The only certainty about 2026 is uncertainty. AI deployment is accelerating, skills demands are evolving, and the workforce is anxious. These forces make effective leadership more essential than ever—and personality assessment especially critical for organisations facing bewildering transition.
Understanding these talent challenges is necessary for organisations looking to maximise the strategic value of personality assessment this year. Organisational effectiveness will rely on making objective decisions about people based on accurate, reliable, and scientifically validated personality assessment data. In 2026, we are committed to using our gold-standard assessments to help people and teams achieve the extraordinary—especially amid rapid global change.
Leadership Effectiveness in Transition
Despite leadership development being a billion-dollar industry, organisations aren’t developing robust leadership benches. Meanwhile, as C-suite roles continue to evolve, executive turnover is increasing. Jackie Sahm, MS, vice president of integrated solutions at Hogan Assessments, observed that leadership effectiveness has not improved, despite the advancements in industrial-organisational psychology and workplace fairness over the last 10 years. “It’s one of the biggest problems in our world right now,” she said. “It’s not just about the efficacy of leadership development programs. It begins with access to leadership in the first place. Who do we give opportunities to lead? Who does not currently get those opportunities?”
Leadership matters, especially when this year’s outlook is brittle, anxious, nonlinear, and incomprehensible (BANI). Ensuring equitable access to leadership begins with objective assessment. Personality assessment reduces bias in leader identification because it measures the underlying tendencies that drive effective leadership, not just superficial impressions.
For instance, every leader has a preferred approach to collaboration, but some are more autonomous and others more cooperative. How a leader is likely to connect with and influence others is not always apparent in a charismatic interview performance. Similarly, a leader’s ability to create team trust is not necessarily related to executive presence.
Under 2026’s conditions, employee psychological safety is paramount. According to Sahm, leaders who successfully cultivate psychological safety create stability, foster genuine human connection, motivate others with shared purpose and values, inspire trust by showing humility, and build and maintain high-performing teams. Integrating personality into all points of talent management (but particularly your high-potential program and succession planning strategy) is crucial for identifying and developing leaders with these capabilities.
Leading Through AI Integration
A majority of US workers say they’re worried and overwhelmed about AI at work, precisely the kind of anxiety that requires psychologically safe leadership. Allison Howell, MS, CEO at Hogan Assessments, pointed out that human judgment is vital for organisations to decide how they will use AI tools. “We as a population and workforce can have more say in what we want the impact of AI to be,” Howell explained. After all, AI transformation is occurring only due to human agency. Given AI’s unpredictability and the need for human oversight, identifying leaders with sound judgment is imperative.
Poorly integrated AI tools could cause data quality issues at a very minimum. Users of generative AI programs are often reminded that AI can make mistakes but may not understand how plausible AI hallucinations can sound. “We need to retain and train human expertise to ensure AI systems are actually doing what they’re supposed to do,” Howell added. How constructively and ethically humans use AI depends on widespread digital and analytical skills that many workers have yet to build. This skills gap demands both capable leadership and strategic talent assessment.
Leading Through Skills Evolution
From skills-based hiring to reskilling to upskilling, skills are dominating the talent market, and rightly so. The present skills gap is closely tied to creating and using AI tools, requiring the human expertise and judgment that Howell mentioned. Leaders supporting a workforce through 2026’s demands face complex questions about which employees can adapt quickly and which will need more support. Personality assessment can measure how readily someone is likely to embrace or resist change, their attitude toward safety and procedures, and their tolerance for ambiguity or risk. This type of insight is critical when there are more workers than jobs in some industries and more jobs than skills in others.
As skills gaps widen, leaders who can create psychological safety for learning are best positioned to boost well-being and drive results. People need safety and certainty if they are to acquire and implement new skills. If organisations expect their workers to rapidly close the skills gap, it is more important than ever to identify and develop resilient, empathetic, and effective human leaders.
Meeting the challenges of 2026 demands a different approach to leadership effectiveness. Organisations cannot afford to promote based on charisma or wait for bench strength to emerge organically. Personality assessment is how the most competitive organisations will hire, develop, and promote leaders who can provide the stability, connection, safety, and trust that the workforce desperately needs right now.
“Because the scale of transformation is theoretically larger, being able to understand and predict the human response and ways of adapting will remain crucial,” said Howell. “We can use personality data to support and navigate all these transformations.”
*This article originally appeared on Hogan Assessments.
