Jennifer Liston-Smith’s reflections on leadership, work-life blend and the meaning of work.
At the close of the year that was 2025, we’re over halfway through the 2020s. Let’s take a look ahead at three of the shifts responsible for the growing edge of leadership in 2026.
Hybrid workplace meets hybrid workforce
For many employers, 2025 has meant clarifying hybrid working policies, including ensuring central workplaces are attractive and productive spaces to get the best from valued workers.
It’s brought challenges in some cases, as King’s College London’s research pointed out, with some workers resisting full return to office mandates. It is becoming clear, thanks in part to Stanford Economist Dr. Nicholas Bloom, that some in-office presence is good, but five days does not necessarily bring more benefits than three days and may lead to more attrition.
What the debate has centred around is the human aspect of work, that delicate balance between productivity and wellbeing. Just as we approach some clarity on that, “hybrid” becomes the buzzword again, but now meaning something else. The hybrid workplace gives way to the hybrid workforce, as AI moves from advisor to co-worker.
AI Agents, such as IBM’s watsonx, among others (including agents employees themselves create), promise to take on the things we hate: repetitive tasks, awkward and disjointed system interfaces, the pain of gathering evidence for real data-driven decision-making.
If we’ve been getting ourselves skilled at prompt engineering, we’ve probably been looking in the wrong direction. Agentic AI does not sit in the cloud like a Large Language Model, waiting for us to ask questions and offering responses for us to weigh up with human skill.
AI agents plan the job, execute it, circulate the findings, evaluate reactions and report on their own performance; and probably ours too. Agents are not so much tools as team members. They are likely to show up in org charts, and to be middle managed by AI “orchestrators“.
The implications? Leadership is no longer just about people-management skills; it’s also about integrating technology thoughtfully, ethically and strategically.
And for chief people officers or HR leaders (apart from a potential change of name to be more inclusive of our digital agentic colleagues?), it includes building strong alliances with the chief information officer, since your teams will be contributing workers who must align to deliver strategic goals and culture, together.
Bring your whole self, including your opinions?
In 2026, it will likely be difficult for people leaders to ignore the growing polarisation in political debates and the echo chambers our people inhabit outside of work.
Commentators have described a movement of the Overton window (named by Mackinac Center’s Joseph P. Overton in the 1990s), emboldening the expression of views that might have stayed out of popular conversation previously. The conundrum for employers is whether or not to accept out loud that this is happening in the workplace, and attempt to influence it.
Some leaders step back, concerned that expressing any views may offend at least some staff or customers. But it’s not likely to go away. There has been an increase in the last two to three years in the use of the Equality Act to protect free speech through tribunal cases.
Employers must now accept that divisive views are present and affecting workplace culture, and also take care to avoid discriminating on the grounds of a genuinely held belief or philosophy, and not react disproportionately. In Higgs v Farmor’s School, dismissal was seen as excessive in response to gender critical views expressed on social media outside of work, even though the employer, a school, was concerned that the remarks might cause offence.
So it needs care. We’d rather not cancel our own employees. But we cannot let them offend each other and our wider stakeholders, unchecked, either. Especially in a world in which the spoken word is seen to escalate into dangerous actions.
If 2025 was a year we’ll remember for employers reviewing and renaming Diversity, Equity and Inclusion to Culture programmes, to align with US Presidential Orders, will 2026 be the year when employers lean in to free speech?
HR Leaders, working with their legal teams, may want to be more proactive about what’s acceptable in workplace conversations, with:
- Guidance on respectful communication and how to get on with each other at work, including distinguishing between expressing an opinion (which is probably OK) and hate speech or harmful conduct (which is not, and should lead to disciplinary action).
- Policies asking for sensitivity in the use of social media.
- Care not to discriminate against those expressing genuinely held religious or philosophical beliefs.
- Consistency in applying policies and interventions, without favouritism, even when that’s hard.
- Training for managers in handling conflict and role modelling respectful conversations and boundaries.
- Reminders that discussions that disrupt work are by definition not appropriate in the workplace
Above all, though, it must be about creating a culture of psychological safety and trust and having a shared story of purpose as an organisation, which is more prominent than individual differences of opinion. This is where HR leaders can really get ahead.
Paradoxically leading for the longer term
We frequently hear we live in an age of uncertainty. It may be that we feel uncertain because of the rise in discussing uncertainty, without knowing exactly what we mean by that.
In any case, it’s hard to predict what’s coming, except to know that disruption is part of it.
UK economic growth in 2025 was literally up and down, some of it shaped by global forces such as tariffs and cyber-threats. Uncertainty in the run-up to the November 2025 budget was blamed for a small contraction in growth, with the Confederation of British Industry emphasising the need for stability both before and after the budget.
Separately, a collective sigh of relief was felt as employers saw the qualifying period for unfair dismissal reduced from 24 months to six months, instead of day one, under the Employment Rights Bill.
What corporate leaders ask of governments is a system in which they can plan, and take calculated risks, within a context of predictability. Reasonable as that is, HR leaders know that what leaders increasingly need is to lead in an agile way, in a context that will inevitably keep shifting.
This is where sustainable leadership comes into view. There is a growing move towards leading for sustainability, particularly among those most directly interfacing with the environment, such as land, building and housing.
What seems to be becoming clearer is that leading sustainably is about more than having a good record on waste management. It’s about leading in a way that improves the world across a triple bottom line (people and planet as well as profit) as a whole rationale for being in business. And perhaps it means even more than that.
According to Cambridge University Institute for Sustainability Leadership, there are seven key characteristics: systemic understanding, emotional intelligence, values orientation, compelling vision, inclusive style, innovative approach and long-term perspective.
While disruptive situations call for in-the-moment pivots, the art, it seems, is keeping our eye on being in it for the long haul. And that means wellbeing as well as external impact.
Rachel Skews, speaking at the International Congress of Coaching Psychology, proposed that “Sustainable leadership is about the impact leaders have on their own performance and wellbeing, the performance and wellbeing of others and the impact on the organisation, and society more broadly”.
Leadership in 2026 looks like a martial art, in its properly philosophical sense: in-the-moment flexibility drawing on long-term discipline and intention.
Who will be supporting and developing these brave new leaders? Coming back to those AI agents, it will possibly be AI coaches. Here too, opinions vary, ranging from suggesting we need to try and find AI’s place in coaching to those, like Professor Tatiana Bachkirova, who warn of the “enshittification” of coaching through AI.
What seems certain as we enter 2026 is the need to question everything, while retaining a strong sense of self and investment in our own wellbeing and that of others.
Jennifer is a business psychologist, leadership coach, coaching supervisor and consultant to HR leaders.
As a UK pioneer of parent transition coaching, Jennifer set up, and for a decade led, the Coaching & Consultancy side of what became Bright Horizons Work+Family Solutions, advising employers in banking, professional services, STEM and wider sectors on programmes for working parents and carers and evaluating their impact and ROI, as well as developing coaches and coaching capability.
More recently she was Head of Thought Leadership with Bright Horizons and now serves as an independent consultant in this area.
