Managing The Now And The Next Is Leadership’s Hardest Job Today

Initially published on Forbes January 20, 2026

Most organizations are very good at managing the now.

They know how to deliver results, hit quarterly targets, and keep the system running. Performance is tracked, efficiency is rewarded, and execution is optimized. By many traditional measures, work still looks functional.

What far fewer organizations are prepared for is managing the next.

The next is where skills change faster than roles, where AI adoption at work accelerates faster than people’s confidence, and where workers are renegotiating what work is allowed to demand of their lives.

The growing tension between these two horizons — now and next — is becoming one of the defining future of work leadership challenges of our time.

The issue isn’t that leaders don’t see the future coming. It’s that most organizations are still structurally, culturally, and operationally built to reward short-term execution, not long-term workforce capability.

The Now: Workforce Performance Without Slack

That tension shows up clearly in recent workforce data. ManpowerGroup’s latest 2026 Global Talent Barometer, based on responses from nearly 14,000 workers across 19 countries, reveals a workforce that looks confident on the surface but increasingly uncertain underneath. Nearly nine in ten workers say they are confident in their skills and experience to do their job today.

Productivity hasn’t collapsed. Work is getting done. But delivery is being mistaken for readiness.

The same data shows that while AI use at work continues to rise, confidence in using AI and new technologies is falling sharply. People believe in themselves, but they are far less certain that the systems around them — learning, development, and career pathways — are preparing them for what comes next.

This is what managing the now without slack looks like. Organizations continue to extract value from existing skills and roles, even as the conditions that made that capability sufficient begin to disappear.

The Next: Skills And Capability Without Confidence

That fragility becomes impossible to ignore when we look at the next horizon of work.

As AI becomes increasingly embedded into daily workflows, preparation is not keeping pace. A majority of workers report receiving no recent training, mentoring, or development to help them adapt. Confidence in career advancement remains below confidence in current performance.

This gap creates caution. One of the clearest signals in the data is the rise of what has come to be known as “job hugging.” Globally, 64% of workers say they expect to stay in their current role, yet 60% say they are actively applying for new jobs.

This is not a contradiction. It’s a strategy. Employees want growth, but not at the cost of security. They are uncertain about what lies ahead and skeptical that their current organization will help them build future-ready skills. So, they manage risk the same way organizations do: by maintaining stability in the present while keeping options open for the future.

Why This Is a Leadership Problem, Not a Workforce One

It’s tempting to interpret these behaviors as fear, resistance, or a loss of ambition. The data tells a different story. On The Future Of Less Work podcast, ManpowerGroup President and Chief Strategy Officer Becky Frankiewicz explained why the company runs the Global Talent Barometer in the first place: “There’s been a tremendous amount of studies… on what employers want. There have been very few on what employees want.”

What employees want, the data shows, is not avoidance of change, but protection from unmanaged risk.

Workers are already using AI. They are not clinging to credentials, with confidence in skills far outweighing faith in degrees. And they are not opting out of growth. They are opting out of uncertainty without support. As Frankiewicz put it, humans are saying, “I choose stability right now… I expect career growth.” Increasingly, employers are reaching the same conclusion: “We actually want the same thing. I want you to stay and you want to stay. So now how do we make that meaningful?”

This is why lateral movement has become the new vertical. Internal mobility replaces exit as the primary growth mechanism. Staying becomes a mutual choice — not a lack of options.

But this equilibrium doesn’t sustain itself.

Designing Organizations For Now And Next

What’s missing is leadership capacity to manage both horizons at once.

Most leaders were trained to optimize performance in relatively stable systems. Far fewer were trained to build capability in environments where roles, skills, and technologies are still taking shape. Managing the next requires different muscles: creating space for learning, tolerating short-term inefficiency, and investing in people before the payoff is visible.

Organizations that will thrive in the coming years won’t choose between now and next. They will deliberately design for both. That means recognizing that performance today is built on capabilities developed yesterday, while performance tomorrow depends on capabilities built now. It means treating learning as infrastructure rather than a perk, building internal mobility so growth doesn’t require exit, and measuring leaders not only on results delivered but on workforce capability built. It also means accepting that some productivity must be traded today to avoid irrelevance tomorrow.

The Global Talent Barometer describes a workforce waiting — waiting to see whether leaders will continue to extract value from what already exists or whether they will invest in what needs to be built next. The future of work is the next. And it will not be shaped by those who manage the now most efficiently, but by those who can hold both horizons at once — and have the courage to act on both.