Ep 25 - The Leadership Reality Check of 2026
Impactful Conversations with Dr Glenn Wallis and Nejmi Alexander
Key takeaways
Nejmi cites recent reporting that 71% of leaders report high stress and around 40% are considering leaving leadership roles, with Gallup recording a dip in manager engagement - and diagnoses the causes as ambiguity, doing more with less, and growing responsibility paired with shrinking autonomy: "a recipe for stress".
Glenn argues that organisations are very good at starting initiatives and very bad at stopping them; deliberately pausing or dropping work is one of the fastest ways to create capacity and lower stress - and one-to-one coaching tackles burnout at the individual level, with improved wellbeing as a by-product.
On AI, both hosts argue that the companies performing best among the 91% investing more in AI are those whose leaders double down on the human element - creativity, curiosity, compassion and removing obstacles for their people - rather than trying to out-run the technology.
Glenn introduces "intelligence capital" (from a conversation with past guest Justine Whitaker): rather than AI-versus-human, the question is how organisations liberate the best of both intelligences - and since AI is always on while humans are not, Nejmi argues this raises every leader's personal responsibility for managing their own energy.
On the credibility gap, Nejmi reports from Leadership Baseline+ work that only around 10% of leaders accurately perceive how their leadership is experienced - most under-rate their impact - and argues that under-rating is as problematic as over-rating, because leaders can't personalise their leadership without knowing where their impact actually lands.
Episode summary
What is the first half of 2026 telling leaders? Three signals: a leader burnout crisis driven by ambiguity and shrinking autonomy; AI adoption that rewards doubling down on the human element; and a credibility gap in which only around 10% of leaders see themselves as others experience them. The answer runs through both levels - fix the system, and lead yourself deliberately.
What's driving the leadership reality check of 2026?
Glenn: Hello and welcome to the Impactful Conversations podcast with me, Dr Glenn Wallis, and my very, very good friend and co-host, Nejmi Alexander. Nejmi, hi sir, how are you?
Nejmi: Very, very well, thank you, Glenn. Middle of the year, and looking forward to this episode - we're going to have a bit of a reflection. It's a good opportunity to think about the conversations we've been having and the experiences we're hearing, and talk to that a little.
Glenn: There's a lot that's gone on. You and I get the very fortunate opportunity to speak with leaders inside both small and growing organisations and the mega global organisations we work within, and there's no doubt in my mind - I know you and I have chatted about this - that the macroeconomic situation, the geopolitical situation globally, has impacted organisations. Not just from a trade and revenue-generating angle: the experience of being inside those organisations has definitely been impacted. And that's not my conclusion - those are the words of the leaders with whom we get a chance to speak.
Nejmi: That's fair - you'd absolutely expect it. It feels like there's a lot more volatility, a lot more pace around changes in expectations. Trying to do more with less - I'm sure that's resonant for most people listening to this conversation. And that has a net impact. No one's an island; we're all operating in a global arena, and so it has an impact in terms of leadership. We've got a great opportunity to bring some of those experiences to life in this conversation.
Glenn: The other thing I hear a lot about is uncertainty - how all the things you've just talked about produce an environment that is uncertain. One of the things both individuals and organisations can do better - and I know you've got some real-life examples of this - is to communicate more clearly about some of those contexts, or why some decisions have been made. Not to make everything absolutely certain, of course, but to make things more certain where you can. If people took nothing else away from today's session, it's this: look at what you can influence, even if you can't ultimately control it, and take some steps to do that.
We could talk about all sorts of things - even in this introduction we've probably touched on seven or eight topics. But there are three specifically we want to explore. First, the theme of burnout for leaders seems to have raised its head again in the first half of this year, and there are some fairly shocking stats we'll share that suggest it's not a good situation for senior leaders in particular. The second is something we've hinted at a couple of times in episodes we've already shared: leading in an AI world - the definite upsides, but also the challenges that come with it. And finally, what we might call the leadership credibility gap: employees, people in your team and across the wider organisation, have maybe higher expectations than ever, and demands they're placing on the organisation and on you as an individual leader - and the tension that's creating on both sides. Where do you want to start?
Why are leaders burning out?
Nejmi: Let's start with burnout - the leader burnout crisis. We've got a few facts and figures, hopefully not to put you to sleep with, but to give some context. A recent report found 71% - nearly three quarters - of leaders report high stress, and 40% are considering leaving leadership roles because of it. Gallup also reported a dip in manager engagement over this past year, with younger managers and female managers hit the hardest. And from other reports, we're seeing that the younger generation entering the workplace - or soon to take on the mantle of leadership positions - are turning away from the idea of people-leadership roles, having seen the impact of what it can look like for their more senior stakeholders today. What's interesting is to explore what that means: what does it actually look like in organisations, what might be causing it, and what could we be doing?
Glenn: Those last two things are really important - why might it be happening, and an exploration of what we've heard firsthand or what the data might be telling us. But we've also always prided ourselves on trying to offer some ways forward to improve things. So for each of these three topics, we'll try to offer a step or two you might be able to take to make the situation even a little bit better. If we can be helpful in that way, I consider our job done.
Nejmi: In my experience with recent client organisations, whenever we're in spaces exploring what the day-to-day experience of leadership is like, this topic tends to come up. And the root cause, in my experience, is several-fold. There's a lack of clarity - a greater sense of ambiguity that leaders are working within. When there's a delta between what good looks like, or what the expectations are, and the reality of the day to day, that will naturally create a source of stress. There's this idea of having to do more with less - which AI can help with, but which also brings greater ambiguity: how do we prioritise, how do we move forward in that context? And there's a lack of consistency of expectation. There's greater and greater responsibility and requirement placed on leaders, but sometimes a diminishing sense of authority or autonomy in taking and making decisions for the best of their team and organisation. So you've got to take more and more risks, be further and further outside your comfort zone, and the rewards are very uncertain. That is a recipe for stress. It's not surprising that stress would be increasing in that context. Does that mirror what you're seeing?
Glenn: Very much so. Among a lot of important information there - it might be affecting the leaders listening, but of course it might also be affecting people in their team and across the organisation, so it's worth asking: are any of these things going on in our organisation, and could we do them better? I want to pick up a couple of things, and dig into a topic you and I have talked about before - I'm not apologising for revisiting it. Organisations are often very good at starting initiatives or projects. And I think we both know - and many, many leaders recognise - that organisations are very often very bad at stopping or pausing things they should deprioritise in the moment. The inevitable effect is that you just accumulate more and more to do. It's not one in, one out - you're just adding all the time. That puts incredible stress on everybody inside the organisation.
I'm not suggesting we should all have our feet up on the desk - being a senior leader is tough, and there are moments when it should be. But if it's tough every minute of every day, maybe it's no surprise that C-suite execs typically only last five years in role before moving on. So there's something about how the organisation says: we recognise what's going on, we're going to press pause on that, that and that, you can drop that one entirely, and we'll come back to it when the time's right. And if that's true at an organisational level, I'd urge individual leaders and managers listening to go back to your own desk, virtual or real, and have that conversation with yourself and your team: where can we create some more capacity? By doing that, you lower the stress levels inside the group, at least a bit.
Nejmi: I love that. Don't look here to do - look here to stop. As a habit. Industrialising that - I love that.
What can organisations actually do about burnout?
Nejmi: More recently, to help build more clarity and consistency of expectations - both the what and the how of leading, what's expected of you to prioritise in how you lead - we do a lot of work around this idea of building leadership systems. Typically with scale-ups and growing organisations, though it can work with whole functions of larger organisations too. The intent is to do the work to build consistency around how leadership happens in an organisation. What I mean by that is: measuring what good looks like from a behavioural standpoint - not as a stick to beat anybody with, but as a tool for genuinely understanding how your leadership is experienced - and then building greater awareness and insight for the organisation around the impacts of that across the organisation.
Once you have that as a data plane, as a foundation, you can start to make more strategic decisions about where you prioritise leadership development, or where you create spaces for working on greater consistency. For example, if clarity - or a misalignment of clarity around strategic objectives, or the way to achieve them - is a source of friction and stress within an organisation, being able to locate that and then do the work to solve for it is incredibly impactful. Likewise, being able to locate where the difference is in how leadership is being experienced within an organisation: do we need to target certain behaviours, or attributes of how the culture is experienced, in order to mitigate stress, or poor retention, people leaving? It's basically building a foundation, a baseline of insight, in order to address how this challenge is being experienced within the organisation.
Even with the idea of clarity: a really simple exercise we've done recently is working with the C-suite to answer some core strategic questions - why do we exist, what are we prioritising, how are we getting there - and then having the same conversation with the level below, to compare and contrast. How clearly are those really core messages translating across the organisation? Where's the delta, the gap in understanding? How do we bring those together to re-prioritise how we move forward over the next six months as a leadership community? Being able to locate the pain point contributing to burnout and stress, and then being proactive to solve for that specific symptom, is incredibly powerful - and it can't be overlooked. If the organisation is feeling that stress, it's a responsibility of every leader to look at how they might be contributing towards it - and, crucially, as a collective: is it systemic? Is there something we could be doing better as a community to address this? We've really seen impact with the organisations where we've taken that kind of data-gathering, strategic approach to solving for the symptoms the team is experiencing.
Glenn: Such an important point - trying to get to the root causes of the systemic failings, if you like, and I don't mean that in a super critical way. No organisation goes on without its challenges; it's whether you're taking the time, through some clear process steps, to identify what they are and how to resolve them - so you're addressing not only the symptoms but the root cause. I'd just add - and I think you'd expect us to say this - if the symptom is individual-level burnout of leaders, one thing we know for sure is that coaching helps improve mental health and wellbeing generally. You're working with somebody, at an individual level, to do the things you've just talked about at a systemic level: get clarity, get peace of mind that there's a plan to go forward with, unravel some of the stuff that's been going around in your head and waking you up at four in the morning. That can be incredibly powerful. So there are two levels - and I suspect we'll end up speaking at two levels quite a lot today: the systemic organisational level and the individual level, though even the individual has a system within which they're working. I'd wholeheartedly urge organisations: if you're recognising burnout in your leadership, you've got two levels of work to do - the systemic piece Nejmi has talked about, and supporting leaders through, say, a big transformation programme with one-to-one coaching. They'll get the benefits of whatever the objective of the coaching is, and a by-product is improved wellbeing. You get two for the price of one.
How do you lead when AI is moving faster than you are?
Glenn: We could go on, but let's move into topic two: AI, and human-centred leadership inside an AI world. We've had a couple of fantastic guests on the podcast talking about this already. There's very interesting data around - I think it's as many as 91% of companies looking to invest more in AI. But the companies doing best at the moment, producing the more positive data in the first half of the year, are those where the leaders are still very much focusing on the human element - the bit that AI will probably never be able to do particularly well, because humans like to talk to humans. As much as I have fantastic conversations with Claude and ChatGPT and other platforms, there's still nothing quite like you and I getting on a call fifteen minutes early and just having a chat, human to human. Losing sight of that in an AI-heavy world would be a mistake. I don't know if you'd agree, and how you're seeing some of that play through?
Nejmi: For sure. The space we're in is a really interesting time in human history. We've never seen the prospect of such disruption - which can be opportunistic too. There's such opportunity, where the limit of what we can do is really just the limit of our creativity. Sometimes AI is not quite up to the task yet, but it's improving day by day, minute by minute, and I'm sure before long it will far exceed that. So yes - almost every company. And if they're not, I'd be surprised if they're still competing in a few years' time. That remaining 9% - I don't know what they're up to.
What's certainly interesting is that the organisations I've seen doing a particularly good job of adoption, innovation and experimentation are the ones where leaders are taking an approach that encourages creativity and experimentation - sussing it out, sharing insights across the organisation about what's working, which use cases are being explored, which custom GPTs have been written and for which challenges. Industrialised learning and sharing. The challenge I've seen is that, with the opportunity of AI - and potentially the threat - a lot of leaders find themselves quite stuck in their thinking: the idea that the world is accelerating beyond their understanding. And there's the challenge that places even on the word leadership: you're expected to lead, but when you feel you're behind, how do you lead effectively? The point you make is absolutely right. The way you lead effectively is by doubling down on your humanity - your people skills, your ability to unearth and understand the blockers to performance for the individuals around your team, being the quarterback who susses out where the challenges lie and removes those obstacles. And that requires creativity, compassion to an extent, and curiosity in the people around you.
Glenn: The way you've just described it reminds me very much of the strengths-based approach: your strength is the fact that you're a human being, and if you double down on your strengths, there's an opportunity to be super effective. The one thing often misquoted about strengths-based approaches is that you can ignore your weaknesses. In this context particularly, I don't think you can. If the weakness is "I don't understand AI", you've got a duty to get yourself up to at least a certain level of knowledge. You don't have to be a software engineer, but you need to know how to employ it, how other people might be employing it, and what the impacts might be. But there's a real opportunity there: look, I'm a human, I have some real strengths as a human leader, and if I double down on that, I'm maximising my advantage, not minimising it.
Nejmi: Absolutely. You've just reminded me of some work I did fairly recently with leaders on self-leadership - how to lead your career in an ambiguous environment - and a strengths-based approach was at the core of the thinking. A really simple tool anyone can employ today is a personal SWOT analysis. SWOT can feel a bit tired - a business studies A-level sort of tool - but employ it for yourself: where are your strengths, where might your weaknesses lie, and what are the opportunities and threats you can see in your career or your environment? Be strategic about the career lattice - the different directions of travel that could be possible - and very intentional about where you see those opportunities and threats for you personally. Then do the mapping: how can you exploit your strengths to realise the opportunities? What does that practically mean - conversations to get more experience in context A, B or C? And how can you exploit your strengths to mitigate the threats you can see, too?
I tend to focus more on the strengths than the weaknesses - a bit counter to what you just described, though not ignoring them; you need to know what they are - but really honing in on: where do my strengths play out in this situation? From a very personal standpoint, to lead yourself and lead your career, be very intentional in the decisions you make and the opportunities you go after, to play to your strengths the most. Often the worry when it comes to AI is being personally redundant - and being on the front foot around your own career strategy in this context can only do you good. So it's really interesting you bring up strengths, because it's absolutely right: you play to your strengths, always.
What is intelligence capital - and why does leader energy matter?
Glenn: The other thing I'm reminded of: I had a call last week with one of our previous podcast guests, Justine Whitaker - I'm sure you remember, we had a great conversation - and she has continued to explore the AI space. I think we should have her back on later in the year to update us on what she's seeing across the horizon. We had a really interesting conversation. She started by saying we shouldn't really be thinking about it as AI versus human, or even AI and human, because that's quite siloed thinking. If you think about an overarching theme that ties the two together, could that be intelligence? Back in the day people talked about human capital - maybe a way to think about this is not AI and human, but intelligence capital. What are you doing to liberate the best intelligences of both parts? And I said to her: the challenge is that an AI large language model, or any AI platform you choose, is always on - pretty much always working at its optimum, unless your wifi breaks down. Human beings aren't that. We come back to our idea of burnout.
So what are organisations - and individual leaders - doing to optimise access to their own intelligence? That's not always easy, because when you're under pressure and the pace is so fast, accessing the best of your intelligence, your insight, your hunches, is difficult. I'd be the first to put my hand up and say: when I'm tired, I can abdicate my thinking to a large language model, because I just don't have the headspace - and I wonder whether that's actually helpful, always. There's an interesting challenge there, particularly for leaders: instead of two very distant and unconnected parts, the joining theme is intelligence - and how are you leveraging the best intelligence to support the organisation's performance? What's your thought?
Nejmi: I think it's great - and for me, what it means is that it increases the personal responsibility of you as an individual, as a leader, for keeping yourself as optimal as you can. That requires self-care, prioritising your workload based on energy, and being more intentional about how you approach the work you do - rather than "I'm on from this time to this time, try to get as much done as I can", which is certainly how I approached most of my career, and where I think most people default to. In entrepreneurial spaces this takes much more focus - it's clearer that your business is only as successful as you are at managing yourself. But I wonder if that always feels true for leaders within bigger organisations. And it feels like it's only ever going to increase: if you want to have the impact that's possible, that's a personal responsibility to prioritise.
Glenn: We'll move on to the third topic, but I do think we should come back at some point and do an episode on the leader as athlete, or the athlete leader - because this isn't about putting ping-pong tables in HSBC's headquarters in Canary Wharf. It's quite a different concept, both personally and at a systemic level.
Is there a leadership credibility gap?
Glenn: Apparently 72% of HR leaders say that employee expectations are higher than ever. It's an interesting segue into this idea that there's a bit of a credibility gap between what employees expect and what leaders in the organisation are offering. Do you see that delta - do you recognise it as true? I'll be honest, it's the one of the three I feel a little less familiar with - but you're sometimes working with slightly different organisations than I am, so you might see it differently.
Nejmi: I think it's definitely true. It's certainly the case that, more and more, it's less impactful to take a single approach to leadership. Employing your default leadership style and operating from gut feel will work for a proportion of the people you serve and lead - but more and more there's a higher expectation of a more personalised experience. And there's certainly a generational gap at play - I'm sure that won't be surprising to anybody leading more junior folks, who might seem, without wanting to go out on a limb, more entitled in how they're thinking about work. But there are factors at play that contribute towards different work values; you might see different attitudes across different age groups. None are more right or more wrong - they're just different. And that requires you to be more adaptable in your leadership. We're absolutely seeing that.
The way we tend to address it is similar to what I mentioned before around leadership systems. With clients, we run what I call a leadership baseline activity: a 360-degree point of view on how your leadership behaviours are experienced. What that allows us to do is understand, across a range of behaviours, how you rate yourself on consistency and quality of impact versus how everybody else sees it. Which can be jarring, I get that -
Glenn: Not jarring at all - honestly, I've done fifty of them!
Nejmi: - but depending on how familiar you are with getting feedback in this way, it can be quite difficult for people to acknowledge that there's a difference between their intent and the impact they have. I totally get that. But it's also incredibly powerful, because you can't go through life with a blinkered view if you want to have impact, and credibility, across the range of people you serve. So - take a guess: broadly, what proportion of leaders do you feel are consistent in how they rate themselves against these behaviours versus the reality? Self-perception versus reality - how well aligned do you think people are?
How accurate is leaders' self-perception?
Glenn: As you might expect, over the years I've done quite a lot of helping leaders review their 360s. And I'd say that, more often than not, they understate their performance against the perception of others. In my experience there are always those who way overestimate how they're being received - but I'm going to guess that more understate than overstate. And I don't think that's them playing the game: when I've had those conversations, unless they were kidding me, they answered as honestly as they could. They weren't trying to appear humble by lowering their own score.
Nejmi: I'm sure there can be an element of that, but I agree - understating your impact is definitely a bigger proportion of people than overstating. But only about 10% of leaders are quite accurate in their own self-perception versus reality - leaving everybody else. And I'd argue that even underestimating your impact can be as problematic as overestimating it. It's really important to understand where you're having impact and double down on that - similar to the strengths-based approach - and where you're having unintended consequences, to understand that and mitigate for it. Ideally, where we want to get to is consistency: people having a good awareness of the impact they have. With that, you can lead in a more personalised manner, playing to a true awareness of your strengths - closing the gap between your intention and your impact.
Glenn: As you were talking, it struck me there's a kind of Venn diagram going on here. There's what we spoke about earlier - has the organisation, at a systemic level, got a set of leadership expectations recognised across the organisation, so it's consistent, at least within a fairly broad framework? And then there's the tension of how you apply that in an individualised style of leadership, without what's perceived to be favourites, or "you can't lead this person because you've got a particular style". There's some art to that balance. But I couldn't agree more: as a leader, if you've only got one default way of leading, you could argue that's consistent - but it's probably not going to work for anybody, because it's so middle-of-the-road that it isn't individualised, and you miss everyone. Some people think a generalised approach is broadly okay for everyone; the opposite is true - it also doesn't work for everybody. So have your conversation with everyone in your team: work out how they like to work, how your leadership matches that, and what you need to do differently. Whether that's with the 360s you suggested - which I think are a fantastic tool that uncovers an awful lot - or, if you can't afford a 360 approach, just have a meaningful conversation with people about how they experience your leadership and how it could be better, and then tailor your approach - again, within the organisation's aspiration for what good leadership should look like.
Nejmi: Absolutely. And there's no expectation to be wildly different from who you are as a leader. That's more damaging - to have an expectation of yourself, or believe the organisation has an expectation of you, to suddenly be a huge performative visionary in every interaction, when that's not your instinct. We're not talking about wholesale changes in who you are and how you lead. It's tweaks around the edges, to make sure you're having the impact you want to have - more consistent, more personalised.
Glenn: And coupled with that - this might be something we come back to, as I'm mindful of time - just because employees have higher expectations doesn't make those expectations right. There's something about having, let's call it an impactful conversation, about the expectations they have and why they think they're reasonable. You might say, "Yes, I think that's reasonable too." Or you might have to say, "I understand where you're coming from, but either we can't afford that approach, or that's not how we do things around here." You have to have a grown-up conversation about expectations - otherwise you could end up rolling over at every demand. And I wonder how much of the "expectations have changed" story is a result of organisations not pushing back hard enough against expectations that are ultimately unreasonable.
Nejmi: That's a really fair point. I know we don't have bags of time, but a closing thought on what you just described. Quite often, when having any of these kinds of conversations with any group of leaders within an organisation - scaling or otherwise - there's an underestimation of the role the individual has in addressing the challenges they see. Often people defer: "If something's not clear, the C-suite needs to fix that, and when they're clear, I'll know it." They're wrestling with the same ambiguity that you are. It's an individual responsibility of everyone as a leader: if you see the challenge, and you have a point of view on how to solve it, try to drive it - address the problem, seize authority where it's plausible to do so. If you're experiencing any of the challenges we've described, and recognise there's something we need to do in honour of some of the ideas in this conversation - do it. Go ahead and try to drive that change forward. It may be that it's not just you experiencing the challenge, and the solution is craving somebody to step forward with fresh ideas or fresh gusto. So please take that as a call to action: go and do something with the insights we're exploring in this conversation.
Glenn: Love that - a great note to finish on. These three topics were selected in part because there was data suggesting that in the first six months of 2026 they were clearly important. We've had plenty to talk about and could carry on, because we're coming up against these topics in our conversations. My sincere hope is that leaders listening recognise some of these situations for themselves, and can take away some of the thoughts and offerings we've scattered liberally across the conversation - and hopefully it makes a difference. That's what we're here for.
Just a quick anecdote - I don't know whether I'd shared this with you. Somebody reached out and said, "Do you mind" - as if they needed my permission - "if I use one of the podcasts in a coaching conversation I've got with a leader, as a bit of pre-work? Because I think what you said about X, Y and Z would be really useful." I was really honoured. I don't know why they felt they needed to ask - I was chuffed to bits that the conversations are being used in that way. I really love having these conversations, and I'd like to think that people listening are taking them away and doing something with them, because there are some practical takeaways.
Nejmi: Well, that's the goal - and that sounds like a perfect example of having impact through our conversations. Music to my ears.
Glenn: Well, look, thank you for that - I genuinely enjoyed it. A lot of our shared experience inside organisations to share with the audience. Looking forward to the next one.
Nejmi: Me too. Thanks, Glenn.
Glenn: Cool - speak soon, take care, bye bye.
Nejmi: Bye.
Transcript lightly edited for clarity: filler, false starts and crosstalk removed; punctuation corrected. Content otherwise faithful to the recording.
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