Leadership qualities and responsibilities are never static. They can change naturally over time and as an organization develops. External pressures also influence leadership expectations. Right now, the business buzz is about artificial intelligence, but tomorrow it might be something else.
We asked members of the Fast Company Impact Council what trend they see reshaping leadership today. Below, 31 of them share the trends and pressures influencing how leaders must lead, in both style and substance.
1. THE PIE, NOT THE PYRAMID
Leadership is moving from hierarchy to distributed ownership. We view our organization as a pie, not a pyramid: Team members bring distinct expertise, but everyone links to a shared center with a real voice. My role isn’t command-and-control. It’s providing clarity around our values and direction, then trusting those closest to the work to challenge assumptions and execute. Great ideas should emerge from any slice. — Susan Watts, SPACECRAFT
2. TRUST CREATION
Because the world is changing so quickly, leadership is increasingly about building trusted relationships that allow teams to navigate uncertainty together. You have to listen for signals, connect the dots, and create enough trust and energy for people to test, learn, and challenge assumptions. The leader’s job isn’t to have all the answers—it’s to bring people along as you find them. — Josh Rosenberg, Day One Agency
3. WILLINGNESS TO ADAPT TO AI TECHNOLOGY
Artificial intelligence is becoming part of how every business operates, even if the technology hasn’t been in your daily leadership until now. We’re long past debating whether AI is good or bad. It’s here, and leaders need to understand what it changes in their industry, their team, and workflows. You don’t need to be the person using every new tool, but you do need an in-depth point of view and a willingness to adapt as the technology evolves. — Erik Herrström, STUDIO HERRSTRÖM
4. THE NEED TO STAY CLOSER TO WORKFLOW
One of the biggest trends reshaping leadership is the need for executives to stay closer to how work gets done. Too many leaders are forming their artificial intelligence strategies based on what they see in the market without understanding how work happens today or where processes create friction that will be exposed as the pace accelerates. Leaders need to be tuned in to their teams and understand how work moves from one person to the next, including the informal steps that keep it moving. For an organization to commit to AI transformation, leaders need firsthand insight into where it can make a meaningful difference and where human judgment still matters. — Thomas Scott, Wrike
5. THE TRIPLE BOTTOM LINE
There is a growing awareness and need for leadership that delivers on the triple bottom line: people, planet, and prosperity. These leaders are building organizations where impact is baked into the core systems of the business, from strategy and operations to incentives and measures of success, rather than siloed in a sustainability or superficial marketing function. As we look to the future, these leaders and organizations are the ones we should be celebrating and amplifying: those proving that impact and prosperity can be mutually reinforcing, not competing priorities. — Bo Zhao, Baby Gear Group
6. THE NEED TO DEVELOP JUDGMENT AT SPEED
The next leadership frontier is all about creating conditions where teams absorb change and adapt faster than the environment shifts. AI has democratized intelligence, but many leaders treat this as a technology problem. The real challenge is organizational. We need to develop judgment at speed without eroding trust. The leaders who win are asking: How do we build teams where humans and AI collaborate? That requires redesigning the work first, then reimagining the workforce, and finally, making sure the workbench is ready: the right platform, data, and agents. — Jacqui Canney, ServiceNow
7. THE SIXTH JOB OF A MANAGER
For decades, a manager’s job came down to five things: setting goals, aligning work, coaching people, clearing obstacles, and judging results. I believe artificial intelligence adds a sixth—mapping and improving the workflows a team executes. I only understood this by living it, recently spending a month teaching myself to code again for the first time since I left computer science for a business degree in 1987, building an application by routing tasks across several AI models. AI doesn’t eliminate managers. It changes what we manage. The leaders who win in this era will design, govern, and continuously improve the workflows in which people and AI work together. — Michael Weening, Calix
8. A RETURN TO DIRECT OWNERSHIP
For years, the prevailing wisdom was to outsource anything that wasn’t core. But when technology is moving this quickly, leaders have to rethink what “core” really means. If a supplier can’t move at your speed, that dependency becomes a risk. For us, that meant owning our fabs rather than relying on someone else’s capacity. The broader lesson is simple: Know what is critical to your success and be willing to own it. — Yuping Huang, Quantum Computing Inc.
9. LEADERS AS CONNECTORS
The leaders I see winning are becoming connectors, not just experts. They know enough about technology, finance, culture, and the customer to see relationships other people miss, and they build teams the same way. My advice is to stop optimizing your career for one perfect ladder. Go collect experiences that make you dangerous across disciplines. — Vineet Mehra, Chime
10. CLEAR ARTICULATION OF JUDGMENT CALLS
The job is shifting from making decisions to clearly articulating the judgment behind them. Leaders have always set strategy and context, but historically that context traveled through meetings, decks, and people, losing something along the way. Now, with artificial intelligence, executives embed their thinking directly into the tools their teams and agents use, allowing context to be reused and reinforced rather than diluted. For leadership, this requires executives to use these tools themselves, spend more time setting context, and be explicit about what good looks like. AI hasn’t made leaders less necessary. It has made vague leadership much harder to hide. — Blake Brannon, OneTrust
11. ROOM FOR AI EXPERIMENTATION
Artificial intelligence is reshaping leadership because some of the most meaningful changes in how we work may not come from the top down. As employees experiment with AI in day-to-day work, they’re often the first to see where a process can be improved, a step can be eliminated, or a problem can be solved differently. Leaders need to create room for that experimentation and, just as importantly, pay attention to what it teaches us. The cost of skipping that learning curve can lead to inefficient usage and token overages. The opportunity isn’t to get everyone using AI. It’s to identify what is working and use those lessons to rethink how the organization operates. — Darren Person, Cengage
12. A CLEAR UNDERSTANDING OF THE “WHY”
Leading organizations today comes with significant challenges. Effective leaders must motivate people, foster meaningful engagement, and create a shared sense of purpose. In an environment defined by constant change and disruption, they must inspire teams to act with urgency, not through pressure, but through a clear understanding of the opportunities and challenges ahead. Organizations united around a compelling “why” move faster, adapt better, and achieve stronger results. — Chris K Bailey, Bailey Brand Consulting
13. THE SPEED OF ADAPTATION
A trend reshaping leadership more than ever is the speed of adaptation. When the capabilities that define the frontier one quarter become commonplace the next, staying ahead stops being something you can delegate and becomes the job itself. The best leaders treat their tools and methods as living experiments, adopting and re-learning faster than feels comfortable. They model that behavior rather than sponsor it from a distance. As generative artificial intelligence puts the power to build in nearly anyone’s hands, a leader’s value moves upstream. They frame the right problems and exercise judgment about what’s worth building. The fastest learners will win. — Adam L’Italien, Liberty Mutual Insurance
14. WILLINGNESS TO BE A BEGINNER AGAIN
Leaders have traditionally earned authority through experience, but experience can become a ceiling when it dictates everything you are willing to try. I believe the next generation of leadership will be defined by people who can run a business and still be students of what it could become. Experiment yourself. Learn from someone you hired. Let an idea change your mind. When your team sees you doing that, they understand they have permission to challenge things, too. You cannot ask people to invent the future while insisting on being the person who already knows it. — Christian Giordano, Mancini Duffy
15. CAST LEADERS FROM VALUES
The next great shift in leadership is “casting from values”. That means choosing leaders not only for what they can do, but what they believe and embody. The world is starving for authenticity—not only from brands, but from leaders. The leaders who will shape the future have a deep, genuine connection to a brand’s core values and champion them. When organizations cast from values, leadership becomes more than a role. It becomes a powerful alignment between who a leader is, what a brand stands for, and how both show up in the world. Get that alignment right and leadership stops being a short-term appointment, and instead becomes a lasting partnership. — David Angelo, David&Goliath
16. HOW NEW TECHNOLOGY AND PEOPLE ARE POSITIONED
The trend I’m watching closest is how leaders choose to position new technology, particularly artificial intelligence, relative to their people. It’s easy to adopt these tools purely as an efficiency play, and there’s real value in that, but the trend that actually matters is treating technology as something that clears space for your professionals rather than closes in on them. — Mike Sewell, Gresham Smith
17. THE MOVE TO EMPOWER PEOPLE TO LEAD
The CEO as a singular authority can be effective at moving fast in certain conditions, but there’s a better approach for an organization that must be agile in a rapidly shifting environment. When we empower people closest to the work to lead, we amplify return on investment in our people and our culture. In doing so, not only do we see better results, we move faster. This is because when we effectively communicate and our people understand the “why,” it allows us to remove the bottleneck and trust their decisions. — Heath May, HKS
18. RECOGNITION OF WHAT SHOULDN’T CHANGE
The most important trend in leadership is recognizing what should not change. Leaders are responsible for moving an organization forward, even as the conditions around it become complex, uncertain, or disruptive. Strategies, priorities, and tactics must adapt to the environment. Leadership principles do not. Integrity, accountability, judgment, courage, and respect for people are not situational; they are foundational. The real test of leadership is the ability to preserve clarity, make decisions, and keep people aligned and committed when the path forward is uncertain. The environment changes. The methods change. The principles do not. — Andrea Montecchi, Oliver Wight Americas
19. POLITICS AS AN OPERATING CONDITION
The trend reshaping leadership isn’t inside the company. While flashpoints like hybrid work and flatter teams point inward, the larger shift is outside the building: Politics and governance have become the least predictable variable in every decision matrix. “We stay out of politics” has stopped being a strategy, because rules that held for decades now change in a news cycle. Today’s leaders have to treat politics as an operating condition, priced like interest rates and managed like supply chains—in statehouses and county commissions, not just Washington. — Howard Franklin, Ohio River South
20. THE ABILITY TO EFFECTIVELY HARNESS AI
Leadership in the time of artificial intelligence will be judged by the leader’s ability to effectively harness AI not for AI’s sake, but to drive value across every facet of the business—product, brand, business operations, and customer experience. Success will now be gauged by how cleanly the organization’s management framework evolves into one that includes AI agents, i.e., people, process, technology, and agents. — Karthik Ganesh, OnMed
21. TRADE FALSE CONFIDENCE FOR REAL TRANSPARENCY
I think leaders are being asked to trade false confidence for real transparency, to say “here’s what we’re still figuring out” without losing credibility. That shift matters most right now around emerging technology and workforce change, where certainty is often an illusion. Leaders who build trust today are the ones willing to be honest about uncertainty. That honesty, more than any five-year plan, is what earns lasting followership. — Jean Accius, CHC: Creating Healthier Communities
22. CONTINUOUS LEARNING
The longer I lead my company, the more I realize that yesterday’s expertise can become tomorrow’s blind spot. As the company evolved, I’ve had to study new industries and consumer behaviors, become a certified health coach and Pilates instructor to understand our users, and personally test our products. Now I’m learning how artificial intelligence is changing how we build products and work as a team. That’s why I see continuous learning reshaping leadership: CEOs need to stay curious enough to question what already works. Experience gives you pattern recognition, but curiosity keeps those patterns from becoming limitations. — Victoria Repa, BetterMe
23. TOWARD CAPACITY BUILDING
Leadership is moving away from command authority and toward capacity building. The leaders earning trust right now aren’t the ones issuing the most directives. They’re the ones investing in the people closest to the work. In education, that means treating teachers as the decision-makers who determine whether a strategy reaches a student, not as staff who execute someone else’s plan. I’ve watched organizations mandate change for years with little to show for it, then watched capacity investment in frontline educators produce results in a fraction of the time. — Kellie Lauth, MindSpark
24. RENEWED FOCUS ON HUMAN JUDGMENT
The leadership trend I see gaining importance is a renewed focus on human judgment, critical thinking, and accountability—not simply greater reliance on artificial intelligence. In many organizations, I am seeing a “prompt-and-send” culture, where people use AI-generated material without properly reviewing, understanding, or validating it. The consequences become clear later, especially in presentations or practical implementation, when they cannot explain the subject or make informed decisions. Leaders need to strengthen the quality of human thinking and use AI as a tool to support, not as a substitute for knowledge, responsibility, or expertise. — Manuel Freire-Garabal, Gioya Health Education Institution
25. THE INDIVIDUAL CONTRIBUTOR WHO MANAGES AGENTS
Leadership advancement used to equate with managing bigger teams. Now, with artificial intelligence expanding the tasks that individuals can accomplish, really high-performing team members may not follow a traditional people-manager path at all. Instead, they might manage a team of agents and contribute a lot as individual contributors. With this trend, organizations will need to rethink how they recognize impact and build career paths internally for those strong individual contributors. — Tigran Sloyan, CodeSignal
26. THE NEED FOR ENGAGING AND DECISIVE LEADERSHIP
I suspect engaging and decisive leadership will be more important than ever in the age of artificial intelligence. We can all come up with documents, graphs, tables, and code much faster than two years ago. That is great. But while AI can generate answers all day long (quite literally), it does not engage human teams to act, nor can (or should) it make tough decisions for us. I believe decisive leaders who motivate and engage teams through co-creation—giving humans a sense of ownership, belonging, control, and agency—will be more effective at making actual business progress in the age of AI. — Hanneke Faber, Logitech
27. TRANSPARENCY
I hear repeatedly how valued it is to lead with transparency. The world is frequently chaotic, unclear and unsettling as a result. I think it matters that people walk into a room and know where they stand, and what’s happening, without obfuscation or conceit. There’s a lot of that happening elsewhere, so I feel like this is a moment for authentic and honest leaders to make work a place where it isn’t. — Helen Andrews, Johannes Leonardo
28. CLARITY WITHOUT PRETENDING TO HAVE CERTAINTY
Leading through uncertainty has become a permanent part of the job rather than an occasional demand. COVID-19 accelerated a fundamental rethink of work, from people reassessing the role it plays in their lives to the rise of hybrid environments. It also forced organizations to make consequential decisions with incomplete information. Those pressures have only continued alongside economic volatility, geopolitical uncertainty, and rapid technological change. The best leaders create clarity without pretending to have certainty. They give people a clear sense of direction while staying transparent and adaptable as circumstances shift. — Patrick Frend, Delve
29. EVERYONE IS BECOMING A MANAGER
The defining trend is that everyone is becoming a manager. With the shift toward agentic artificial intelligence, professionals are now managing armies of digital agents heading off to execute tasks and write code. But technology cannot run on autopilot. Humans must stay in the loop. As AI automates routine execution, what remains are high-value choices that demand human judgment, empathy, discernment, and ethics. Leaders must coach their teams not just to do the work, but to direct, evaluate, and take full accountability for agent outputs. Ultimately, AI doesn’t eliminate the need for human judgment; it significantly raises the bar for it. — Tony Grimminck, Scribd, Inc.
30. ADAPTABILITY
Adaptability keeps rising to the top for me recently. With so much change happening globally, there’s less value in walking into every room with all the answers and more value in listening, staying curious, and being willing to adjust as circumstances evolve. Especially in a global industry like cotton, the strongest leaders bring together different perspectives, create space for others’ expertise, and know when to change course. — Liz Hershfield, COTTON USA
31. VULNERABLE LEADERSHIP
The old school top-down, always-be-right style of leadership doesn’t cut it anymore. Showing your humanity, listening deeply, and steering the ship from a place of humility, kindness, and honesty is key. — Phillip Haid, Public Inc.
