The publications
that matter now.

Harvard Business Impact's annual global study into leadership development finds organisations prioritising the adoption of AI-based talent management and internal mobility, with respondents expecting leaders to make far greater use of AI in strategic decision making during 2026. Scalability was named the most important attribute when selecting a leadership development programme, and a large share of organisations still buy their leadership development externally.

The picture that emerges is of a leadership layer being asked to absorb new tools and new judgement at speed, while the organisations around them look for programmes that can reach many people at once rather than a select few.

A multinational study among 404 university faculty members across the United States, Paraguay, Peru and the Dominican Republic examined how leadership practices reach engagement. The finding: organisational climate is the mechanism in between. Leaders who model the way and inspire a shared vision shape the climate, and it is that climate which drives engagement, rather than the leader's behaviour acting directly on people.

The researchers deliberately avoided the common weaknesses of leadership research, including overstated causal language, and treat leadership practices as something organisations can actually develop rather than a fixed trait.

Researchers from Anadolu, Gaziantep and Izmir Democracy University analysed PISA 2022 data covering educators in Brazil, Malaysia and Macao, roughly nine thousand respondents across three economies with very different performance levels. They tested how leadership behaviour reaches wellbeing and job satisfaction.

Leadership behaviour was directly associated with both outcomes, but the effect ran substantially through two mediators: professional autonomy and organisational trust. Where those two were weak, leadership behaviour translated far less into wellbeing, across all three economies.

A systematic review of the literature on leadership behaviour in private sector digital transformation identifies two distinct research streams that are usually treated separately: effective strategic leadership behaviour and effective operational leadership behaviour. The review finds that relation-oriented and task-oriented behaviours need to be aligned to the cultural context to be effective, and that a leader's own digital competence shapes how supported employees feel.

The implication is uncomfortable for the traditional split between visionaries and operators: transformation appears to require both capabilities in the same leadership layer.

Advisers from the leadership consultancy ghSMART, writing in Harvard Business Review, examined why founder transitions are among the most consequential moments in a company's life. Their central finding is stark: a founder-CEO handover carries a risk of failure or performance downturn that is two to three times greater than a transition between non-founder chief executives.

Drawing on dozens of interviews and client cases, the authors trace the difficulty to how influential founders remain, and set out how founders, successors, boards and investors can plan the moment early, design an ongoing role that helps rather than hinders, and make sure the successor is genuinely set up to lead rather than left in the founder's shadow.

A recent academic review of the startup-to-scaleup literature, published by Springer Nature, gathers what the research consensus says about why some young companies make the leap and others stall. Leadership and vision run through all of it: founders set the direction, attract the capital and build the culture, but scaling asks something different of them.

The pattern the authors describe is precisely a change of season. Early-stage companies tend to thrive on visionary, improvised leadership; scaling rewards a more structured, managerial approach, which the review calls a complete shift in mindset. Founders who scale learn to delegate, build management systems and align teams around shared objectives, rather than remaining the single point every decision passes through.

McKinsey analysed more than two hundred family-owned businesses across fifty countries and ten sectors. The finding upends the usual story: after a CEO transition these companies underperform on revenue, shareholder returns and earnings for five years, and it happens whether the successor is a family member or an outside hire. The culprit is rarely the heir. It is the leader who leaves.

Some outgoing leaders exit too abruptly, handing over a title and a pile of inherited problems. Others never really leave, operating behind the scenes in ways that quietly undercut the successor. The best transitions, McKinsey found, treat the exit as its own carefully designed project, begun years early. Tellingly, the firm's own book on the subject is called CEO For All Seasons.

Deloitte surveyed more than nine thousand leaders. The headline is a gap between doing and doing well: around sixty percent already lean on AI to support their decisions, yet only about five percent believe they manage that relationship effectively. Alongside it, most leaders call building an adaptable workforce critical to success, while only a small fraction feel they are leading that change well.

The message is not that AI is coming. It is that AI is already in the room where decisions are made, and most leaders are improvising. The skill of the next few years is not adopting the tools but building the judgement to use them, and the honesty to admit how new that judgement still is.