Transformation is no longer something organisations are preparing for. It is something they are living through, across strategy, structure, technology and culture at the same time.
Our 2026 Transformational Leadership research shows that nearly nine in ten senior leaders expect the rate and scale of transformation to continue increasing over the next five years. As that pace accelerates, the challenge facing organisations is not only whether they can define the right transformation strategy, but whether their leaders have the skills required to deliver it.
The research highlights a clear shift in the leadership capabilities organisations believe they will need most. Adaptability, digital understanding and decision-making rise significantly in importance, while more traditional leadership models appear increasingly misaligned with the reality leaders are facing.
To understand how these skill requirements are playing out in practice, and where the gaps are most keenly felt, we spoke with three senior HR leaders working at the sharp edge of transformation: Kirsten Lord, Chief People and Culture Officer at Corinthia Hotels Limited; Diane Christensen, Chief People Officer at Ricardo; and Ritu Jain, Senior Vice President of People at Carbon Clean.
Together, their insights add depth and challenge to our research findings, revealing where leadership skill gaps are most visible, which capabilities matter most in practice, and how organisations are attempting to respond under real-world constraints.
Our transformational leadership research places digital understanding and adaptability at the top of the future skills agenda. HR leaders broadly agree with this assessment, but the interviews suggest that the most significant gaps sit beneath the technical conversation.
Across all three conversations, a consistent theme emerged. Organisations continue to promote leaders for technical or functional expertise, while underinvesting in their ability to lead people through sustained change. This becomes most visible during transformation, when leaders are required to communicate direction without certainty, maintain trust without complete information, and manage the emotional impact of change on others.
As Kirsten explained, the issue is not a lack of intent or capability, but a structural mismatch between how leaders are selected and what transformation now demands.
“We still haven’t cracked the fundamental issue, which is the quality of people leadership. We promote people because they are technically good, then expect them to lead others through change without really equipping them to do that.”
In more stable environments, this gap can remain hidden. In periods of continuous disruption, it becomes impossible to ignore. Leaders who have built credibility through expertise and control are now being asked to operate with influence, judgement and emotional intelligence instead.
Our research reinforces this tension. While technical and digital capabilities are rising in importance, it is the human skills – communication, decision-making under pressure and the ability to take people with you – that often determine whether transformation succeeds or stalls.
This does not reduce the importance of digital capability. Instead, it clarifies the kind of leadership required to apply it effectively.
Adaptability emerges in our leadership research as the most in-demand leadership capability over the next five years, with a clear and sustained increase year on year. The interviews reinforce this finding, while also reframing what adaptability now looks like in practice.
It is no longer about responding well to a defined change programme. Instead, leaders are operating in a permanently shifting environment, expected to pivot, recalibrate and re-prioritise repeatedly, often without the psychological safety of knowing when change will stabilise. Kirsten described the cumulative toll this takes on leaders.
“There isn’t a one-and-done change anymore. It just keeps rolling, and leaders have to keep finding the energy to explain, reassure and re-engage people.”
This sustained demand has implications that are rarely acknowledged in leadership role design or development. Many leadership frameworks still assume periods of intensity followed by resolution. In reality, leaders are operating in an environment where ambiguity is ongoing and certainty is short-lived.
Diane added that adaptability is also about stretching beyond one’s comfort zone:
“Leaders need opportunities to work across areas, gain diverse perspectives, and stretch beyond their comfort zones. That’s how they learn to navigate complexity and drive transformation.”
This is where resilience becomes a critical companion skill. Not resilience as ‘endurance’ or ‘heroic effort’, but resilience as the ability to recover, reflect and continue making sound judgements under pressure. Across the interviews, there was shared concern that organisations continue to reward pace and decisiveness over reflection and recalibration, reinforcing behaviours that are increasingly unsustainable.
Our research identifies digital understanding as a foundational leadership capability rather than a specialist or technical one. The interviews reinforce this shift, while also exposing where confidence and capability still lag behind awareness.
Ritu described a growing gap between leaders’ recognition of AI’s importance and their confidence in engaging with it meaningfully.
“People don’t know what they don’t know. AI has moved from being a peripheral innovation to something that shapes how organisations operate, and leaders are still catching up.”
Importantly, none of the HR leaders suggested that leaders need to become technical experts. Instead, they pointed to digital fluency as the essential skill. Diane observed, “it’s no longer enough to know the theory; you have to understand how digital tools can reshape the workforce and how people engage with them.” Leaders need to understand where AI can genuinely add value, where human judgement must take precedence, and how to ask the right questions of their teams and advisors.
Diane highlighted that this becomes particularly risky when ethical considerations are treated as technical issues rather than leadership responsibilities.
“Bias, privacy and governance are not just technical issues. They are cultural and reputational issues, and leaders have to own them.”
AI also challenges leaders more personally. It disrupts traditional notions of authority and expertise, requiring leaders to operate beyond familiar ground and without the comfort of mastery. As Ritu noted:
“AI pushes leaders out of their comfort zone. It tests their judgement, their ethics and their willingness to learn in public.”
For HR, this has clear implications. Sitting closest to capability, culture and workforce impact, HR is increasingly involved in how digital skills are developed and governed across organisations.
One of the more revealing findings in our research is that HR leaders ranked collaboration more highly than other functional leaders. The interviews help explain why. As Ritu reflected:
“Collaboration is like the glue that holds everything together… leaders who collaborate effectively can align teams, reduce resistance, and accelerate adoption during transformation.”
Across the three conversations, collaboration emerged as a useful indicator of how effectively organisations were set up to deliver change. Where leaders continued to operate in silos, transformation efforts struggled to gain traction, regardless of how well designed they were. As Kirsten put it:
“When leaders are operating with tunnel vision, it becomes very difficult to lead enterprise-wide change.”
In practice, collaboration is not a soft skill or cultural nice-to-have. It is a strategic enabler that supports adaptability, innovation and resilience. It also underpins psychological safety and trust, which HR leaders know are critical to engagement and retention, even if they are harder to quantify.
This helps explain why HR’s emphasis on collaboration is less about consensus and more about execution. Without it, many of the other leadership skills highlighted in our research become significantly harder to apply. Collaboration, therefore, enables transformation by aligning people, functions and priorities.
The interviews make it clear that HR leaders are not passive observers of these challenges. In each conversation, there are examples of deliberate efforts to strengthen leadership capability, even in constrained circumstances.
Rather than launching large-scale programmes, the focus has often been on practical interventions. Kirsten, Diane and Ritu all described renewed attention on everyday leadership behaviours, particularly the quality of conversations between managers and their teams. Helping leaders communicate more openly, hold uncertainty with confidence and build trust when answers are incomplete was seen as a critical capability shift.
Alongside this, there was clear recognition of the role external expertise can play in accelerating capability at pace. Our research shows that almost three-quarters of organisations are planning to turn to agencies and interim talent to meet their needs and deliver growth projects over the next five years, up from 60% in 2024. This reflects a growing understanding that, in fast-moving environments, organisations cannot always build every capability internally quickly enough.
Both Kirsten and Diane reflected on how interim or specialist support can help leaders see new ways of working more quickly.
“Sometimes it’s easier to demonstrate what good looks like than to describe it. Bringing expertise in can shift thinking very quickly.”
At the same time, these efforts sit within real limits. Budget pressure, change fatigue and competing priorities mean leadership development often struggles for attention, even as the cost of inaction increases. HR leaders are acutely aware of this tension, balancing immediate operational demands against longer-term capability risk.
Taken together, our transformational leadership research and the perspectives of Kirsten, Diane and Ritu point to a clear conclusion. Strategy and technology remain essential to transformation, but leadership skills are becoming an increasingly important contributor to whether change is delivered and sustained in practice.
Leaders who are best placed to succeed are those able to operate without certainty, lead people through sustained change and balance digital fluency with human judgement. These capabilities are not new, but they are being tested and relied upon far more heavily than before.
HR leaders are increasingly being asked to enable this shift, often without a formal mandate or additional capacity. In doing so, HR is playing a central role in one of the most significant leadership transitions organisations have faced in recent decades.
As Kirsten put it, “you don’t need to have all the answers, but you need to create the conditions for people to thrive.”
The pace of change shows no sign of slowing. What will determine success is not whether organisations adopt the right tools or frameworks, but whether their leaders have the skills to carry people with them through uncertainty, complexity and continuous reinvention.
BIE’s People and Culture Practice is built on long-term relationships and a deep understanding of the strategic people agenda. We work in close partnership with clients to deliver interim solutions and executive search, connecting organisations with commercially minded HR leaders who can deliver strategy, add senior-level value and lead through change.
If you are navigating transformation or considering your next leadership move, we would welcome the conversation.
