Skip to content
Work 2028 โ€“ Trends, dilemmas & choices - Henley Business School

Work and Leadership 2028

Planning for the future of business is an intimidating thought considering the current pace of change. What new technology will there be? What will the workforce look like? Will the work style be different?

At the Henley Centre for Leadership, and in collaboration with Deutsche Telekom and Detecon Consulting, we researched how work and leadership will look in 2028 and identified 16 projections and subsequent implications. These trends will help businesses facing the fourth industrial revolution to debate and make choices for the future today.

The following highlighted areas are just a selection of the trends drawn from interviews with 50 influential business and societal leaders from a number of sectors and countries โ€“ sometimes not providing straight forward answers, but rather dilemmas and food for thought and action.

It is getting serious โ€“ a cry for societal purpose

In view of societal divisions and inequality, our study projects that businesses are at a junction; societal responsibility will define and decide their existence. Profits will be allowed within a long-term perspective but to have legitimacy in 2028, successful organisations will need to pursue truly sustainable business models and strive for human-centricity.

Organisations should question prescribed purposes, learned patterns of economic behaviour, narrow societal contributions, and involve many managers and employees in deep debates regarding organisational purpose.

Leading a hybrid workforce โ€“ preparing leaders to facilitate people-machine ecosystems

Sounds awkward? People-tech ecosystems and digital arenas, consisting of people and artificial intelligences, robots, machine learning, social platforms will be the reality.

Managers must start now to understand what leading in these new environments means. Who is accountable for the decisions and consequences in people-machine ecosystems? How can they inspire and motivate people-machine ecosystems? Who leads whom in an AI-human ecosystems?

Gig leadership in transparent settings โ€“ translucent, collective and rotating leadership

Episodic working and technology will shake up leadership as we know it, creating more translucent, collective and rotating leadership, coined as gig leadership. Our interviewees expect this will be accompanied by radical transparency and immediacy amongst employees and managers.

Organisations need to prepare people for transparent leadership by incorporating more agile leadership structures and organisation-wide leadership development. This will enable them to find hidden leadership talent and redefine assessment of leadership success and promotion.

Episodic loyalties and the need for belonging โ€“ people and firms as temporary companions

Our study shows that organisations will face a paradox of flexibility and gig and episodic working, while people will show a need for belonging and to engage episodically with deep loyalties. With reduced touchpoints, firms need to establish a strong pull: for instance life-long learning paths or treating people as โ€˜alumniโ€™.

Organisation should explore now if they suit being an episodic home or adapting to become one.

Leading for human centricity โ€“ in search of leadership capacities and personal qualities

While technology will be ubiquitous, our research predicts that successful organisations will radically focus on human centricity; employees will be genuinely valued as humans.

Successful business leaders will address two areas:

  • Multifaceted complex leadership capacities that embrace networked relationships, enable other people to thrive and lead, or navigate cross-boundary working
  • Deep personal qualities where leadership becomes self-directed, enables survival and is virtuous and generative

We have to get uncomfortable โ€“ unlearning leadership development

Our study shows that it is time to unlearn some development habits for 2028 leadership; this will be uncomfortable and exciting, and include shedding well-nurtured blinders of leadership learning.

Businesses will have to focus on transformative development that nurtures whole-person learning and people-tech system development. Multi-level leadership learning for all employees or cross-career, disruptive leadership learning and unlearning will help.

If you have more appetite for 2028 work and leadership, you can find more projections in our โ€˜Work 2028: trends, dilemmas & choicesโ€™ report:

Please fill in the fields below to download the full report.

As well as contacting you about your report request, weโ€™d like to tell you about other events and opportunities to find out more about our courses and studying at Henley. Please let us know below if you are happy for us to do so:(Required)
The personal information you supply on this form will be used to help us respond to your request, for quality assurance and for data analytics purposes. Your personal data will not be sold to any organisation, and will not be shared with any organisations outside the university apart from those that help us to provide this service or unless required by law. The information that has been provided in this form will be treated in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation (2016) and all applicable data protection laws. Please refer to our privacy policy for more information. If, at some stage, you wish to be removed from our database, please advise us by emailing to info@henley.fi.
This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Join the debate!

Bernd is an Associate Professor of Leadership, Organisations and Behaviour and Director of The Henley Centre for Engaging Leadership.

He helps organisations with his expertise in leadership for creating and sustaining organisational energy, energising management teams, developing inspiring and purposeful leadership and fellowship, and leading change.

Related content

Could an Executive MBA be part of your talent and succession planning? - Henley Business School Finland

WANTED: Customerโ€ฏ Engagementโ€ฏ Manager

  • 26 Sep 2023
We are looking for a Customer Engagement Manager to strengthen our team in Helsinki! In this position, you will have the opportunity to lead our management programmes, company specific programmes and bring business to life!
Pia Forsell

Leader in spotlight: Pia Aaltonen-Forsell, CFO

  • 7 Jul 2023
Pia Aaltonen-Forsell is CFO of Outokumpu, the largest stainless steal producer in Europe. She does not have the most obvious background for a CFO: she is Master of Social Sciences in economics. She thinks that her background is a great asset, since as a CFO you need to understand the economy in general, not just business.ย 

Alumni spotlight: Hannu-Matias Nurmi, Chief Executive Search

  • 3 Apr 2023
Just before the global pandemic hit, in early 2020, Hannu-Matias Nurmi took a brave step. He founded a company. Not the most common route to entrepreneurship as Hannu-Matias has a humanistic background. However, nowadays, the company โ€“ called Chief Executive Search โ€“ employs eight people and is growing.