Why Stability Is the Leadership Skill of the Decade
As AI pressure builds and teams run thin, new research points to the capability leaders are most urgently under-investing in.
Ask any leader what they are focused on right now and the answer is likely to involve AI. Adopting it, proving its value, getting teams to use it consistently. After years of investment, the pressure to demonstrate return is real.
But Atlassian’s State of Teams 2026 research – drawing on 12,000 knowledge workers across industries – found that while 89% of executives say AI is making their people faster, only 6% can point to measurable return on investment. Individual speed is going up. Team performance is not following.
The gap between those two numbers is where the leadership conversation needs to be, building the capability that closes it.
What the research says
Atlassian’s research found that when AI accelerates individual output without changing how teams coordinate, it creates what they call a fragmentation tax: the cost of disconnected tools, siloed knowledge and rising coordination burden. 87% of knowledge workers say that with everyone in execution mode, they lack the time and capacity to coordinate effectively. As individuals get faster, the team around them slows down. This fragmentation tax is estimated to costs the Fortune 500 approximately USD $161 billion per year.
The organisations that have cracked the AI ROI code (just 14 per cent of those surveyed) share one characteristic: they have approached AI as a team-level capability, not an individual one. But only 24 per cent of executives currently focus their AI implementations at the team level.
The people that leaders are trying to stabilise are often already under strain. Employees are arriving at work already stretched. AHRI research found that 55% of Australian workers are experiencing ‘quiet cracking’ – maintaining performance on the surface while silently falling apart under sustained pressure. Unlike quiet quitting, it is invisible until it becomes a sudden crash or clinical burnout. Gallagher’s 2026 Workforce Trends Wellbeing Index found 63% of workers across Australia and New Zealand are financially unwell, with a third relying on secondary income to manage cost-of-living pressures. Gallagher links this directly to reduced focus, fatigue and lower problem-solving capacity. People managing persistent economic uncertainty are not arriving ready to absorb more complexity. The leadership task is not just building stability at work – it is building it for people already stretched outside of work.
The solution? Managing for Stability, or the ability to absorb the pressures of continuous transformation, shield teams from complexity and create the conditions for productive work as a team. This was highlighted in The University of Sydney’s 2026 Skills Horizon. As Kiersten Robinson, Chief People Officer at the Commonwealth Bank, put it: “The pace and rate of change is going to increase exponentially. We must increase our comfort with change and ambiguity because it is ever present. You still need to provide people with a sense of confidence and stability.”
What this means for leadership and team development
Stability is not a passive state. It is an active, deliberate practice. The Skills Horizon identifies three things that underpin it, each of which coaches and L&D practitioners can work on directly with leaders and teams.
Articulate direction clearly and repeatedly
Teams do not need certainty about outcomes. They need certainty about the team’s purpose, priorities and approach. Leaders who communicate a consistent directional message – and adapt the language to context rather than changing the direction itself – give their teams a cognitive anchor. Emily Craven, CEO of Story City, explained: “Times are uncertain, but your people want you to be really certain about the decisions that you give them. Storytelling helps you shepherd them through uncertainty.”
In practice this encourages leaders to develop a short, repeatable narrative about where the team is going and why, rather than a strategy deck. A story they can tell in five minutes that orients people back to shared purpose whenever change comes.
Create routines as anchors of certainty
Predictable rhythms matter more when everything else is unpredictable. Regular team check-ins with a consistent format, structured retrospectives and shared working agreements give teams the experience of something reliable. Deliberate design of the small, repeatable moments signal a team knows how to function together, regardless of what is happening around it and has a system in place to absorb and react to change.
Build psychological safety as a leadership behaviour
Richard de Crespigny, captain of the Qantas A380 flight that survived catastrophic engine failure over Indonesia in 2010, mentioned what it took to keep his crew functional under crisis conditions: “A team will never function efficiently unless every person in it has the psychological safety to contribute and to step up when necessary and call STOP.”
Leader’s daily behaviour is the primary driver of whether teams can raise concerns, surface problems and take the risks that performance requires. Psychological safety is built through specifics: listening, inviting challenge, responding non-defensively when things go wrong and following through when someone raises an issue (A. Edmondson, Harvard Business School research).
How TMS tools support this capability
Managing for Stability requires a shared language for how people work together. Without that foundation, even the strongest leadership intent gets lost in interpretation.
The Team Management Profile (TMP) can build that foundation. When team members understand their own work preferences and those of their colleagues, there is better role clarity and team cohesion. People know not just what they are supposed to do, but how they prefer to do it for the best results. That shared understanding is a stability resource that persists even when tasks, structures or reporting lines change around a team.
Team Signals provides the ongoing measurement layer. Once the foundations are built through TMP work, Team Signals gives leaders a regular check on whether the conditions for stability are met and teams are engaged. The diagnostic tool makes team health visible and actionable for higher psychological safety.
Where decisions are needed faster, more frequently and are more distributed across the team, QO2 adds an important dimension. The profile measures each person’s natural orientation toward opportunities versus risks, and in a world where every level of the team is being asked to make more calls at greater speed, achieving the right balance is critical. A team skewed toward obstacle-thinking can stall in high-velocity environments, one skewed toward opportunities may miss the friction points that flag a poor decision. Understanding the team’s QO2 profile gives leaders a practical way to build the decision-making system that stability under pressure requires.
Why this cannot sit with the leader alone
Managing for Stability is a leadership capability. But whether it develops and holds depends on decisions made well above any individual leader.
If an organisation measures and rewards output and speed above everything else, leaders who invest in directional narrative, check-in routines and psychological safety practices are doing so against the current. Microsoft’s decade with stack ranking illustrates this precisely: no performance criterion measured contribution to colleagues’ success, and the result was what employees described as a culture of survival (BusinessChief, 202410). If a senior executive responds to uncertainty with blame, the signal reaches every level of the team.
Edmondson’s research confirms that how leaders respond in moments of failure and pressure is the behaviour teams use in deciding whether it is safe to surface problems (A. Edmondson, Harvard Business School). If a development program builds role clarity and then a restructure dissolves it without explanation, the foundation collapses. The 2026 IC Index found trust in senior leaders fell nine points in a single year, with fewer than half of employees reporting that the reasons behind organisational changes were clearly communicated to them (IC Index 2026, IPSOS Karian and Box).
The capabilities that will define leadership success in the decade ahead require the organisation to design for them, to name stability as a performance value, measure it, recognise the leaders who build it and ensure that broader organisational decisions do not routinely undermine what those leaders are working to create.
The 14 per cent of organisations realising genuine AI ROI are not doing so because they found better tools. They are doing so because they approached AI as a team-level and organisational-level capability, with the culture and structures to support it. Stability at scale is an organisational design question, not a leadership development one alone.
Scaling stability across the organisation with TeamOS
One of the challenges of building leaders to Manage for Stability is that it is contextual and relational. What stability looks like for every team will be different. Training programs introduce the concept. But they cannot provide the ongoing reinforcement that makes it an everyday practice.
This is where an AI coach can support everyday development at greater scale. Training programs introduce the concept of stability. What they cannot provide is the ongoing reinforcement that makes it practice: answer context-specific prompts or provide individual advice in function of how each team member prefers to work.
TeamOS is built to close that gap. Leaders working with Oski, the AI coach trained on their own psychometric data, receive consistent support to build and sustain the practices that create stability. And because TeamOS works at the team level, the development is not only for the individual leader. Conditions for stability become supported across the whole team, not just modelled from the top.
Ready to build stability at scale?
Building stability across your leadership population is an ongoing investment in the conditions that allow everything else to work. Get in touch to explore how TMP, Team Signals and TeamOS can support that investment across your organisation.
Contact us to start the conversation