Turning tensions into triumphs: Helping leaders transform uncertainty into opportunity

Short-term results versus long-term value: It’s not an either/or proposition

In last year’s Global Human Capital Trends report, we highlighted an emerging tension between business and human outcomes and turned our attention to how organizations could navigate this tension to drive human performance in an increasingly boundaryless world of work. We defined the human performance equation as the combination—or balance—of both business and human outcomes, emphasizing that they are mutually reinforcing, and that focusing on the human element is becoming one of the most important factors in unlocking and sustaining organizational performance.

However, our research this year suggests that advancing this goal has not been easy. Only 6% of respondents to this year’s survey say their organizations are making great progress in establishing human sustainability—the ability to create value for all people connected to the organization—as a guiding business strategy. Finding balance between business and human outcomes can be challenging, as efforts to improve one can sometimes seem to come at the expense of the other. And it appears that some organizations may still be over indexing on business outcomes that yield short-term results instead of human outcomes, where long-term value may take more time to become evident.

But this isn’t an either/or proposition. It’s a both/and proposition.

In this year’s report, we take a deeper dive into some of the specific tensions that underscore the balance between business outcomes and human outcomes. As we discussed last year, these outcomes can be mutually reinforcing, but they will require thoughtful decisions across a number of dimensions.

For example, as your organization transforms, should you consider creating sources of stability and belonging for workers, or focus on creating agility for the organization? Should workers be given more or less empowerment about where and how they work? Should advances in artificial intelligence automate work or reinvent it? By trying to ensure predictable outcomes, are we limiting the potential of our people and organizations to grow, innovate, and explore new territory?

There’s no right or wrong answer here. 

Navigating these tensions isn’t about picking a side (figure 1). It’s about finding the right balance between both sides of these tensions. While you may skew toward one end of a spectrum overall, specific choices can—and will—be made all along the spectrum. The choices will likely differ from one organization to another, and even within the various functions of the same organization. And they’ll likely evolve over time.

Niki Rose, Telstra’s workforce experience and capability executive, explains it this way: “We need to recognize and value both ends of the decision spectrum, the polarities, understanding that in a systems thinking approach, both can be true at the same time,” she says. “Navigating the tension between them means having the courage to make choices without the certainty of their outcomes.”

Understanding the dynamics involved in this kind of organizational decision-making requires a nuanced approach, particularly from those at the helm. Since decision-making is largely the responsibility of organizational leaders, they play a particularly important role in helping their organizations navigate these tensions moving forward.

The vital role of leaders in this year’s trends

To be a leader is to decide—to make choices—and the pressures executives face are often intense and contradictory. Leader well-being is taking a hit, as at least four out of 10 workers, managers, and executives in Deloitte’s Well-being at Work Survey say they “always” or “often” feel exhausted or stressed.¹

Executives, in particular, are feeling the squeeze. They’re caught between conflicting pressures from boards and stakeholders to deliver short-term financial results while also taking risks for long-term gains—and that can have a bigger impact than you might think. Research from the National Bureau of Economic Research shows that tough decisions during economic downturns can actually shorten a CEO’s lifespan by an average of 1.5 years.²

On top of all this, the rapid rise of AI is changing the way we work, and leaders now face the tough task of building trust and preparing their teams to adapt to working alongside AI.

The core of what it means to be a leader remains what it has always been: working with and through others to create value greater than the sum of the parts—clarifying intention, marshalling resources, and overcoming obstacles as needed. And while truly great leaders recognize the imperative for shared business and human outcomes at the heart of the human performance equation, it often seems they are in conflict. That leaders must choose between them. In periods of high uncertainty, leaders often face pressure to focus solely on business outcomes.

Given the pressures described above, executives can’t be faulted for defaulting to a focus on the basics.³ But with organizations and workers facing constant change in the future, including the accelerating impact of AI, leaders should challenge themselves to take a longer view. The key is embracing the idea that human performance isn’t a zero-sum equation between human and business outcomes, and it doesn’t involve choosing workers over profit, or profit over workers.

Leading only for business outcomes isn’t leadership: it’s an algorithm. Computers are infinitely better at executing algorithms than humans—which is why there are already discussions of AI replacing CEOs.⁴

And leading only for human outcomes isn’t leadership either: it’s conservatorship or guardianship. While that sort of relationship is valuable to those under its care for a time, it’s focused only on preservation—not creativity, growth, or adaptability—and so it comes with an expiration date.

This is why human performance is about balancing both business and human outcomes.

Moving forward, leaders can find (or rediscover) the focus needed, mitigate and rationalize the many competing pressures, and turn these tensions into sources of potential energy by leaning into the human performance equation. They can use it to improve decisions and decision-making, ensure that the systems in and through which they lead are supportive of mutually beneficial outcomes, and address the full scope of decisions related to humans and AI head-on.

Making good decisions in ambiguity

Decision-making is a discipline, one that can be improved through rigor and that involves skills that can be practiced and developed.⁵ As leaders, we can and should commit to improving the rigor of decision-making processes and the skills we bring to them. Refining decision-making capabilities isn’t a finite task, with a clear state of completion. Instead, it’s an ongoing journey of understanding, learning, and improving.

In addition, leaders should also consider the organizational systems in which they are making decisions. These systems—culture, governance, rewards, and reinforcements—are the water leaders swim in, so omnipresent and essential that they’re often unnoticeable. Over time, they convey both overt and covert messages about how leaders should act, what they should prioritize, and who they should focus on. As leaders, we need to build support for human performance into the system.

So what does it mean as a leader to make good decisions in a future dominated by change? And what should you keep in mind to help ensure you’re making the best choices possible?

• Ensure you’re considering the right data—not just the data that’s easy to collect. High-quality decisions are based on evidence, which can help drive integrity in the decision-making process. Leaders should make sure they’re considering the right data and be forthright in when, how, and where that data will be used in the decision. Focus on metrics that measure human outcomes, such as data on skills development and employability; emotional, mental, physical, social, and financial well-being; career stability and advancement opportunities; and societal impact.⁶
• Consider the input of multiple stakeholders, but don’t get bogged down by trying to achieve consensus. Striving for unanimous agreement can slow down the decision-making process and lead to indecisiveness. Instead, leaders should aim to balance inclusivity with decisiveness, ensuring that they make informed choices while keeping momentum going. Educating stakeholders on how decisions are made in your organization can also have an impact on how quickly you’re able to take action: High-performing organizations are 22 times more likely to openly discuss strategies for how decisions will be made, nine times more likely to teach decision-making skills and capabilities, and seven times more likely to provide tools to support higher-quality decision-making than are low-performing organizations, according to Deloitte’s decision intelligence research.⁷
• Place decision-making responsibility at the right levels and involve people with the right experience. Delegate decision-making authority to those who have the relevant knowledge and experience to make informed choices. For instance, when it comes to integrating AI into business processes, it’s essential that leaders involved in these decisions have a solid understanding of AI technologies and their implications. This understanding enables them to evaluate potential benefits and risks more accurately, foresee implementation challenges, and make strategic decisions that align with the organization’s goals.

By working to develop skills and processes that support informed and agile decision-making, leaders will be in a stronger position to make the often complex and difficult choices that are necessary to fuel human performance. This ongoing journey of refining decision-making capabilities can not only enhance individual leadership but also strengthen the overall resilience and adaptability of the organization, improving its ability to successfully navigate the tensions between business and human outcomes.

Key questions, tensions, and decisions for leaders in the 2025 trends

Our research finds that organizations that are leading in addressing the challenges posed by this year’s trends tend to outperform other organizations. For example, organizations that successfully increase the capacity of workers to grow personally, use their imagination, and think deeply are:

• 1.8 times more likely to report better financial results.
• 1.4 times more likely to say they are creating broad value for customers, community, and society.
• 1.6 times more likely to say they provide workers with meaningful work.

Achieving success like this means that leaders will likely need to make tough choices across multiple dimensions, setting a clear vision and direction that balances business and human outcomes for their organization. This year’s Global Human Capital Trends report shines a light on these choices, organized around the themes of work, workforce, and organization and culture, and what it means to navigate the tensions in them.

Here’s a preview of some of the key questions, tensions, and decisions we explore in this year’s report. 

The work: How things get done

How do I provide stability for my workers while creating the agility my business needs to thrive?

Key tensions:

A strong connection between worker and organization—one that drives positive human and business outcomes—depends on a certain amount of shared, solid ground. But as the nature of work changes at speed and scale, much of that stable ground is eroding.

Today’s workers are being asked to learn new skills and ways of working, adapt to new technologies and pivot in response to unexpected change, both internal and external. According to our 2025 survey results, a disconnect between executives and workers is emerging, with leaders preparing for more agile ways of working and workers favoring stability.

The challenge is that the ability for organizations to evolve and adopt new models of work depends largely on the ability of the workforce to do the same. How can leaders find the right balance between the stability that workers crave and the agility that organizations need to create stagility?

How do I unlock worker capacity, and how should it be used? 

Key tensions:

Opening up worker capacity may hinge on an organization’s ability to implement two key things: a new corporate mindset about how we define and value slack—unscheduled, unassigned time that workers have autonomy over how to use—and a new mechanism to evaluate the best path to reducing or streamlining unnecessary tasks and processes and replacing them with essential work.

When it comes to the practical question of how organizations can begin to unlock worker capacity, we propose a work reset that includes hitting pause and taking some time to evaluate the most important human and business outcomes. Implementing a framework that has both horizontal reach and vertical empowerment across the organization for this work reset can help ensure that organizations are focused on the right work and the right outcomes, that they capture and “spend” the capacity created in the most impactful ways, and that they guard against losing capacity gains.

The workforce: Who’s doing the work and how we support them

Do I need to update our employee value proposition for an AI-powered world, and if so, how?

Key tensions:

Organizations will need to think through the ways they can help their people thrive in a world where AI is reshaping work and how we do it. An organization’s employee value proposition (EVP)—sometimes called a workforce or human value proposition—crystallizes the reasons people come to an organization and stay with it. Revising the EVP for a new AI world of work will likely be essential to realizing both human and business outcomes.

Why is this urgent now? Because people are at the heart of AI’s promise. Technology’s value doesn’t come from replacing human labor; it’s about working more closely than ever with humans, amplifying the human ability to discover and capture opportunities for innovation and growth. As AI becomes increasingly intertwined with workers, it’s changing their experience—often through silent, unintended impacts on the work they do and the ways they do it.

An updated EVP for the world of human and machine collaboration can account for those changes and support a healthy, mutually beneficial relationship between organizations and their workers.

Why are my new hires not ready to contribute?

Key tensions:

The experience gap—the gulf between what employers demand and what workers bring—presents a thorny and ever-present riddle: Workers can’t get jobs without having the required experience. But they can’t acquire the necessary experience without foothold jobs or equivalent opportunities.

While this gap has always been a challenge, the ability to gain experience is being complicated by new developments such as AI taking on entry-level work, the erosion of the apprenticeship model in the face of remote work, and the growing complexity of work that increasingly demands more—and more varied—types of experience.

Closing the experience gap is possible, but it will likely require changes on both the supply and demand side of the talent market. Hiring organizations, job seekers, and educational institutions should reflect deeply on the capabilities organizations truly seek when they impose experience requirements so they can determine how to meet those underlying needs—including new approaches they might take.

How do I get more value out of work and workforce technology?

Key tensions:

It used to be relatively easy for organizations to decide whether to invest in technology and which technologies to choose. No longer. The value case for new technology investments must capture not just process efficiencies or a simple set of inputs and outputs, but also the tech’s impact on less easily measurable results traditionally associated with human capabilities, such as innovation, ways of working, and human performance and outcomes. The value case also needs to account for additional investments or changes necessary to realize the technology’s promise.

In the face of a changing tech and work landscape with a myriad of new work and workforce technologies emerging daily, leaders need a new calculus to identify the right tech, the right timing, and the right stakeholders to create the value case that will realize human and business outcomes. In short, they need a new value case for tech.

Organization and culture: The structure and practices that unlock performance

How can we motivate people to do what needs to be done to unleash human performance?

Key tensions:

Understanding what drives people to act can help organizations boost performance, spark innovation, and drive collective action for change. Yet our 2025 survey results indicate that few organizations appear to recognize the power of motivation and are taking deliberate action to harness it.

Emerging technologies have long been influencing consumer behavior by tapping into motivations in marketing and customer engagement, yielding remarkable results. But why aren’t some organizations applying the same focus on their workforce? What’s holding them back?

While some organizations may feel their employee value proposition reflects the motivations of their people, it is only by understanding and tapping into motivations at an individual level—the unit of one—that we can truly drive performance. In doing so, organizations can encourage people to do things that they might not want to do, incentivize them to improve their performance and the quality of their work, and create unified teams.

Why doesn’t performance management work?

Key tensions:

Given that negative perceptions of performance management processes have persisted over decades of reinvention, the question arises: Do we even need performance management?

The real issue is that we are expecting too much from the performance management process. We look at it as the primary driver of human performance. But the reality is that many things must happen to drive human and business outcomes—what we call human performance—in today’s complex world of work, more than a single human resources process can achieve. Relying on a single process to drive human performance is just unrealistic.

We will always need the ability to assess people’s performance to make people decisions like promotions and rewards. And we may not always love it. But if continually reinventing the process won’t solve our core need to unlock how people create business and human outcomes, we need to move beyond process to a broader, more long-term effort to engineer human performance in the flow of everyday work.

Do we still need managers, and if so, how should they spend their time?

Key tensions:

Some key capabilities that managers often perform will always be needed—like coaching and development of their people. People being managed are in need of support more than ever today due to the shrinking half-life of skills, the impact of AI on jobs, and the increasing pace of change. And new capabilities will need to be developed in light of a changing landscape in the world of work. This suggests that managers may need to take on new roles as well.

For most organizations, eliminating managers altogether isn’t the solution. But neither is simply retaining or elevating the role of the manager as it has existed for over a century. Instead, organizations should consider seeking a third path: reinvention of the role entirely. Because in an age in which work is increasingly complex and volatile, people-powered, and more AI-augmented than ever before, the traditional role of the manager is no longer fit for purpose.

We may indeed have fewer managers in the future, but what and how they do their work will need to evolve for the new world of work.

Leading for human performance

Tensions between organizations and workers have always existed and are not going away. If anything, they can be expected to intensify as the impact of AI on work and workers accelerates. Moving forward, leaders will likely need to take an approach to decision-making that puts human performance—balancing business and human outcomes—at its heart.

Of course, leaders can’t do this alone. Organizations must shift, too, redesigning structures and metrics to elicit the behaviors and actions that lead performance, and ensuring leaders can both learn about and benefit from tech tools and AI. Doing so may not be simple, but it can blaze a trail for a sustainable future for organizations and the people who inhabit them.

This effort is not about marketing or brand. But it is about writing your narrative—your story as a leader. A story in which you demonstrate the value of leading human performance to drive greater outcomes for your organization and its investors, your workforce, and the communities in which you live and work.