Leadership Insights: Strategies for Resilient Leaders

How to Work with Empathy

Empathy, altruism, and empathic distress get used interchangeably, but they’re functionally distinct, and confusing them is exactly what derails otherwise well-intentioned leadership.
Empathy is awareness, not action. It maps another person’s physical, emotional, and cognitive state through three separate, trainable brain networks.
Empathic distress, feeling someone else’s pain so intensely you act to relieve your own discomfort rather than genuinely help them, is a common, well-documented failure mode, and it’s distinct from skilled empathy or true altruism.

Empathy has been held up as a core leadership skill for years, and for good reason: mastered, it’s a genuine path to real influence. Low empathy carries real risk for leadership failure. But empathic distress, a specific, well-documented failure mode, can just as easily derail a leader’s judgement and quietly damage their own wellbeing in the process. Getting clear on the actual language matters, because empathy, sympathy, kindness, altruism, compassion, and compassion fatigue are frequently used as if they mean the same thing, and they don’t.

Empathy

Empathy is awareness rather than action. It gives you an accurate map of another person, or a group of people, and for social mammals generally, that map is what enables collaboration, survival, and success. Empathy takes real effort: intention, focus, and detailed evaluation, not passive absorption. Neuroscientific research, including work by Tania Singer and Matthieu Ricard, has identified distinct, differentiated brain networks doing this work, shaped over time by genes, early environment, culture, and deliberate practice.

The first network maps another person’s physical state, posture, skin tone, movement, breathing, pulse. The second maps their emotional state through facial expression and tone of voice. The third maps their perspective and thinking. These are physical, emotional, and cognitive empathy respectively, and training any of the three shows up as measurably increased activity and volume in the corresponding brain regions.

Empathising and systemising tend to operate in tension. Most people are naturally stronger in one than the other: someone who empathises easily may find tuning into others comes naturally, while someone who systemises well may excel at logic while missing social cues that seem obvious to others. This is simply a spectrum of individual variation, not a deficiency in either direction.

Altruism (Compassion)

When you take real action to improve someone else’s state or prospects, that’s altruism, and it can range from directly relieving suffering to challenging someone to give their genuine best effort. At its best, altruism serves both the other person’s short and long-term needs at once. This is the primary role of parents, coaches, caregivers, and leaders alike: effective altruism gives people the support and direction to succeed with real autonomy, not dependency on you.

Empathic Distress (Sympathy)

When you tune into someone else’s emotion, you experience a real reaction of your own. Someone in tears over a bereavement may leave you genuinely sad. Witnessing another person’s suffering or anger can have a powerful effect on your own emotional and physiological state. That’s a natural part of emotional empathy, but negative emotion, left unmanaged, reliably leads to worse decisions. Empathy distorts and biases under that pressure. When distress takes over, focus shifts away from the other person and toward reducing your own discomfort instead.

Here, you end up acting to relieve your own discomfort rather than making the decision that’s genuinely best for the other person. Parents who overindulge children, some charitable giving patterns, and quietly absorbing a colleague’s workload all fit this pattern. Excessive kindness without real wisdom creates dependency, not growth, and the added burden lands squarely on you, which is exactly the path toward compassion fatigue: pure exhaustion from overprotecting others rather than genuinely helping them.

Developing Skilled Empathy and Altruism

Empathy is genuinely learnable, and the change is visible on a brain scan. It develops largely through mimicry and practice, starting with healthy early bonding, then extending through family and community. In a community where empathy is consistently modelled, people tend to pick it up by example. The reverse holds too. Beyond upbringing, deliberate mental practice has measurable effects on both empathy and altruism at any stage of life.

Calm and Connect

Your social engagement system needs to be genuinely active to do any of this. Anxiety, anger, or depression shuts it down. Activating the ventral vagus nerve restores calm, safety, and genuine engagement, and it’s trainable through slow breathing, chanting, cold water exposure, or yoga. Many leaders operate under such relentless pressure that this system never gets the chance to switch on, and without it, empathy, altruism, and trust simply aren’t available, however good the intention.

Be Steady and Positive

Sensing someone else’s state matters, but becoming a victim of their distress helps no one. A steady, caring, genuinely positive baseline depends on real sleep, fitness, relaxation, and emotional agility. Only from that steadiness can you actually think clearly, make good decisions, and act with real skill to help.

Prepare Deliberately

Before an important conversation, actually consider what the other person is experiencing and seeking. Get clear on your own state and goal. Rehearse how you’ll approach the steps that follow rather than improvising cold.

Physical Empathy

Step fully into the conversation, distractions genuinely removed, face to face wherever possible. Notice posture, skin colour, breathing, eyes, the pulse visible in the neck. If you’re unsure, ask directly: “I can imagine that would make you anxious.” That’s physical empathy in action, the foundation everything else builds on.

Emotional Empathy

Tune into expressed emotion directly. The eyes, mouth, and face carry thousands of distinct micro-movements that signal genuine feeling, well documented in Paul Ekman’s research on facial expression, and the voice carries equally rich, hard-to-fake emotional information. Careful attention to these subtle signals maps someone’s real emotional experience, and emotion is what predicts thought and action next.

Cognitive Empathy (Perspective-Taking)

Actively consider what the other person might genuinely be thinking. What’s their actual perspective? What might they be hoping for, or worried about? If you’re unsure, ask with real respect: “Help me understand your position.” With more confidence, reflect back what you believe they’re thinking: “Am I right that you were frustrated by that?” That’s cognitive empathy, perspective-taking made explicit.

Get to Know the Whole Person

Historically, people lived in small, tightly connected communities where everyone knew each other in real depth. In a global, largely virtual world, you may know very little about someone before a conversation even starts. Beyond preparation and research, take a genuine moment during the conversation itself to understand more about who they actually are. That builds a richer context for applying empathy well over time.

When a deeper conversation like this concludes, close it properly: thank the other person, repeat back the key points, the conclusion, and what you’ve each committed to. That’s the altruistic path in practice. You’ve understood each other. You’ve agreed on responsibility and action. You’re actively building a culture of candour, safety, care, and trust, one conversation at a time.

A genuinely high-empathy, high-altruism conversation is biologically expensive. Give yourself real time to rest and recover before marching straight into the next one.

Further reading:
Working with Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman, 1998
The Social Conquest of Earth, Edward O. Wilson, 2013
Power and Care, Tania Singer & Matthieu Ricard, 2019
Against Empathy, Paul Bloom, 2018
Polyvagal Safety, Stephen Porges, 2021

Mental Health Matters: A Guide to Organisational & Personal Resilience

A landmark 2023 study found one in two people worldwide will experience a mental health disorder by age 75, based on WHO survey data spanning over 150,000 people across 29 countries.
WHO estimates depression and anxiety alone cost the global economy 12 billion working days and US$1 trillion in lost productivity every year.
A genuine mental health strategy needs both organisational commitment, culture, policy, trained leaders, and real personal practice, physical, social, digital, and emotional habits that actually support wellbeing day to day.

One in two people will experience a mental health disorder at some point in their lives. That’s the finding of a landmark 2023 study by researchers John McGrath, Ronald Kessler, and colleagues, published in The Lancet Psychiatry, drawing on World Health Organization survey data from more than 150,000 people across 29 countries, the largest coordinated study of its kind. Applied globally, that’s over 4 billion people personally touched by a mental health disorder in their lifetime.

Before diving in, and more importantly, to genuinely look after your own mental health in case reading a long article on this topic triggers anxiety, you’re welcome to scroll straight down to the personal and organisational action plans near the end. Otherwise, keep reading.

The effects of mental health disorders in the world of work have never been more visible. WHO estimates the global economy loses 12 billion working days every year to depression and anxiety alone, at a cost of US$1 trillion annually in lost productivity. What does that actually mean for you and your organisation? Read on to find out, with a real example.

Mental health issues and other stress-related disorders are recognised as leading causes of early retirement, high absenteeism, general health problems, weakened leadership, and reduced organisational efficiency. Mental health risk is also genuinely linked to newer pressures: rapid technology change, process overload, skills and agility gaps, digitalisation, and the sheer volume of information many people now have to process daily, sometimes called infobesity.

Do organisations need more reasons to tackle this seriously as part of a genuine resilience and wellbeing strategy? Before going further, let’s align on the actual terms so we’re discussing the same thing.

What Do We Actually Mean by Mental Health?

According to WHO, mental health is a state of mental wellbeing that enables people to cope with life’s stresses, realise their abilities, learn and work well, and genuinely contribute to their community. It’s also a basic human right, central to personal, organisational, and socio-economic development.

We can’t discuss mental health without addressing mental illness directly. Casual terms like “bonkers,” “crazy,” “psycho,” or “deranged” are still used, even by well-intentioned people, and they promote real rejection and stigma rather than understanding. The term mental disorder is broader, encompassing both diagnosable mental illnesses and crisis states that may not meet full diagnostic criteria: depression, bipolar disorder, burnout, anxiety disorders (including phobias, PTSD, panic disorder, generalised anxiety disorder, OCD, social anxiety), psychosis (including schizophrenia), substance use disorders, eating disorders, and behavioural addictions (screens, gambling, work, and others). Chronic stress itself can, in some cases, be understood as a mental disorder. Given how broad this territory genuinely is, it’s not surprising most people are affected at least once in their life.

This also can’t be covered without mentioning psychosocial risk. The European Agency for Safety and Health at Work defines it as the risk of harm to a worker’s psychological or physical wellbeing arising from poor work design, organisation, and management, alongside a poor social context at work. Workplace stress is genuinely associated with poorer mental health, even though stress itself isn’t classified as a mental disorder.

What Mental Disorders Actually Cost Your Organisation

The US$1 trillion annual global productivity cost is a genuinely staggering headline figure. Translating it to a specific organisation takes a proper framework. One useful formula was developed by Ravi Tangri, a Canadian strategy and leadership expert and author of Stress Costs, Stress Cures, who is also certified with Resilience Institute. His formula, incorporating six weighted cost elements, is one of those presented by the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work: 19% of absenteeism costs, 40% of staff turnover costs, 55% of Employee Assistance Programme costs, 30% of short- and long-term disability costs, 60% of workplace accident costs (professional causes only), and 100% of costs related to workers’ compensation and stress-related legal claims.

Applied to a real example: a Switzerland-based company with roughly 3,000 employees, an average absenteeism rate of 4%, a below-average turnover rate of 3%, modest EAP spend, disability and workplace accident costs under €1 million, and no workers’ compensation claims, still reached an estimated €3.9 million in annual stress and psychosocial risk costs. That’s a genuinely sobering number for an organisation that looks, on paper, like it’s managing things reasonably well.

A Guide to Implementing Mental Health in Your Organisation

Beyond the direct cost savings, taking mental health seriously genuinely helps organisations manage economic pressure, develop more authentic, empathic, and adaptive leadership, recruit increasingly scarce talent, advance real diversity, equity, and inclusion, and reduce quiet quitting and presenteeism.

Conduct a Genuine Needs and Risk Analysis

Use a robust resilience or mental health diagnostic, or a proper health risk assessment tool. What actually gets measured is what actually gets addressed.

Build a Genuinely Inclusive Culture

Actively end stigma and discrimination by raising real awareness and breaking the silence and taboo that still surround mental health at work.

Set Real Policies and Regulations

Cover overtime, leave, harassment, ethics and compliance, code of conduct, and psychological safety directly. A dedicated pillar or pilot group focused on mental health and psychosocial risk can genuinely help drive this.

Train and Coach Your Leaders Directly

A manager’s skills, behaviours, and habits have a genuine, direct link to the mental health of their team. Leaders need real training to detect risk, including psychosocial risk, and to manage their own mental health, emotions, and chronic stress alongside their team’s.

Offer Genuinely Targeted Training Programmes

The right content depends on your specific assessment and needs analysis, but strong candidates include mental health first aid, sleep and fatigue, stress and change management, resilience, suicide prevention, and addiction awareness, especially tailored for younger employees. Measure, map, and evaluate outcomes, and revise what isn’t working.

Get the Right Resources in Place

Depending on budget: a designated person of trust, an internal mediator, occupational health nurses, trained mental health first aiders, or structured group discussion forums can all genuinely help.

Your Personal Guide to Improving Your Mental Health

Around World Mental Health Day each 10 October, it’s worth reinforcing a few genuinely practical, individual habits: looking after yourself physically, socially, emotionally, mentally, and digitally all have a real, cumulative impact on your own mental health.

Make Real Time for Physical Care

Stay physically active; Harvard Health Publishing notes exercise can have an effect on depression comparable to medication for some people. Protect your sleep, aim for enough deep sleep especially around seasonal clock changes, and eat well: plenty of fruit and vegetables, omega-3-rich foods, protein, dark leafy greens, nuts, seeds, and legumes.

Keep a Genuine Support Network Close

Family, friends, or even pets, real social interaction has a genuine, positive impact on brain function and mental wellbeing.

Be Deliberate About Digital Consumption

Nurture real, offline connection, and seek support directly when you genuinely can’t switch off. It’s possible to navigate a digital-heavy life with real resilience rather than simply being carried by it.

Explore Complementary Options

Relaxation, meditation, hatha yoga, massage, support groups, bright light therapy, or music therapy can all genuinely support wellbeing alongside anything else you’re doing.

Practise Genuine Self-Compassion and Gratitude

Be kind to yourself directly. Kindness and self-compassion are associated with activation in the brain’s reward circuitry, involving neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine, contributing to genuine feelings of satisfaction and wellbeing. Practising gratitude consistently is also linked to meaningful improvements in mental health over time.

Reducing psychosocial and mental health risk is a genuinely major issue for organisations, one that shows real ability to be efficient and sustainable when properly tackled. Cost, productivity, and legal obligations all drive this conversation, but it’s also a genuine public health issue: because it reaches nearly every active member of the labour market, the workplace remains a fundamentally important player in promoting mental health across the wider population.

One in two people will face this. The real question isn’t whether your organisation, or you personally, will encounter it. It’s whether you’re genuinely prepared when you do.

Written by Delphine Caprez, Corporate Health Consultant, Author, and Senior Consultant at Resilience Institute.

Sources:
McGrath, J.J., Kessler, R.C., et al. (2023). Age of onset and cumulative risk of mental disorders: a cross-national analysis of population surveys from 29 countries. The Lancet Psychiatry.
Exercise is an all-natural treatment to fight depression (2021), Harvard Health Publishing.
Mental Health First Aid (2019), ensa, Swiss Foundation Pro Mente Sana, Zürich.
European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (2014), Calculating the costs of work-related stress and psychosocial risks.

Mindful Leadership in Asia: What the Research Actually Shows

A 2025 meta-analysis of 109 studies and nearly 20,000 participants found leader mindfulness consistently predicts more follower-centred leadership behaviour, and better follower wellbeing, performance, and leader relationships.
Psychological safety research shows organisations built on a clan-style culture generate meaningfully higher psychological safety than those built on hierarchy, yet many organisations operating in Asia default to hierarchy without examining that trade-off.
A 2026 scoping review of high power distance environments in Asia found the answer is not to eliminate hierarchy, since that rarely works, but to use it deliberately to build safer, more respectful relationships across rank.
Global organisations that import Western mindful leadership frameworks unchanged into their Asia offices tend to see limited traction. The research now points to a specific, adapted approach instead.

Mindful leadership research has matured considerably since the idea first became popular in corporate learning circles. It is no longer a single brain-scan study and a persuasive TED talk. It is now a body of large-scale, peer-reviewed evidence, and a growing part of that evidence speaks directly to a problem that Western leadership frameworks have historically ignored: hierarchy. For any organisation operating in Asia, whether a regional business or a global multinational running a Singapore or Hong Kong hub, that is not a side note. It is the central design question.

What the Evidence Actually Shows

A 2025 meta-analysis published in the British Journal of Management pooled 109 studies, 396 effect sizes, and nearly 20,000 participants to test whether leader mindfulness genuinely predicts better outcomes for the people who work for them. It did, consistently. Leaders with higher mindfulness engaged in more follower-centred leadership behaviour, and their teams reported stronger wellbeing, better performance, and healthier leader relationships as a result. This is a materially stronger evidence base than the single neuroimaging study most mindful leadership content still leans on, and it confirms the underlying claim while adding an important nuance: the researchers specifically tested region as one of several moderators, which is itself a signal that context, not just the presence of mindfulness, shapes how the effect plays out.

A separate 2024 review in Frontiers in Psychology mapped the specific leadership qualities that regular mindfulness practice tends to build: sharper self-awareness, steadier emotional regulation, and a demonstrated ability to notice one’s own biases rather than act on them unexamined. None of this claims mindfulness turns a leader into someone new. It claims something more modest and more useful: consistent practice measurably shifts how a leader shows up under pressure, which is precisely the condition most leadership failures occur under.

Presence Versus Focus, and Why the Difference Matters More Under Hierarchy

Focus is the ability to concentrate on one task, shutting distractions out. Presence is broader: full awareness of the people and dynamics in the room, not just the task at hand. Most leadership training optimises for focus, because it is easier to teach and measure. Presence is harder, and it is precisely the skill that hierarchical cultures make harder to practise, since a leader’s rank alone can quietly discourage the kind of open, unfiltered feedback that presence depends on noticing.

Sports psychology offers a useful, if imperfect, parallel. Athletes who perform best under pressure are typically the ones who can hold total presence in the moment rather than narrowing entirely onto mechanics. The parallel to leadership is real but should not be overstated: a boardroom is not a competition arena, and the research connecting elite athletic presence to executive decision making is suggestive rather than a direct transfer. What does transfer cleanly is the underlying mechanism: presence, like any attentional skill, responds to deliberate practice, not innate talent alone.

Psychological Safety in High Power Distance Cultures

Psychological safety, the shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk taking, has become one of the most cited concepts in organisational research since Amy Edmondson’s original work and Google’s well known internal study on team effectiveness. What gets discussed far less often is that most of the foundational research, including that internal study, was conducted primarily in Western, relatively low power distance organisational cultures.

Research specific to Asia tells a more complicated story. A large 2025 study spanning 18 societies and 2,451 employees found organisations with a clan-oriented culture, built on collaboration and belonging, generated significantly higher psychological safety than those built around hierarchy, and that trust in top management was the key mechanism connecting culture to safety. Separately, a 2026 scoping review focused specifically on high power distance environments across Asia concluded that trying to eliminate hierarchy outright is rarely realistic or effective. The more workable path is using the existing hierarchy deliberately, senior leaders actively inviting dissent, visibly rewarding people who raise concerns, and modelling fallibility themselves, to build respectful, safer relationships across rank rather than pretending rank does not exist.

This matters directly for any global organisation running a regional Asia office. A psychological safety programme copied unchanged from a headquarters in London or New York, built on an assumption of low power distance, will tend to underperform in Singapore, Jakarta, or Tokyo, not because the underlying science is wrong, but because it was validated in a different cultural operating system. The RI Asia perspective on this is straightforward: culture types like clan and hierarchy are not fixed traits an organisation is stuck with. They are measurable, and a resilience or culture assessment that accounts for regional context gives a leadership team a genuine baseline to work from, rather than an imported assumption.

Tools for Cultivating Mindfulness, Adapted for Hierarchical Teams

Meditation remains a foundational practice, and mindfulness apps have made guided sessions genuinely accessible for time-poor leaders. But the tools that matter most in a high power distance environment are not the individual ones. They are the visible, structural ones a senior leader controls.

Name the rank gap in the room out loud. A senior leader who explicitly invites dissent, and thanks someone by name for raising an uncomfortable point, does more to build safety across a hierarchical team than any values statement.

Practise mindful communication as a specific skill, not a vague ideal. Full attention during a conversation, and a deliberate pause before responding, matters more in cultures where junior staff will not repeat a point they feel was dismissed the first time.

Build in structured, anonymous input alongside open discussion. Where face-saving norms make it genuinely costly to disagree with a senior leader in the room, a written or anonymous channel captures signal that presence alone will miss.

Measure it rather than assume it. Psychological safety and mindful leadership both vary by team, not just by national culture. A validated assessment shows you which teams are actually struggling, instead of applying the same programme everywhere.

On Emotional Regulation and the Polyvagal Theory

A physiological account often cited alongside mindful leadership is polyvagal theory, which links the vagus nerve to our capacity to self-regulate under stress. It offers a genuinely useful intuition, that leaders who understand their own physiological stress response can create more stability for the people around them, and it is worth treating as a helpful working model rather than a settled, uncontroversial account. Some of its specific physiological claims remain debated within the broader neuroscience field. The practical takeaway holds regardless of where that scientific debate lands: leaders who notice their own reactive state, and deliberately pause before responding, produce calmer teams than leaders who do not, and that pattern shows up consistently across the mindfulness and leadership research regardless of which underlying mechanism explains it.

Implementing This Without Importing a Framework That Does Not Fit

Mindful communication, better decision making, and stress management remain the three practical pillars of implementation. What changes for organisations in Asia is the delivery, not the destination. Decision making benefits from a clear, calm mind regardless of geography, but a leader in a high power distance culture also needs to actively create space for dissenting input that will not surface on its own. Stress management practices like breathing techniques and brief meditation work the same way everywhere physiologically, but the organisational permission to visibly step back and pause, without it reading as weakness, varies significantly by culture and needs to be modelled deliberately by the most senior person in the room.

Before your next leadership offsite, ask:

Was our mindful leadership or psychological safety programme designed here, or imported unchanged from headquarters?
When was the last time a junior team member disagreed with a senior leader in a meeting, and what happened next?
Do we actually know which of our teams struggle most with psychological safety, or are we assuming it is evenly distributed?

Mindful leadership is not a Western concept waiting to be exported to Asia. The underlying skill, noticing your own reactive state and choosing a deliberate response instead, is universal. What has to be built locally is the structure around it, because hierarchy does not disappear just because a leader has learned to breathe more calmly.

How AI Is Redefining Leadership: Why Human Judgement Still Matters Most

AI genuinely improves decision-making, until leaders start trusting it too much. Automation bias, the tendency to accept an AI’s output even when it’s wrong, is a well-documented, decades-old risk now showing up across medicine, aviation, and increasingly, leadership.
A 2009 airline crash, later linked partly to over-reliance on cockpit automation, remains one of the starkest illustrations of what happens when a skilled human stops actively questioning a system.
Resilient leaders don’t reject AI. They stay self-aware enough to keep genuinely questioning it, which is precisely the skill automation bias erodes if left unchecked.

Artificial intelligence has been genuinely transformative, reshaping industries and changing how work gets done. For leaders, it brings real opportunity alongside a complex, easy-to-miss risk. AI can’t replace the emotional intelligence, adaptability, and judgement that define good leadership, but it can quietly erode a leader’s willingness to actually use them.

How AI Is Actually Reshaping Leadership

AI is changing leadership in three clear ways. It analyses large volumes of data quickly, supporting faster, better-informed decisions. It automates routine tasks, from scheduling to performance tracking, freeing leaders to focus on strategy. And it surfaces predictive insight, flagging trends and risks that might otherwise go unnoticed. Tools now generate detailed reports and forecast shifts in market behaviour well beyond what a person could track manually, giving leaders real room to focus on long-term vision rather than operational grind.

The first item on that list, better decisions, deserves a closer, more honest look than it usually gets.

The Risk Hiding Inside “Better Decisions”

Automation bias, the tendency to accept an automated system’s output while discounting contradictory information, was first documented in the research literature in 1999, well before modern AI, and it hasn’t gone anywhere since. A 2026 international AI safety report notes it “undermines competence by discouraging active reasoning and verification,” weakening both the accuracy of a person’s judgement and their willingness to act independently of the system in front of them.

The effect isn’t hypothetical. In February 2009, Continental Connection Flight 3407 crashed near Buffalo, New York, an accident later linked in part to increased cockpit automation contributing to a loss of situational awareness among the flight crew. More recent research finds the same pattern in far lower-stakes settings: a 2025 study found that participants who held more positive general attitudes toward AI performed worse at distinguishing real from AI-generated content when given AI guidance, precisely because their trust in the tool discouraged genuine, independent scrutiny. Similar patterns have been documented in medical diagnostics, where clinicians using AI-based decision support have been found to accept incorrect recommendations without sufficient critical evaluation.

None of this means AI-assisted decisions are worse than unassisted ones. The research consistently finds real benefits from good human-AI collaboration. It means the benefit depends entirely on the human half of that collaboration staying genuinely engaged, not quietly deferring the moment a confident-looking output appears on screen.

Why Human Skills Are the Actual Safeguard

AI excels at processing scale. It’s the human capacity to stay genuinely engaged, sceptical, and present that determines whether that processing actually gets used well.

Emotional intelligence underpins trust, collaboration, and a team’s willingness to raise a genuine concern about a system’s output rather than deferring silently. One Forbes contributor piece put it directly: empathy and adaptability are vital for leaders navigating the AI shift, a view broadly consistent with the wider research on human-AI collaboration, even if that specific framing is one perspective among several rather than a settled consensus.

Adaptability matters because AI is a tool, not a finished solution. Integrating new systems, adjusting workflows, and navigating the genuine ethical questions AI raises all require a leader who can pivot without losing their footing.

Creativity and vision stay firmly human. AI optimises within existing parameters; it doesn’t set new ones. Visionary leadership is still what turns a good forecast into an actual decision worth making.

Resilience as the Framework for Staying Sharp

Resilience is what keeps a leader’s judgement genuinely intact alongside AI, not despite it. Self-awareness lets a leader notice when they’re deferring to a system rather than actually evaluating it. Emotional regulation keeps decision-making composed under pressure rather than rushed toward whatever answer arrives fastest. And agility in the face of uncertainty turns a wrong AI output, or a wrong human call, into a genuine learning moment rather than a repeated pattern.

Building This Deliberately

Build a Habit of Second-Guessing the Output

Before accepting an AI-generated recommendation on anything consequential, ask directly: what would make this wrong, and have I actually checked for it? This is the specific habit automation bias research shows erodes fastest under time pressure and repeated exposure, and it’s exactly the one worth protecting deliberately.

Invest in Emotional Intelligence Directly

Strengthen your capacity to empathise, connect, and read a room, capacities that don’t erode with automation and directly support a team’s willingness to speak up when something looks off.

Stay Genuinely Curious About How the Tools Work

Understanding roughly how an AI system reaches its output, not the underlying code, but its general logic and known limitations, makes it meaningfully easier to spot when it’s confidently wrong rather than accepting a plausible-looking answer at face value.

Use a Resilience Assessment to Find Your Own Blind Spots

Tools like the Resilience Assessment reveal where self-awareness, emotional regulation, and adaptability are genuinely strong versus quietly under strain, useful information well before those factors get tested by a high-stakes, AI-assisted decision.

AI is a powerful ally, not a substitute for judgement. The leaders who thrive won’t be the ones who trust it most. They’ll be the ones who stay resilient enough to keep questioning it.

What Does AI Actually Change About Human Leadership?

Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index, built on 20,000 employees across 10 countries, found that organisational factors, culture, manager support, and talent practices, explain 67% of whether AI actually improves someone’s work. Individual mindset explains 32%.
Gartner’s 2025 research found only 26.7% of employees actually believe in their organisation’s culture. That was true before most companies had rolled AI out at any real scale.
Naval Ravikant has started calling AI a motorcycle for the mind, an upgrade on Steve Jobs’s old bicycle metaphor. His point is not really about speed. It is that a motorcycle can throw you if you do not know how to ride it.
These questions sit at the centre of Fit for Change, Across Differences, a closed-door gathering of senior HR and L&D leaders in Singapore this October.

Ask ten leaders what AI has changed about leadership and most will talk about tools. Faster drafting. Meeting summaries nobody has to type. An agent that drafts the first pass of a performance review. That is real, and it matters, but it is not the interesting question.

The interesting question is what happens to leadership itself once the work under it changes shape. And the early data on that is more specific than most of the AI commentary flying around right now.

The Tool Question Was Never the Real One

Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index ran a large analysis trying to answer a genuinely useful question: what actually determines whether AI use translates into better work, not just more AI use. They surveyed 20,000 employees across ten markets and modelled 29 separate factors against self-reported outcomes.

The result surprised even people inside Microsoft, according to the report. Organisational factors, culture, manager support, and talent practices, accounted for 67% of the effect. Individual factors, someone’s own AI skill and attitude, accounted for 32%. In other words, whether an employee personally likes or is good at using AI matters about half as much as whether their manager and their workplace actually support them in using it well.

That flips the usual framing on its head. Most corporate AI rollouts still look like training programmes: teach people prompts, run a workshop, measure adoption. The Microsoft data says the workshop was never the lever. The manager was.

Culture Was Already Fraying Before AI Arrived

Here is the part that should worry a CHRO more than any AI rollout timeline. Gartner’s 2025 research on organisational culture, run before most companies had deployed AI at scale, found only 26.7% of employees actually believed in their company’s stated culture. Just 26.4% understood it. Another 26.4% said they were actively acting on its behalf. Roughly a quarter, a quarter, a quarter, across the board.

Deloitte’s 2026 Global Human Capital Trends research then found 65% of organisations believe their culture needs to change significantly because of AI. So the honest picture looks like this: most companies were already running on a culture their own people did not fully believe in, and now they are asking that same fragile culture to absorb one of the biggest operational shifts most workplaces have seen in a generation. Deloitte also found 42% of workers say their employer rarely even checks what AI is doing to people, as opposed to what it is doing to output.

Gallup’s Q1 2026 CHRO Roundtable, a survey of 102 CHROs at global Fortune 500 companies, found something consistent with this. In workplaces that have rolled out AI, only 51% of employees say their culture has stayed the same over the past year. In workplaces without it, that number is 59%. AI does not sit neutrally on top of an existing culture. It moves it, and the direction it moves depends heavily on how the rollout was led, not just whether it happened.

What Naval Ravikant’s Motorcycle Metaphor Actually Gets Right

Steve Jobs famously called the personal computer a bicycle for the mind, a tool that made a fundamentally human capability, thinking, dramatically more efficient without replacing the rider. On his own podcast in early 2026, Naval Ravikant updated the line for the current moment: AI is not a bicycle anymore. It is a motorcycle.

People usually repeat that quote for the speed. The part worth sitting with is the risk. A bicycle is forgiving. You wobble, you learn, you rarely get hurt badly. A motorcycle amplifies your skill in both directions. A good rider goes faster and further than a bicycle could ever take them. A bad rider crashes harder.

Applied to leadership, this is close to what the Microsoft and Gartner data is describing from a different angle. AI amplifies whatever is already true about how a team works. A team with clear direction, psychological safety, and a manager who actually models good judgement will use AI to genuinely extend their capability. A team without those things will use AI to generate more output faster, with no one checking whether the output is actually right, or whether anyone still knows how to check.

On a separate 2025 episode, Ravikant made a related point about recruiting, quoting the investor Vinod Khosla: “the team you build is the company you build.” That line predates AI by years, but it has become more true, not less, now that so much of the actual production work can be delegated to a model. What is left for a human team to own is judgement, direction, and trust in each other. That is exactly the layer culture sits in.

The Singapore Angle Nobody’s Global Deck Accounts For

Most of this research comes out of the US and Europe, which is a real gap for anyone leading a team here. Singapore’s own economic story right now is a strange, specific version of the AI moment: Q1 2026 GDP growth came in strong, largely on the back of electronics exports riding the global AI investment wave, even as the Ministry of Trade and Industry kept its full year forecast cautious, citing Middle East tensions as a real drag on the outlook.

That is the Singapore condition in one paragraph. AI as genuine tailwind, geopolitics as genuine headwind, both hitting the same small, open economy at the same time. A leader here is not choosing whether to engage with AI. That decision was made for them by the export data. The actual leadership question is whether the team underneath them has the judgement, trust, and shared direction to make good calls while both forces are pulling at once.

This is one of the exact questions being worked through at Fit for Change, Across Differences, a closed-door gathering of senior HR and L&D leaders in Singapore on 16 October, co-hosted by Resilience Institute and Aperian. The session looks specifically at cultural agility and human-first leadership in an AI-driven world, the same gap the Microsoft and Gartner data both point to. It is invite-only with limited seats, RSVP by 30 September. Details are on the event page.

What This Actually Means for How You Lead

The temptation is to answer “what does AI change about leadership” with a list of new skills. Prompt literacy. AI fluency. Something with the word “agentic” in it. The data above suggests a less exciting, more useful answer.

AI does not change what good leadership looks like. It raises the cost of bad leadership. A manager who never built trust, never modelled sound judgement, and never made their team feel safe raising a concern was already a problem before AI arrived. Now that same manager is handing their team a motorcycle. The gap between a well led team and a poorly led one used to grow slowly. It is starting to grow fast.

Before your next AI rollout conversation, ask:

Are we investing more in individual AI training than in the manager behaviour that the Microsoft data says matters twice as much?
If a quarter of our people do not believe in our culture, what exactly are we asking AI to amplify?
Do our managers actually know how to check AI-assisted work, or are they just checking that it got done?

AI does not replace judgement. It removes the friction that used to slow bad judgement down. That is the actual leadership problem, and no amount of prompt training solves it.

20 Types of Workplace Culture, and What the Research Says Works

Four of the culture types below, clan, adhocracy, market, and hierarchy, come from Cameron and Quinn’s Competing Values Framework, one of the most studied models in organisational research.
A 2025 study using the framework’s assessment instrument found that hierarchy culture is often the dominant style in large organisations, even though clan culture, with its focus on people and belonging, is associated with stronger resilience.
Separate 2025 research found adhocracy culture has the strongest link to digital transformation capability among the four core types, ahead of clan, market, and hierarchy.
Gallup’s 2026 workplace report found global engagement fell to 20% in 2025, with the sharpest decline among managers, a reminder that culture is carried by daily leadership behaviour, not by a values poster.

Workplace culture gets described in a lot of grand language: the soul of an organisation, its DNA, the thing that eats strategy for breakfast. Most of that language is not wrong, exactly, but it is not especially useful either. What is useful is knowing where these culture types actually come from, what the current research says about which ones support resilience, and having a clear enough picture of your own culture to do something about it.

Where These Culture Types Actually Come From

Four of the categories below, clan, adhocracy, market, and hierarchy, are not marketing labels. They come from the Competing Values Framework (CVF), developed by Cameron and Quinn and built around two tensions every organisation navigates: flexibility versus control, and internal focus versus external focus. It remains one of the most extensively tested models in organisational culture research, with a validated assessment tool, the Organisational Culture Assessment Instrument, used across industries from healthcare to manufacturing.

The other types in this list are not part of that academic framework. They are practical, commonly used descriptions (performance-oriented, well-being, transparent, and so on) that organisations and consultants use to describe cultural emphasis. Both kinds are useful. It just helps to know which is which before you go looking for a study to back up a claim about your “aggressive culture.”

What Recent Research Says About Culture and Resilience

An exploratory study applying the CVF’s assessment instrument to public institutions found that hierarchy culture tends to be the dominant style in practice, even though employees consistently prefer, and organisations benefit more from, a clan culture oriented around unity and belonging. The researchers concluded that resilient cultures are specifically the ones that emphasise cohesion and mutual support, because that is what allows an organisation to absorb a shock and respond rather than fracture under it.

A separate 2025 study published in Information and Management examined all four CVF culture types against digital transformation capability and found adhocracy culture had the strongest positive relationship, followed by clan, then market, then hierarchy. The practical read for leaders is not “pick one culture type and commit forever.” It is that different cultural emphases pay off for different challenges, and a resilient organisation needs enough flexibility in its dominant culture to draw on adhocracy’s adaptability and clan’s cohesion when the moment calls for either.

This is not an abstract concern. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 report found global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, its lowest point since 2020, with the sharpest single year drop occurring among managers, the people most directly responsible for translating a stated culture into daily behaviour. Culture that exists only in a values document does not show up in that kind of data. Culture that is actually practised does.

Culture and Strategy Are Not Actually in Competition

The idea that “culture eats strategy for breakfast” gets repeated so often it has lost some of its meaning, but the underlying point holds up. Strategy sets the direction. Culture determines whether people actually follow it when no one is watching.

Deloitte’s Core Beliefs and Culture research found 94% of executives and 88% of employees believe a distinct workplace culture is important to business success, though only around 12% of executives believed their own organisation was actually driving the “right” culture, a gap worth sitting with. More recently, Deloitte’s 2024 workplace wellbeing research found 93% of executives and 88% of workers agree a company’s purpose should extend beyond shareholders to include people and society, and that organisations investing in what Deloitte calls human sustainability see stronger engagement, retention, and trust in leadership as a result. The pattern across both surveys is consistent: people already believe culture matters. The gap is in execution, not conviction.

Culture Is Practised, Not Mandated

You cannot mandate culture into existence with a mission statement or a slogan on a wall. It is built through consistently repeated behaviour, starting with leaders. As Gandhi put it, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” In an organisation, that means leaders modelling the values they want to see before anyone else adopts them, because employees calibrate to what leadership actually does, not what leadership says in a town hall.

Types of Workplace Culture

Most organisations are a blend of several of these. Missing one you recognise from your own workplace? Let us know.

Resilient Culture. Prioritises adaptability and the ability to recover from setbacks. Strong for quick recovery and sustained problem-solving, but can tip into complacency if people assume resilience will always carry them through without addressing root causes. Start by measuring your current resilience levels rather than assuming you know where you stand. This type tends to support and strengthen all the others on this list.

Clan Culture (Competing Values Framework). Resembles an extended family, built on collaboration, loyalty, and shared tradition. Strong for loyalty and a nurturing environment, weaker on incorporating outside ideas and can drift toward excessive consensus-seeking. Build it through genuine interpersonal investment and team-building, not forced fun.

Adhocracy Culture (Competing Values Framework). Encourages risk-taking, innovation, and entrepreneurial behaviour. Strong for agility and pioneering work, weaker on stability, and can tip into chaos without some structural anchor. The 2025 research above found this culture type has the strongest link to digital transformation capability of the four CVF types.

Market Culture (Competing Values Framework). Focused on results, competition, and the external environment. Strong for competitive edge and goal achievement, weaker on long-term thinking and can neglect employee wellbeing if left unchecked.

Hierarchy Culture (Competing Values Framework). Structured, with clear roles and defined procedures. Strong for stability, predictability, and efficiency, weaker on innovation and change readiness. The most common dominant style in large organisations, according to the research cited above, but not the one most associated with resilience.

Purpose Culture. Driven by a shared mission beyond profit. Strong for commitment and alignment, weaker on operational discipline if the mission is not tied to concrete metrics.

Learning Culture. Prioritises growth, knowledge-sharing, and adaptability. Strong for staying current, weaker on decisiveness if constant learning tips into analysis paralysis or change fatigue.

Innovative Culture. Emphasises creativity and new ideas. Strong for market leadership, weaker on focus if novelty is rewarded for its own sake.

Customer-centric Culture. Built around exceeding customer expectations. Strong for loyalty and satisfaction, weaker on internal operations or employee experience if the balance tips too far outward.

Team-first Culture. Centred on collaboration and team dynamics. Strong for cohesion, weaker on individual accountability and can slide into groupthink.

Aggressive Culture. Driven by competition and outperforming rivals. Strong for achieving significant milestones, weaker on sustainability and ethical guardrails need to be explicit and enforced, not assumed.

Performance-oriented Culture. Rewards based on measurable results. Strong for clarity and achievement, weaker if metrics crowd out process quality or ethical behaviour.

Safety-first Culture. Built around protocols and training. Strong for reducing incidents and building trust, weaker on speed, and can breed complacency if audits become routine rather than genuinely scrutinised.

Bureaucratic Culture. Rigid adherence to established policy. Strong for standardisation and compliance, weaker on innovation and change response.

Holacracy. A flatter system without traditional hierarchy, with clear but autonomous roles. Strong for flexibility and empowerment, weaker on accountability if role boundaries are not actively maintained.

Diversity and Inclusion Culture. Prioritises inclusiveness across backgrounds. Strong for wider perspectives and morale, weaker if initiatives stay surface-level rather than structural.

Sustainability and Green Culture. Built around eco-friendly practice. Strong for reputation and long-term thinking, weaker if upfront costs are not budgeted honestly, which invites greenwashing accusations.

Transparent Culture. Built on open communication and shared information. Strong for trust, weaker if information sharing outpaces people’s ability to process it usefully.

Global Culture. Prioritises multicultural operation and global perspective. Strong for reach and adaptability, weaker on complexity and requires genuine cultural sensitivity training, not a single onboarding slide.

Coaching Culture. Built on continuous feedback and mentoring. Strong for development and retention, weaker if it tips into over-management rather than genuine growth support.

Well-being Culture. Focused on holistic employee health, physical, mental, and emotional. Strong for productivity and retention, weaker if wellness initiatives become a substitute for addressing the operational causes of stress in the first place.

If you are a senior HR, L&D, or OD leader working through what a resilient, inclusive culture actually looks like across borders and functions, Resilience Institute and Aperian are co-hosting Fit for Change, Across Difference, a closed-door gathering of 40 to 45 senior leaders in Singapore on 16 October 2026. The session looks at cultural agility, cross-cultural psychological safety, and human-first leadership in an AI-driven world, the same questions this article is built around, worked through directly with peers. It is invite-only with limited seats, RSVP by 30 September 2026. Details are on the event page.

Cultivating the Culture You Want

Look at your own organisation honestly. Which of the types above actually describes it today, not which one you would like to claim in a recruitment deck? Then ask what specific, repeatable behaviours would move you toward the culture you actually want.

Before your next leadership offsite, ask:

Which culture type would we honestly assess ourselves as today, using a validated instrument rather than a gut feeling?
Where does our stated culture diverge from what our engagement or resilience data actually shows?
What is one behaviour our leadership team could model consistently, starting this month, that the culture we want actually requires?

Culture is not a slogan you choose. It is the pattern of behaviour your organisation actually rewards, and the research now gives leaders a real way to measure which pattern they have, rather than guessing from a values poster.

EQ Is Rising in Demand and Falling in Reality. Here’s the Data

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 places motivation and self-awareness, empathy and active listening, and resilience among the fastest-growing core skills through 2030.
A 2025 study tracking 28,000 adults across 166 countries found global EQ scores fell by 5.79% between 2019 and 2024, with the sharpest declines in motivation and optimism.
A 2025 meta-analysis of 34 studies and 8,515 participants found a strong link between emotional intelligence and resilience (r = .523), and separate research shows EQ competencies can be measurably improved through training.
Singapore’s SkillsFuture agenda has already flagged social and emotional competencies as part of its Care economy skills pillar, giving employers a national policy hook, and funding support, for measuring and building this capability.

Scroll LinkedIn for five minutes and you will find three different posts calling emotional intelligence the leadership skill of the future. It is easy to assume this is recycled hype, the same Daniel Goleman talking points dressed up for a new year. It is not. The data behind the claim has actually changed, and not in the direction most people expect.

The skill is becoming more valuable at the same time it appears to be declining. That combination is the real story, and it is a much stronger reason to measure emotional intelligence properly than any billboard slogan ever was.

The Skill Getting More Important, and Somehow Getting Weaker

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, based on a survey of more than 1,000 large employers representing over 14 million workers, found that 39% of core job skills are expected to change by 2030. Within that shift, motivation and self-awareness, empathy and active listening, and resilience, flexibility, and agility all rank among the fastest-rising core skills, alongside creative thinking. As AI takes over more analytical and administrative work, employers are explicit that the human-centred skills sitting underneath emotional intelligence are what they need more of, not less.

At the same time, a 2025 study published in Frontiers in Psychology, using the validated Six Seconds Emotional Intelligence Assessment across a stratified sample of 28,000 adults in 166 countries, found that global EQ scores fell by 5.79% between 2019 and 2024. The researchers call this an “emotional recession.” The steepest declines were in intrinsic motivation, optimism, and a sense of pursuing meaningful goals, exactly the competencies tied most closely to workplace resilience and retention. Demand for the skill is rising while the underlying capability appears to be eroding. That gap does not close itself.

What the Research Actually Shows About EQ and Performance

The link between emotional intelligence and resilience is not a marketing claim. A 2025 multilevel meta-analysis covering 34 studies and 8,515 participants, published in a peer-reviewed journal, found a strong positive correlation between emotional intelligence and resilience (r = .523), with the relationship stronger among practising professionals than among students. A separate 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis found that structured emotional intelligence training produced measurable, sustained improvements in emotional regulation and resilience, which matters because it means this is a trainable capability, not a fixed trait people either have or do not.

That combination, a strong evidenced link to resilience and evidence that training moves the needle, is the actual case for measuring emotional intelligence at work. It has nothing to do with which tech CEO name-drops Goleman in an interview.

5.79%

the average decline in global EQ scores from 2019 to 2024, tracked across 28,000 adults in 166 countries

How to Actually Measure It

Once you accept that EQ needs measuring, not just discussing, the options fall into a few categories.

360 competency assessments compare a self-rating against feedback from peers, direct reports, and managers. Goleman’s own Emotional and Social Competence Index (ESCI) works this way, scoring self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. It requires a certified practitioner to administer and interpret, and it is designed purely for individual development rather than organisational benchmarking.

Validated psychometric instruments, such as the Six Seconds Emotional Intelligence Assessment used in the 2025 emotional recession study, measure EQ as a set of learnable competencies with published reliability and validity data, and they can be aggregated to show trends across a whole organisation or region, not just one person’s development plan.

Situational judgment tests, such as the MacCann and Roberts Situational Test of Emotional Understanding and Situational Test of Emotion Management, present realistic scenarios and ask respondents to identify the most effective emotional response. These treat EQ as a cognitive ability rather than a personality trait, which some organisations prefer for hiring and screening decisions.

The Resilience Assessment folds emotional intelligence into a wider resilience framework rather than measuring it in isolation. Its “Engage Emotion” category and related factors sit alongside indicators for withdrawal and vulnerability, so a leader can see how a person’s emotional skills connect to their actual risk of burnout and their overall performance capacity, not just their self-reported EQ score in a vacuum.

Singapore’s Skills Agenda Already Points This Direction

SkillsFuture Singapore’s Skills Demand for the Future Economy work has identified the Care economy, alongside Green and Digital, as one of the three growth pillars for national workforce planning, with wellbeing and social-emotional capability explicitly named within it. That gives Singapore employers something most global commentary on this topic misses: a live national policy framework, and associated funding support, for building exactly the competencies this article is about, rather than treating emotional intelligence training as a discretionary line item competing against everything else in the L&D budget.

Decide whether you are measuring for development or for benchmarking. A 360 tool like the ESCI is built for individual coaching. A psychometric instrument with organisational norms is built for tracking a whole team or company over time. Using the wrong one for your goal wastes the exercise.

Ask for the reliability and validity evidence before you buy. Given how many tools now claim to measure EQ, insist on seeing the psychometric documentation, not just a features list or a client logo wall.

Pair the assessment with training, not just a report. Measurement without a development pathway produces a static score. The 2024 meta-analysis found training is what actually shifts emotional regulation and resilience over time.

Re-test on a set schedule. Given the documented global decline in EQ scores, a one-off assessment tells you where a team stood on a single day. A repeat measurement tells you whether the trend in your organisation is moving with the global decline or against it.

Before your next leadership development conversation, ask:

When did we last measure emotional intelligence with a validated instrument, rather than assume we know where our leaders stand?
If global EQ scores are falling, do we actually know whether ours are holding steady?
Does our current EQ or resilience data connect to a training plan, or does it sit in a report nobody revisits?

Emotional intelligence did not become important because a book sold well in 1995. It is important now because the research shows it drives resilience, the World Economic Forum ranks it among the skills employers need most through 2030, and the same research shows it is quietly getting weaker. Organisations that measure it will know which side of that gap they are on. The ones that do not will find out the hard way.

Global Engagement Hit a New Low in 2026: What Gallup’s Data Means for Resilience

Global engagement was 23% in Gallup’s 2024 report. It’s now 20%, the lowest level since 2020, and the second straight year of decline, with no region worldwide bucking the trend.
The sharpest new finding: manager engagement specifically has collapsed from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025, wiping out what Gallup calls managers’ historical “engagement premium” over the people they lead.
Disengagement now costs the global economy an estimated $10 trillion a year, roughly 9% of global GDP, and best-practice organisations still achieve 79% manager engagement, nearly four times the global average, proof this is genuinely fixable, not inevitable.

Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report has become one of the most closely watched annual snapshots of how work is actually going for people, and the trend line across its last three editions tells a genuinely sobering story. In 2024, global engagement stood at 23%. The 2026 report, published in April 2026 and covering 2025 data, puts it at 20%, the lowest level Gallup has recorded since 2020, and the second consecutive year of decline. Every region measured saw engagement fall or stay flat. None improved.

Resilience Institute offers a holistic approach to exactly the pattern this data describes, sustainable human performance and wellbeing, not a quick fix. This piece looks at what’s actually changed between the 2024 and 2026 reports, and what the sharpest new finding means for how resilience training should actually be applied.

Then and Now: What Actually Changed

The headline numbers moved in a consistent, worsening direction across every recent edition of the report. Global engagement: 23% (2024 report) → 21% (2025 report) → 20% (2026 report), a genuine, sustained decline rather than a single bad year. Daily stress has stayed stubbornly high across the same period, 41% in the 2024 and 2025 reports, 40% in the 2026 report, essentially flat and still well above pre-pandemic levels. One figure did move in the right direction: global wellbeing (Gallup’s “thriving” measure) rose slightly to 34% in the 2026 report, its first improvement in three years, though still meaning fewer than one in three people worldwide report genuinely thriving in their lives overall.

The economic cost has grown alongside the decline. The 2026 report puts the cost of low engagement at roughly $10 trillion in lost productivity, around 9% of global GDP, a meaningfully larger figure than what earlier reports cited.

The Real Story: Managers Are the Ones Disengaging Now

Here’s what the 2024 report couldn’t yet show, and what makes the 2026 report genuinely different rather than just a worse version of the same story: manager engagement specifically has collapsed. It’s fallen from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025, a 9-point drop, with the steepest single-year fall, from 27% to 22%, landing between 2024 and 2025 alone. Individual contributor engagement, by contrast, has stayed relatively flat across the same period. Managers used to hold a real “engagement premium” over the people they led. Gallup’s own language is direct: that premium has essentially vanished, and managers are now barely more engaged than their own teams.

This matters enormously given a separate, consistent Gallup finding: managers account for up to 70% of the variance in team-level engagement. When the people responsible for driving engagement are themselves disengaging fastest, the effect ripples downward directly. Gallup’s own framing for 2026 is blunt: the manager crisis is now the workforce crisis, not a side issue sitting next to it.

There’s a genuinely hopeful data point buried in the same report worth holding onto: best-practice organisations still achieve 79% manager engagement, nearly four times the global average. This isn’t an inevitable, structural decline. It’s a solvable problem that most organisations simply haven’t solved yet.

Beyond Surface-Level Solutions

Plenty of organisations have addressed stress with surface-level fixes, wellness apps, generic stress management sessions, and these tend to fail at creating meaningful, lasting change. A more holistic approach, one incorporating emotional regulation, physical vitality, and mental clarity together, goes beyond basic wellness toward genuinely sustainable behavioural shift.

Real resilience requires a systems-level view: the interplay between work, life, and individual capacity, not any one lever in isolation. That’s what makes an intervention resonate with what employees actually need, rather than another well-intentioned programme that doesn’t move the underlying numbers.

Measuring What Engagement Surveys Miss

Gallup’s engagement data reveals the scale of the problem clearly. What it doesn’t reveal is the individual mechanics underneath it. Resilience Institute’s Resilience Assessment offers a deeper, more granular view, measuring specific factors like emotional stability, focus, and vitality that often stay hidden inside a traditional engagement survey. This data-driven layer lets organisations target interventions precisely: highlighting, for instance, that a specific team is struggling with sustained energy rather than motivation broadly, information a standard engagement score alone won’t surface.

Addressing Loneliness Directly

Loneliness remains a genuine, persistent thread across every recent edition of Gallup’s report, particularly among remote and younger workers, and it’s directly linked to declining mental health, disengagement, and lower productivity. Human connection is a genuine cornerstone of resilience, and programmes built to strengthen social bonds within teams, guided reflection, small group discussion, structured check-ins, even in virtual settings, measurably help counter the isolation the data keeps flagging year after year.

What This Means for Building Resilient Leadership

Invest in Managers Specifically, Not Just Employees Broadly

Given managers are now the fastest-disengaging group in the entire dataset, resilience investment aimed only at individual contributors misses the actual point of leverage. Managers need real support for their own resilience before they can genuinely model or sustain it for a team.

Build Regular Feedback and Clear Expectations

Practices like consistent feedback, clearly set expectations, and genuinely modelled emotional intelligence help managers create an environment that naturally reduces stress rather than compounding it.

Prioritise Organisation-Level Change, Not Just Individual Coping

Gallup’s own findings consistently favour organisation-level initiatives, changes in management practice, better resource allocation, over individual stress-management interventions alone. Resilient leaders create the conditions; individual coping skills matter more once those conditions are actually in place.

Moving From Surviving to Thriving

Gallup’s data consistently shows engaged employees are more likely to thrive across their whole life, not just at work, and building genuine resilience means helping people move past survival mode, where stress and overwhelm dominate, toward a state where they can find real meaning, purpose, and satisfaction in their role. A thriving workforce isn’t just more pleasant to manage. It’s measurably more productive, innovative, and adaptive, genuine advantages as organisations navigate a working environment that shows no sign of settling down.

The data didn’t just get worse between 2024 and 2026. It got more specific. The manager crisis is the workforce crisis, and that’s exactly where resilience investment needs to go first.

Why Hours in a Forest Can Feel Timeless? And What are the Proven Benefits?

In 2008, immunologist Dr. Qing Li at Nippon Medical School sent a group of Tokyo office workers into the forest for three days. He drew their blood before the trip and again after. What he found reshaped how scientists think about

Why the highest performers work in 90-minute cycles and take recovery seriously.

Psychologists Robert Yerkes and John Dodson identified it in 1908, and it has held up for over a century. It looks like an inverted U. On the left side, low pressure produces low output. As pressure increases, performance rises.