It’s new leadership model season.
You know the one. The time of year when organizations quietly escort the leadership model they
Over the past few weeks of the new year, it seems like half the conversations I’m in are about “refreshing,” “reimagining,” or “reinventing” leadership development.
But why?
The cynic in me says this: with all the turnover in talent development and HR leadership, the safest path to job security is to declare whatever exists as “outdated,” hire a consulting firm, spend a year (or two) designing a new leadership model, and then launch a massive training initiative to roll it out.
Mission accomplished. Rinse and repeat.
But that’s not the whole story. And it’s not even the most important part.
The real reason leadership models are getting blown up is that the world leaders are operating in has fundamentally changed; economically, politically, socially, technologically, and operationally. The gap between what leaders are trained to do and what they are actually required to do has become painfully obvious.
So yes, companies do need new leadership models in 2026, but not for the reasons most decks suggest.
Here are five practical reasons that actually matter.
1) Strategy Is No Longer Stable, and Execution Is Constantly Under Threat
Most leadership models were built for environments where strategy changed every few years.
That world is gone.
In 2026, leaders are executing strategy in real time while the assumptions underneath it are constantly shifting—supply chains break, regulations change, technology accelerates, competitors emerge from nowhere, and customer expectations reset overnight.
Leadership is no longer about aligning to strategy. It’s about detecting when the strategy is breaking and making intelligent trade-offs before the damage compounds.
If your leadership model doesn’t explicitly train leaders to:
…it’s already obsolete.
2) Leaders Now Run the Business, Not Just Their Function
Many leadership models still assume leaders operate primarily within their functional lane.
Finance stays in finance. Operations stay in operations. Marketing does marketing things.
That assumption no longer holds.
Leaders today are expected to understand how decisions ripple across the enterprise; how pricing impacts operations, how cost-cutting affects customer experience, how talent decisions show up in financial performance.
This is why business acumen is no longer “nice to have.” It is a foundational leadership capability.
A modern leadership model must hardwire:
If leaders can’t connect their choices to revenue, cost, risk, and long-term value creation, they aren’t leading, they’re managing activities.
3) Authority Has Declined, but Influence Has Not
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: leaders have less formal authority than ever.
Remote work, matrixed organizations, global teams, and talent mobility have all diluted the old command-and-control model. You can’t “tell” people what to do and expect compliance.
But influence hasn’t disappeared. It has just become more complex.
Leadership now requires:
Any leadership model that doesn’t explicitly address how leaders build influence without authority is preparing people for a job that no longer exists.
4) The Cost of Poor Decisions Is Higher and More Visible
In the past, bad leadership decisions were often hidden.
Today, they show up quickly:
The margin for error has shrunk.
Leadership models can no longer be abstract collections of behaviors. They must prepare leaders to make better business decisions, faster, with incomplete information, and under scrutiny.
That means moving beyond “be inspirational” and toward:
Leadership is increasingly about decision quality, not personality.
5) AI Changed the Job (Even If the Title Stayed the Same)
This one is unavoidable.
AI has already changed how work gets done. Leaders now have access to:
But here’s the catch: AI doesn’t replace leadership, it exposes it.
Leaders who understand the business, ask good questions, and make sound judgments get exponentially better with AI.
Leaders who don’t? They just make bad decisions faster.
A 2026 leadership model must explicitly address how leaders:
Ignoring this isn’t cautious. It’s negligent.
In Summary
Companies don’t need new leadership models because the old ones were bad.
They need new leadership models because the job of leadership has changed.
The danger isn’t rebuilding the model. The danger is rebuilding it around the same outdated assumptions, just with new language, new icons, and a bigger training budget.
If your new leadership model doesn’t make leaders better decision-makers, sharper business thinkers, and more capable under pressure, then it’s not a leadership model.
It’s branding.
And the business will pay for that eventually.