerge when development is built around who each leader actually is.
Leaders who know and operate from their strengths maintain composure, make better decisions and recover faster when things go wrong. In the age of AI, where the pace of change will only accelerate, that inner resourcefulness is not a development aspiration. It is a survival capability.
“In the age of AI, inner resourcefulness is not a development aspiration. It is a survival capability. The leaders who will thrive are those who know what they uniquely bring – and have built the self-insight and standout strengths to deploy it, whatever the conditions.”
– James Brook, Founder & CEO, TalentPredix™
High performance in turbulent conditions is not a solo endeavour. It is built in teams – and the quality of those teams depends almost entirely on the culture the leader creates around them.
Google’s Project Aristotle research identified psychological safety as the single biggest factor in team performance: more predictive than the intelligence, experience or technical capability of the individuals within it. When people feel safe to speak up, to challenge, to be honest about what is not working, the team shares perspectives, thinks better and adapts faster.
But psychological safety does not emerge by accident. It is built – through how leaders respond to mistakes, how they handle disagreement, and whether they create genuine space for diverse perspectives and ideas. Leaders who build trust and belonging in their teams are not being soft. They are building the conditions for their teams to perform at their best precisely when the pressure is highest.
Belonging matters beyond safety. When people feel valued for who they are – not just what they produce – they bring more of their genuine capabilities to their work. In a world where the most valuable contributions are creative, adaptive and relational, that is a significant competitive advantage.
The shift from compliance culture to one of genuine collaboration and inclusion is one of the most strategically important leadership transitions of our time. It cannot be mandated from the top.
It must be modelled.
This is especially urgent given that 75% of Gen Z prioritise values-aligned work over pay and are actively turning down management roles that lack genuine purpose. The next generation of leaders will follow those who model it – or they won’t follow at all.
The evidence on what happens when leaders genuinely invest in the strengths and potential of their people is not ambiguous. Gallup’s research on strengths-based organizations consistently finds substantial performance gains across every metric that matters commercially.
10–19%
increase in sales
26–72%
lower staff turnover in high-attrition organizations
22–59%
fewer safety incidents
These are not wellbeing outcomes. They are business outcomes – and they result from one thing: leaders who create conditions where people can perform at their best.
But performance alone is not enough. The organizations that will sustain growth through the disruption ahead are those whose leaders connect what people do to why it matters. Purpose is not a values statement on a wall. It is the lived experience of understanding how individual contributions connect to something meaningful – to customers, to communities, or to a mission worth pursuing.
Leaders who set a clear, compelling direction and then invest in developing the distinctive strengths of everyone around them do not just improve short-term performance. They build the creative energy and intrinsic motivation that generate lasting innovation and durable competitive advantage.
In 2004, psychologist Fred Luthans and colleagues published what remains one of the most important insights in organizational psychology: that alongside human capital (“what you know”) and social capital (“who you know”), there is a third and critically underinvested form of capital that determines how effectively leaders show up and perform under pressure.
He called it psychological capital. And he defined it as the positive inner resources that enable people to sustain high performance through adversity, uncertainty and constant change.
“Who I am is every bit as important as what I know and who I know.”
– Fred Luthans, Business Horizons, 2004
Psychological capital comprises four specific, developable resources – what Luthans called the HERO within each of us.
Hope: the ability to set goals and find multiple pathways to reach them.
Efficacy: genuine confidence in one’s capacity to take on challenge.
Resilience: the ability to recover from adversity with learning rather than depletion.
Optimism: not naïve positivity, but realistic, constructive expectation about the future.
The critical insight is this: these resources are not fixed. They are state-like. They can be developed – and they can be depleted. Research is clear that sustained pressure without adequate support and development erodes them. Leaders who are high in PsyCap sustain performance where others deplete. They navigate ambiguity with composure. They model the resilience and agility their teams need to see.
Leaders who operate from their genuine strengths, and help team members do the same, access their HERO resources more readily – and strengths-based development is one of the most reliable ways to build all four.
This is not a case for ignoring weaknesses or avoiding tough conversations. It is a case for investing in the psychological infrastructure that makes every other leadership capability more sustainable. In white water conditions, leaders need more than knowledge and networks. They need the inner resources to keep leading effectively when the ground keeps shifting.
The question for every organization is no longer whether leadership development matters. It is whether you are building the right kind for this new era we are entering.
“Leaders have invested heavily in what people know and how they work with others. The next frontier is helping people become psychologically and emotionally stronger, individually and collectively – so they can perform, adapt and thrive under pressure.”
– James Brook, Founder & CEO, TalentPredix™
Explore how TalentPredix™ can help your organization develop leaders equipped for constant change. Request a free trial or book a discovery call to find out more.
Sarah’s manager pulled her aside last Tuesday. “We need you to lead the AI implementation project,” he said. “It’s a stretch, but I know you can handle it.”
Sarah smiled and nodded. Inside, she felt her stomach drop.
She’d never led anything this big. She barely understood the technology. And her manager’s words—”I know you can handle it”—felt less like confidence and more like a polite way of saying: “Figure it out on your own.”
Three months later, Sarah was working 70-hour weeks, second-guessing every decision, and dreading Monday mornings. The stretch didn’t make her stronger. It nearly broke her.
We’re told constantly that growth lives outside our comfort zone. That discomfort is the price of progress. That we should embrace being stretched.
And it’s true, to a point.
In today’s workplace, growth isn’t optional. AI, digital transformation, shifting customer expectations, and relentless disruption mean both leaders and employees must adapt faster than ever before. Staying comfortable isn’t safe anymore. It’s a path to stagnation, declining relevance, and missed opportunities.
But here’s what nobody talks about: stretch without support doesn’t build capability. It destroys it.
When people are pushed into unfamiliar territory without clarity, resources, or psychological safety, the result isn’t growth. It’s anxiety, resistance, and burnout. The very opposite of what organizations need.
The challenge isn’t choosing between stretch or safety. It’s learning how to combine them effectively.
Not all stretch is created equal. There’s a world of difference between positive, energizing stretch and negative, depleting stretch—but most organizations treat them identically.
Positive stretch challenges people to grow in areas aligned with their natural strengths. It builds on what they already do well, asking them to do it at a higher level, in a new context, or with greater complexity.
Example: A naturally analytical person is asked to lead a data-driven strategy project for the first time. The task is unfamiliar, but it plays to their core strengths. The challenge feels energizing, not draining. With the right support, they thrive.
Negative stretch forces people repeatedly into areas that drain their energy, sit far outside their natural talents, or lack adequate support.
Example: That same analytical person is told to lead a client relationship role requiring constant networking, emotional reading of social dynamics, and improvised small talk. Every day feels like swimming upstream. The harder they try, the more exhausted they become.
The first builds confidence and capability. The second erodes engagement and wellbeing.
Most organizations don’t distinguish between the two. They stretch people indiscriminately, assuming pressure creates diamonds. Sometimes it does. Often, it just creates damage.
Psychological safety is what transforms stretch from threatening to energizing.
When people feel safe to ask questions, admit uncertainty, experiment, and occasionally fail, they lean into challenge. They take intelligent risks. They learn rapidly.
When they don’t feel safe, they do the opposite. They hide problems. They avoid risks. They pretend to understand when they don’t. Learning stops. Performance suffers.
Here’s the mistake leaders make: they think psychological safety means lowering standards or avoiding accountability. It doesn’t.
Psychological safety means creating conditions where high standards and learning can coexist. Where people can be both challenged and supported. Where “I don’t know yet, but I’ll figure it out” is an acceptable, even valued, response.
Think about the best leader you’ve ever worked for. Chances are, they held you to high standards while also making it safe to struggle, ask for help, and learn as you went. That’s the combination that unlocks performance.
Most leaders genuinely want to develop their people. But good intentions collide with reality in predictable ways:
To do better, leaders need a clear, evidence-based view of people’s strengths, motivations, and natural working styles. Not assumptions or gut feel. Actual data.
Tools like TalentPredix provide this clarity, revealing where individuals are most likely to grow with energy rather than drain. This allows leaders to:
When you understand where someone’s energy comes from, you can design stretch that builds them up instead of wearing them down.
The Leader’s Balancing Act
Effective leaders create stretch and safety simultaneously. Here’s how:
They clarify expectations. Ambiguity kills psychological safety. People need to know what success looks like, where they have autonomy, and what support is available.
They normalize learning. They talk openly about their own uncertainties and mistakes. They model asking for help rather than being “know-it-alls”. They treat “I need to learn this” as a sign of engagement, not weakness.
They provide resources, not just pressure. Stretch works when people have time, tools, coaching, and access to expertise. Without resources and support, stretch becomes a setup for failure.
They check in on energy, not just output. They ask: “How sustainable does this feel?” Not just: “Are you getting it done?”
They celebrate learning, not just results. When someone tries something new, learns from it, and adjusts—that’s valuable even if the outcome wasn’t perfect.
They intervene when stretch becomes strain. They recognize the warning signs: declining quality, withdrawal, defensiveness, overwork. And they act before burnout sets in.
Remember Sarah, the one thrown into the AI project?
Here’s how her story could have gone differently:
Her manager says: “I’d like you to lead this AI implementation. It’s a big stretch, and I think it aligns with your analytical strengths and your interest in transformation work. Here’s what would set you up for success: weekly check-ins with me, access to our AI consultant for questions, and permission to say no to other projects so you can focus. I don’t expect you to know everything on day one. I do expect you to ask good questions and bring me challenges early. What do you think?”
That’s positive stretch with psychological safety.
In a world changing at breakneck speed, sustainable performance won’t come from relentless pressure. It will come from environments where people are challenged in ways that energize them and supported in ways that make learning possible.
Stretch that builds energy, not burnout.
Safety that enables performance, not comfort.
Organizations that strike this balance won’t just keep pace with change. They’ll shape it.
In a constantly changing workplace, the answer is not less challenge. It is better design. Stretch aligned to strengths. Psychological safety that enables learning. Clear expectations and real support.
TalentPredix helps organizations understand where energy comes from, where strain is likely, and how to design development that builds sustainable performance.
If you are serious about creating growth without burnout, book a conversation with us or request a demo to see how it works in practice.
As a consultant specialising in positive leadership and strengths-based, amplifying approaches to getting the best from people, I rarely write about autocratic leadership. However, considering recent political events – including developments at Davos and the unorthodox and unsettling discussions surrounding Greenland – and the visible resurgence of political and business leaders who lead through command, overt power plays, and enforced compliance, it felt both timely and necessary to explore this topic.
Whether driven by uncertainty, rapid change, increased pressure to deliver results, or poor role models in their organization or broader society, some leaders revert to top-down, directive behaviour that fuels fear, silences dissent and stifles initiative. This autocratic leadership style, characterized by unilateral decision-making and control, can be exhausting for teams and limiting for performance.
This drive for control and power can stem from insecurity, early experiences of vulnerability, or highly competitive environments that reinforce dominance as a way to feel safe, valued, or successful. In some cases, it may also be linked to underlying psychological patterns such as narcissistic traits (an excessive need for admiration and validation), sociopathic tendencies (reduced empathy and a focus on personal gain), or an inflated sense of self-importance that distorts how power and entitlement are perceived. These patterns exist on a spectrum and do not always constitute a clinical disorder; however, they can still significantly influence behaviour and organizational outcomes.
It is important to note that a strong need for power is not inherently negative. When balanced by empathy, self-awareness, and values, it can be channelled responsibly in service of others and the organization. However, when unchecked or driven primarily by ego or fear, it often leads to controlling behaviour, reduced trust, low morale, and psychologically unsafe work environments.
What often goes unexamined in this dynamic is the role of followers. Leaders do not operate in a vacuum. Their behaviour is shaped not only by their own motivations but also by how people around them respond. And in many cases, followers can inadvertently give fuel to autocratic leaders, reinforcing their ego, authority, and controlling habits.
Autocratic leaders often thrive on certainty, control, and visibility. In times of ambiguity and pressure, people may default to polite deference, offering rapid compliance and accommodation rather than constructive challenge.
This can show up as:
In both organizational and political settings, researchers have noted that followers’ role orientation – whether they see their role as compliant or co-creative – influences how much power leaders accumulate and exercise. When followers adopt a passive or highly compliant stance, they reduce actions that might otherwise check a leader’s authority, indirectly reinforcing autocratic behaviour.
Even when leaders are rewarded by followers and stakeholders for decisiveness in short-term situations, such as responding to a crisis, this can teach them that authority yields trust, compliance and recognition. Over time, these dynamic shifts organizational norms toward control rather than collaboration, and followers are partly responsible for that shift.
Unquestioning compliance might feel easier in the moment, but it can have significant costs to the organization and its stakeholders including:
Influence strategies do not require open rebellion, irrational action or irresponsible confrontation. As my previous article on this topic argues, subtle shifts such as asking thoughtful questions, creating coalitions to push back, establishing shared goals, and building trust before offering alternative viewpoints and constructive feedback can help create space for collaboration without triggering defensiveness in a leader.
In other words, it’s not just about resisting autocracy. It’s about leading with influence and constructive challenge – grounding feedback in shared purpose, reinforcing strengths unrelated to control, and modelling collaborative and inclusive leadership ourselves.
Autocratic leaders don’t exist apart from their teams and followers can choose to fuel or check their authority. In doing so, they shape not only individual relationships, but the broader leadership culture of their organization.
Autocratic leadership is rarely about one person. It’s shaped by pressure, fear, and the behaviours that get rewarded over time.
At TalentPredix™, we help organizations surface these dynamics early by making leadership behaviour, influence, and psychological safety visible, not personal or political.
If you want healthier challenge, stronger leadership cultures, and teams that don’t stay silent under pressure, book a demo or get in touch to see how we support that shift.