Dive Brief:
- Although company leaders are critical to organizational growth, only 17% said they “feel confident anticipating and reacting to change,” according to the Global Leadership Forecast 2027 from consulting firm DDI.
- That percentage has not changed much since 2025, DDI said in a statement, adding that leaders who didn’t feel confident “are a third as likely to stay productive during setbacks.” Additionally, 19% reported that they often felt “used up,” even though most elected to stay in their roles.
- The confidence problem can create real challenges for companies because organizations with “effective change leadership” were 2.4 times more likely “to meet or exceed their financial targets,” according to the research.
Dive Insight:
This is DDI’s 12th leadership forecast since 1999, and its data was drawn from more than 11,000 leader responses as well as responses from about 2,500 HR professionals. The company said that the results of its research indicated a hidden corporate performance risk.
“The pressures on leaders are compounding,” Rosey Rhyne, manager of DDI’s Center for Analytics and Behavioral Research, said in a statement. “Recurring restructuring is reshaping leaders’ roles, and AI is redefining how their work gets done. These shifts are rapid and deeply personal, and many leaders are struggling to maintain the trust and engagement they need to lead their teams through disruption. The cracks show up first at the front line, where these pressures reinforce each other.”
Artificial intelligence is also having an impact, with 81% of leaders touting AI productivity gains and 75% reporting improved work quality, but just 14% said they felt ready to “use emerging technologies successfully.” Only 18% of respondents said leaders check the quality of their AI output.
As technology adoption speeds up, 87% of leaders said they were worried that their existing skills were becoming obsolete. That can create a retention problem, as anxious leaders were 5.1 times more likely to “report a definite intention to leave their organization,” per the study.
Trust is also a factor, with just 21% of individual contributor respondents saying they trust senior leadership and only a quarter saying they trust their immediate manager. DDI said that leaders who trust senior leaders were 5.9 times more likely to believe that leadership decisions would actually be translated into action.
At the same time, just 9% of leaders reported being fully engaged, while half said their engagement was somewhere in the middle of the scale. However, the study found that leaders who were completely engaged were 8.8 times more likely to regularly bring out the best in their teams.
“Organizations can’t slow the pace of change, but they can make sure leaders have the support and capabilities to meet it,” Tacy M. Byham, CEO of DDI, said in a statement. “That may mean making a counterintuitive choice: giving leaders who drive urgent change the time and capacity to build their skills while they continue to deliver. Building change-ready leaders protects more than their well-being. It protects their ability to perform when the business needs them most.”
If the attrition rate of leaders increases, many HR professionals worry that there may be problems filing those senior roles in the future. Nearly four-fifths (78%) of senior HR leaders, talent acquisition managers and learning and development experts reported being worried about how AI’s encroachment on entry-level work might negatively affect the development of critical leadership skills, according to a recent study from talent management company Talogy.