The 5 Top Personal Growth Trends in 2026
It’s been a tumultuous start to the year in geopolitics, tech, and capital markets. There’s no better time to think about how to improve ourselves so that we can improve the world around us.
We can’t control much, but we can manage our attitude and determination to grow.
Rather than addressing a specific area of growth, in this week’s post I’m highlighting the top five areas that I’m seeing in requests we get from talent, functional, and organizational leaders.
Perhaps this list will inspire or focus the growth that you or your team will do in the year ahead.
1.Commanding the Room. Decision-makers (executives, customers, etc.) want more direct contact with the experts rather than the spokesperson. People making decisions don’t want layers of translation and interpretation. They want to hear explanations and updates straight from the engineering team or from the field. As a result, many leaders have told us they want to improve their executive presence, presentations, and meeting facilitation. For example, I work with a medical device manufacturer that wants its technical teams to be better able to structure and deliver presentations to customers with (or instead of) salespeople.
2.Efficiency with Engagement. Cost and market pressures increase the need for process improvement, supplier negotiations, and increased capacity of team members. The challenge with pushing for these efficiencies is to do it without burning people out or disconnecting people from each other and the mission. For example, a financial services customer sees the need to standardize their services and focus their services on fewer, more “strategic” clients. At the same time, they are coaching their teams on communication and collaboration skills that will help them improve interactions with all of their stakeholders.
3.Working Across the Matrix. “Cross-functional collaboration” and “influence without authority” come up in most conversations we’re having. Centralized operations like shared services need to be relevant and aligned to the segments they support. Specialized functions like HR, finance, legal, supply chain, marketing, tech, and data/analytics want to be viewed as partners able to negotiate trade-offs that drive enterprise outcomes. For example, a retail client is focused on improving the communication skills of category and geographic leaders. This includes leading conversations with the “so what” and asking better questions that get people to come to their own conclusions.
4.Non-Reactive Interactions. In a highly charged world, it’s easy to get triggered by what others say and do. Interactions tend to become too passive or aggressive too quickly. What does that look like? Passivity is camera-off, no reply, everything is fine, I’ll just take care of it, avoidance. Aggressiveness is you’re wrong, here’s what I think, I need you to, how could you??, powering up on others.
The goal is to be calmly assertive instead of being triggered. For example, I coach a leader who is a nice, calm guy … until the people around him don’t do what they’re “supposed” to do. He’s working on expressing his frustration in a less reactive, more thoughtful way.
5.Leading the Way on Change. We can’t ignore AI, societal issues, generational shifts, and other market/political changes. A fear-based response criticizes, condemns people, and complains about the changes. A hope-based response assumes optimism and that we all have agency. Organizations like a commercial construction company I work with are empowering their people to take ownership of change. Developing skills with AI, learning how to bridge opposing perspectives, and understanding people who are different — these are the growth opportunities for all of us.
We all have an opportunity to grow this year amidst all the challenges and changes around us.
What’s an area that you or your team could work on?
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