Make 2026 the Year of Meaningful Impact 

As leaders, we will face a wide range of challenges in the year ahead. While core capabilities and technology set a company’s foundation, people will continue to unlock the full potential of an organization and help define the future.

Effectively motivating, aligning, and mobilizing employees is at the heart of leadership. People are central to many things that contribute to business results–strategy, growth, financial performance, client satisfaction, and employee engagement. In 2026, leadership is very much focused on getting people and culture right at all levels of the organization.

We create meaningful impact by taking ownership of helping others unlock their potential and work toward a shared purpose, even when the path forward isn’t clear. I call this “working through others” to accomplish organizational goals. Leaders and managers set the tone through the choices we make every day: how we define expectations, how we hold ourselves and others accountable, how we delegate, how we coach, and how we create space for ideas to emerge. Here are six approaches I’m taking in 2026 and beyond:

1. Invest in talent. Continuous learning opportunities and career mobility attract and retain talent in a competitive industry. For example, at WSP in the U.S., our Elevate program provides robust professional development to help mid- to senior-level high-potential leaders drive business success, building our leadership pipeline and providing additional motivation for top-tier talent to stay with the company. Elevate is a nine-month program where our future leaders get 360-degree exposure to all facets of our business and their own personal leadership development needs. Even if you don’t have a similar program, you can encourage self-driven learning and help rising stars explore cross-disciplinary opportunities. In today’s market for top talent, “love ‘em or lose ‘em!”

   Connecting employees with peers can help build a more agile and future-ready workforce. While many companies focus on identity-based employee resource groups, consider creating groups organized around business-specific topics.

   We have organized 140 global Practice Area Networks (PANs), driven by grassroots leadership. For example, our PAN focused on construction management connects professionals in engineering and project controls to solve real-time challenges in managing schedules, costs, estimating, value engineering, and project delivery risks. The PANs promote knowledge-sharing, helping members tap into diverse expertise across sectors and geographies, supporting day-to-day work, professional growth, and business development. Our employees typically belong to three or four PANs that are most relevant to them.

2. Champion excellence and innovation. Deep expertise propels business forward. Excellence and innovation differentiate you with your clients. Recognize and reward innovation and excellence through day-to-day communication, frequent references from your clients and markets, the stories you tell during town hall meetings, and more formal recognition and awards programs. In all these ways, don’t just show your people what good looks like, show them great. Then, take a step further and actively work to sustain it.

   We created a Global Innovation Platform that serves as a dynamic inventory of hundreds of innovations, including digital tools, business processes, and research projects. Examples include a home-grown machine learning platform to forecast freight travel, and a virtual “Japanese paper folding” technique that can be used to analyze stress in complex structures like buildings and bridges.

   We provide a structured innovation program to employees with winning ideas that align with industry trends and our business growth goals. Contributors become part of a team led by product managers in a startup style business model and, depending upon the idea’s potential value, also have the chance to shift responsibilities and help develop the idea for the company.

   We also formed an internal Innovation Advisory Board (IAB) with charter to frequently meet and assess innovation concepts. The IAB, comprised of a number of executive leaders and key contributors, plays an important role in validating proposed innovation “solutions” are addressing client problems–not just innovation for innovation’s sake.

3. Ask the right questions and model digital fluency. It is vital to stay abreast of trends and technology. AI is key but isn’t the only digital tool to consider. Accelerate performance through smart adoption of AI, automation, and other emerging software and technologies. Learn prompt engineering to reduce time spent gathering and processing information. Encourage your team to share digital enablement ideas and celebrate their progress.

   We invite employee ideas for solving high-impact industry problems, including solutions that employ AI, digital twins, reality capture, geospatial intelligence, smart places, and predictive analytics. Teams work under the guidance of experienced business leaders and product managers to develop a minimum viable product (MVP) quickly. Once an MVP is validated, the program supports teams in creating a business plan and market strategy, operating in a startup-style model to launch solutions. It formalizes what I see as best practice: to keep asking, what needs to be solved, and what will help develop innovative solutions?

4. Mentor and cultivate strategic advisors. More than offering technical expertise, I want my team to become strategic advisors, bringing clarity, perspective, and leadership at all levels in our organization. In a climate shaped by macro-economic shifts, regulatory changes, political dynamics, and funding pressures, we need to deliver insight and foresight for real business value to clients.  

   Promoting stronger connections across generations through systematic networking is so important that we created an internal platform, WSP Connects. It fosters networking across geographies, disciplines, and generations, offering virtual coffee breaks and bi-monthly pairings to encourage informal conversations and idea sharing.

   WSP Connects also matches mentors and mentees across geographies and disciplines based on career aspirations, interests, and job families. For us, it’s available in English, Spanish, and French, with resources like mentoring handbooks, conversation guides, and career development templates.

5. Clearly Define Accountabilities. I’ve found that an effective management model is “high challenge, high support.” Make it clear what is expected, who is accountable, and how you as a leader will then actively support the team.

   Strive for DACA, which means: clarity around direction; healthy discussion and challenge to achieve alignment; agreement for personal and collective commitment; acknowledgement that accountability and metrics are required to drive performance.

   Always take advantage of every opportunity to discuss and reinforce objectives, expected outcomes, as well as behaviors that reflect your values. If you are in a customer service business, ensure your team understands the importance of customer-centricity and what it means to make everything about your clients.

   With those fundamentals in place, you can drive decision-making and encourage people to achieve their greatest potential and collective business results.

6. Share Stories. Storytelling is a key function of leadership. During team meetings, mentoring conversations, and one-on-one’s, it’s important to make a point of sharing memorable leadership moments. Explain the decisions you’ve made and why. Remember that it’s not only key to share successes, but also to share lessons from failure—to foster a culture of continuous learning and collaboration.

   Extend this approach to others, as well. Internally, we encourage employees to share their experiences on our intranet and a dedicated Kudoboard. Externally, employees are often the company’s most trusted and effective ambassadors. Consider revisiting your policies and platforms to better enable your people to share their experiences.

These practices can help deepen capacity to solve challenges and advance our businesses. When we foster environments that reward curiosity, align strengths with opportunity, and recognize progress, innovation is a natural outcome. When that innovation is shaped by client priorities, it drives impact, differentiation among providers, and lasting partnership.

People are driven by the opportunity to tackle complex problems and strive for meaningful impact. My leadership advice for 2026? Encourage everyone on your team to rise, to buy into a high challenge/high support culture. If you set ambitious objectives and targets, provide the framework, communicate, and provide support channels to your people, they will achieve great things!