Stability of top management and digital skills, corporate governance is transformed

While cybersecurity is perceived as the most pressing risk, artificial intelligence emerges as the area where the skills gap is most pronounced. Digital and emerging technologies have risen back to the top of the list of development priorities, with 49% of leaders citing them as critical to future competitiveness.

However, the effectiveness of leadership is hampered by internal structural limits. 28% of executives identify lack of strategic clarity as the biggest drag on performance, followed by ineffective decision-making processes that slow operational execution. In this scenario, the longevity of the mandates of the “Baby Boomers”, with 58% of executives at the end of their careers expecting to remain in office for the next three years, requires more rigorous planning of generational turnover to avoid bottlenecks in the development of new talent.

The Italian panorama: between volatile markets and tactical execution

Italian leaders show a divergent profile compared to the global average. While at an international level attention is polarized on technological governance, in Italy the agenda is dictated by economic volatility. For 36% of Italian executives, market uncertainty represents the main challenge, followed by geopolitical risks (31%).

On the domestic front, the Italian priority shifts to implementation capacity: team effectiveness (27%) and talent retention (26%) exceed mere digital transformation. This data suggests that, in the national context, the success of innovation processes still strictly depends on organizational cohesion and the ability to translate the strategic vision into concrete actions.

The three directions for leadership in 2026

The consolidation of corporate governance requires a structured intervention on three interdependent pillars:

AI accountability: technological integration is no longer a delegable issue, but requires direct participation of top management to guarantee ethical and decision-making rigor.

Strategic Clarity: It is essential to simplify decision-making processes to reduce the gap between planning and execution.

Succession Management: the stability of mandates must be accompanied by growth paths for the new generations, in order to avoid gaps in competence in the long term.

“Top executives’ careers are getting longer. This is good news, because long-standing leadership brings stability and vision, but organizations must also know how to valorise experience, without making it a brake on the emergence of new talent“, commented Elisabetta Mereghetti, Head of Career Transition & Mobility and Leadership Development at LHH. “Today, the new generation of leaders is not willing to wait passively. Without structured development and succession paths, longer tenures at the top risk turning into a bottleneck, slowing down the growth of skills and the evolution of the organization. Added to this is a growing lack of strategic clarity and effectiveness in decision-making processes. When goals are unclear and decisions stall, execution slows and change initiatives lose momentum. Bridging the gap between strategic vision and execution will be crucial to address increasingly complex and uncertain contexts“.