Confidence is often treated as one of the prerequisites for leadership. Jamie Dimon recently offered a different way of thinking about what happens when it is missing. The JPMorgan Chase CEO said insecurity can become especially dangerous as executives move into larger jobs and find themselves responsible for areas they do not fully understand. Some leaders grow into that uncertainty. Others respond by surrounding themselves with people who agree with them, either filtering bad news or trying too hard to appear certain.

Now that you have read the title, you might be thinking, “Oh no, not one of these feel-good articles.” And before you think I am advocating for participation trophies, artificial optimism, or the belief that everyone deserves first-place recognition, I am not. I actually believe struggle, difficulty, and failure build character. Somewhere I heard, “If every day is a sunny day, then what’s a sunny day?” There is wisdom in that question. We only recognize a sunny day because we have experienced rain, clouds, and storms.

You know those people who seem to glide through life’s toughest moments without making a big deal of it? They might not announce their strength or broadcast their struggles on social media. They simply get on with things, quietly rebuilding after setbacks while the rest of us are still processing what happened. Here’s the thing: resilience isn’t always loud or obvious. Sometimes the most resilient people among us are the ones who never talk about it. They’ve developed an internal toolkit that helps them navigate adversity without fanfare or drama. So what makes them different? Let’s dive in.

Daily tasks and leadership demands can take on a life of their own. Without the right tools, the workday can slip by with critical items still left undone. Meetings can get sidetracked. Communications can languish.

Management tools and systems can help wrangle the many demands of leadership. But with so many tools and systems out there, which make the cut? We asked our Fast Company Executive Board members what management tools they rely on daily. Here’s what 15 of those members shared about the tangible tools and management ethos they use to make their workday a success.

Consider two data points that should not coexist: 96% of HR leaders expect entry-level roles to evolve into artificial intelligence (AI) supervision positions within the next five years; yet, 46% still don't proactively offer AI-specific upskilling training.

The destination for work has shifted. However, many organizations still expect their people to navigate there without a map. The traditional career path was often shaped by technical progression and at times, it could be slow and inequitable.

People will do a lot to avoid being seen alone in public. Eat at the bar instead of a table. Stare at their phones through entire meals. Arrange plans with people they’d otherwise cancel on just to avoid being the person sitting there by themselves. As though being seen without company is evidence of being a sad, lonely loser.

According to Psychology Today, therapists hear versions of this all the time—the discomfort of being seen alone, the anxiety of not having someone to share thoughts with in the moment, the low-level dread of what it might mean if nobody reaches out. People will spend time with people they don’t even like, just to sidestep it.

We live in a world that rewards speed, productivity, and performance. Leadership has followed suit, driven by the need to control outcomes and stay ahead of crises. Too often, we reward decisiveness over reflection, performance over presence, and certainty over curiosity. We implicitly ask people to leave their humanity at the door in order to succeed.

Research continues to point to the costs of relentless acceleration. The 2026 edition of Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace shows employee wellbeing and engagement remaining stubbornly low, while other research shows how chronic time pressure doesn’t just increase burnout, but also erodes empathy.

AI has rapidly transformed how work gets done across industries, but for many people, it’s causing more anxiety than productivity gains. More than half of surveyed workers are worried that AI will put them or someone in their household out of work, according to research from Reuters.

If you’re feeling the anxiety and the pressure of AI in the workplace, there are steps you can take to develop your skillset and feel more secure in your abilities at work. The key is to develop the uniquely human skills that AI cannot easily replicate.

Training has never been more accessible, more engaging or more widely adopted. Yet one question continues to challenge learning and development (L&D) leaders: Why doesn’t better training consistently lead to better workplace performance?

Organizations invest heavily in learning initiatives, participants leave sessions with positive feedback and facilitators deliver high-quality experiences. But weeks later, many employees return to familiar routines and the expected improvements in performance fail to materialize.

If you’re a CEO or a VP of HR, you can usually spot an executive coaching candidate before they realize it for themselves. From your vantage point, you get to see things that may be invisible to the executive living inside their own day-to-day world, like attrition patterns, succession bench depth, who’s getting promoted on other teams and who's carrying more workload than they should be.

The hard part isn’t seeing the signs. Rather, it’s knowing when the signs add up to a candidate for executive leadership coaching compared with a training problem, a performance problem or just a leader having a rough quarter.

Last month, a CEO announced that his institution would replace "low-value human capital" with artificial intelligence. The backlash was swift—public outrage, union condemnation, regulatory scrutiny, and an apology that landed as badly as the original comment. He joins a growing list of CEOs who simply cannot get their AI messaging right.

But this isn't really a messaging problem. It's an emotional-intelligence problem. As any brilliant influencer or speech writer will tell you, the key to successful or influential communication is heart—being able to speak in a way that resonates with your audience.

A few years ago, a group of researchers and I were tasked with answering that question. In addition to identifying what makes a great team, we worked to isolate the skills needed to build and maintain such a team, and outline ways to develop those skills.

I recently shared these discoveries with members of the Lighthouse, my community for emotionally intelligent leaders, and the conversation revealed practical lessons for anyone who’s trying to get more out of their team.

It used to be that you had to wait for the morning newspaper or an evening TV broadcast to get the news. An event had to be especially noteworthy to be pushed out as a “breaking” piece that would get communicated shortly after it occurred.

Now more than ever, the world runs on instant information — and not just for headline-grabbing events. AI is rapidly reshaping how businesses obtain and react to the breaking news that can directly impact their bottom lines, even when that information wouldn’t be considered newsworthy to others.

For decades, organizations have treated learning and skills development as something that supports work but stays separate from it. Whether it’s a course to complete, a session to attend or a program to roll out, it traditionally happens in isolated moments, disconnected from the work itself.

This model is fundamentally broken, built for a world where skills had long shelf lives and change moved slowly enough to train for in advance. But it no longer reflects how people build skills today.

Strong leadership includes the courage to address what needs attention. Many leaders want their teams to grow, but delay the conversations that would bring greater clarity and strengthen accountability. Over time, that silence can leave people unsure of what is expected and unsure of how to improve.

Learning how to give feedback to employees helps leaders create clarity, strengthen trust, and reinforce healthy standards across the team. When feedback is handled well, it supports individual growth and gives accountability a clearer, steadier place in the team’s culture.

High-pressure situations at work, like an important meeting, are often the backdrop for our most reactive professional moments. In 2025 nearly two-thirds (60%) of employees who spent more than 15 hours a week in meetings reported experiencing severe stress levels, according to a Wiley Workplace Intelligence report.

When conflict arises, our bodies often react before our brains. You might lose your temper, lose your words, or find yourself anxiously agreeing to something that you don’t actually have capacity to do. It can feel deeply frustrating, and even shameful, when your responses feel impulsive and out of your control.

The idea of work-life balance has been around for decades, but today the combination of rising financial pressures, gig-work, cobbling together of part-time jobs, and (for white-collar workers) nonstop digital contact, flexible schedules, and remote work can make it difficult for many of us to ever truly “switch off.”

For some families, long hours are a necessity. But for others, the pressure to keep working can be rooted in a sense of obligation—to be ever more successful, maintain a certain lifestyle, or simply keep up with expectations shaped by a consumeristic and highly individualistic culture.

When K’ai Roberts Fu stopped trying to sleep eight hours in a row, her nights got dramatically better.

For years, Roberts Fu, a speaker and author (her book, 12 Mis-Steps, launches May 19), had been waking naturally after three or four hours of sleep, lying awake for an hour, and then drifting off for another stretch. She told herself she was bad at sleeping. She worried. Which, predictably, made sleeping harder.

In a world that rewards speed, scale, and certainty, the most transformative leaders share one foundational quality that doesn't show up on any balance sheet.

I've been in leadership development long enough to know that most organizations don't have a courage problem — they have a naming problem. We dress it up in strategy decks and OKRs, we talk about innovation and disruption, but we rarely say the quiet part out loud: real transformation requires the willingness to be uncomfortable, be wrong, and sometimes be alone in your conviction. That willingness has a name. It's courage, and it has to come first.

When I was in sixth grade, I used to torture myself with a particular hypothetical I’d heard someone pose: Would you rather live a shorter but happy, carefree life or a longer life that wasn’t quite so easy?
I’d twist myself into knots over something like this. The instinct is to say the happy one. Who wants to be unhappy? Trading longevity for happiness seemed like a lopsided bargain.

Then again, I’d run around and take the other side of the argument: What if unhappiness had its own value? What if worrying about things actually made you do things — useful things, meaningful things — that a carefree person wouldn’t bother with?