The May/June 2026 issue of Harvard Business Review contains four articles that, taken separately, each offer useful advice for leaders navigating an unusually demanding moment. Read together, they make a single, more important argument: the gap between a strategy that looks good on paper and one that actually holds under pressure is almost never the quality of the plan. It is the quality of the human system built to carry it.
Teams that improve don't just hire better people
Ron Friedman's research on superteams — drawn from a survey of more than 6,000 knowledge workers across industries — identifies three traits that separate the highest-performing teams from everyone else: they get more done, their members actively make one another better, and they keep improving over time. It is that third trait, continuous improvement, that proves hardest to manufacture and easiest to lose.
These are not personality traits. They are structural conditions — built deliberately by leaders who treat growth as a daily practice, not an annual event.
Fear is doing more damage than leaders acknowledge
Eric Solomon and Anup Srivastava write about a phenomenon most senior leaders recognize but few name directly: strategy now feels less like running a marathon on a clear day and more like sprinting through fog while the track shifts beneath your feet. Three forces are colliding simultaneously — policy volatility that arrives via social media before legal teams can assess it, AI infiltrating every workflow faster than most organizations can develop doctrine for it, and geopolitical fragmentation breaking apart the integrated global operating model most large organizations were built on.
The organization gets busier and simultaneously more aimless. The leaders who navigate this period well won't be the ones who feel less fear. They'll be the ones who converted it into focus before it converted them into firefighters.
The real return on upskilling sits one level up
Research published in the Journal of Political Economy followed a government agency that assigned frontline staff to a 120-hour upskilling program. Four to six months later, trained workers' performance had risen roughly 10%. But the most meaningful impact appeared one level above the trainees. Using email metadata to map communication patterns, researchers found that trained employees had sharply reduced the volume of messages they sent upward — meaning managers spent far less time on clarifications and escalations that had previously consumed their days. The training's biggest beneficiary wasn't the person who attended it.
The implication matters for how organizations justify development programs. Measuring training ROI purely through the trainee's individual productivity misses the most valuable effect: the bandwidth freed at the managerial level, where even small gains in attention generate outsized strategic value.
Humility is not a soft trait — it is a structural advantage
Two studies published in the Journal of Applied Psychology examined which leadership behaviors best supported employees through a disruptive return to work. Across both studies — one with 658 employees, a second with 1,607 at a large pharmaceutical company — the result was consistent: employees who worked for humble leaders were significantly less likely to quit and significantly more likely to perform well in the months following disruption. Employees with less humble leaders were actually quitting at higher rates.
What humble leaders did differently was not simply express more empathy. They acknowledged the distress the disruption had caused and then collaborated with their teams to find approaches that fit individual needs. Named distress plus shared ownership of the response — that combination produced the organizational connection that kept people from leaving.
What the four articles share
Each article addresses a different domain: team performance, crisis leadership, workforce development, leadership style. But the mechanism they describe is the same. The organizations and leaders that perform through difficulty are not the ones that had better plans. They are the ones that built the conditions for honest thinking, shared ownership, and continuous adaptation — before the difficulty arrived.
The leaders who bring their village into the room to cocreate strategy aren't doing it despite the pressure they're under. They're doing it because of it. They get a better plan, a more capable team, and people who are already bought in before the work even starts. The research is consistent on this point: the strategy and the development happen at the same time, or neither happens at all.