WR Feature: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of How Businesses Are Chasing Growth in 2026
Everyone wants growth. That part hasn't changed. What has changed — dramatically, and in ways that are still reverberating through every industry — is what companies are willing to do to get it, what they're willing to sacrifice, and who ends up paying the price when the profit strategy doesn't work as cleanly as the slide deck promised.
We are in a moment where the pressure to grow is colliding with a workforce that is more burned out, more skeptical, and more clear-eyed about what they will and won't tolerate than at any point in recent memory. The result is a business landscape that looks, depending on where you sit, either like an extraordinary opportunity or an ongoing crisis about to reach a tipping point.
Here is an honest accounting of what's actually happening.
The Good: Some companies are finally figuring out that people are the strategy
There is a version of the 2026 growth story that is genuinely encouraging, and it lives inside the organizations that came out of the pandemic era having learned something real and took action to integrate it into their goals and their culture.
The companies that are growing sustainably right now — not just posting numbers but actually building something durable to meet the chaotic moment — tend to share a few characteristics. They have leaders who understand that employee engagement is not a HR metric, it is a revenue metric. They have invested in the kind of management infrastructure that most companies skip: training leaders to actually lead, not just to hit targets. They have recognized that the institutional knowledge carried by their experienced employees is irreplaceable by a software subscription, and they have made retention a strategic priority rather than an afterthought.
These organizations are also, not coincidentally, the ones that resisted the most aggressive return-to-office mandates and DEI rollbacks. Not only out of ideology, but also out of math. They looked at what flexibility and belonging were actually produce: lower turnover, higher engagement, faster onboarding of new talent because the experienced people stayed long enough to mentor them. And then they decided, strategically, that the cost of dismantling those things was higher than the cost of maintaining them.
The research has been consistent for years now: companies with high employee engagement outperform their peers by 23% in profitability, according to Gallup. The good news is that some companies are finally treating their retention number as seriously as their customer acquisition cost.
The leaders doing this well share something else in common. They have done their own work. They regulate themselves. They have enough self-awareness to know that a dysregulated leader or boss, like one who operates from panic, who manages from fear, who communicates inconsistently because their own nervous system is running the meeting, produces a dysregulated, unmotivated, and burned out team. Dysregulated teams do not grow companies. They survive them.
The Bad: The growth playbook most companies are actually running
Here is what the majority of organizations are doing in 2026, and it is worth being honest about it because the gap between what companies say about people strategy and what they actually do is wider than it has ever been.
The dominant growth strategy right now is subtraction dressed as optimization. Cut headcount. Automate what can be automated. Demand AI do more work. Push the remaining workforce to absorb the work of the people who were eliminated. Call it "efficiency." Watch productivity dip while profits temporarily go up due to cuts, then blame the team when they go back down and apply pressure with new KPIs or demands on employees to do more with less.
The layoffs of the last two years have not been purely economic. They have been, in many cases, a big gamble — that AI tools will replace a meaningful percentage of knowledge workers, that the remaining employees would quietly absorb the slack, and that the short-term hit to morale would be worth the reduction in payroll.
In some narrow cases, for some specific functions, that bet has paid off. In most cases, however, what companies got instead was a workforce that is frightened, overextended, and deeply distrustful of leadership and technology, which is precisely the internal condition least likely to produce the innovation and performance that growth actually requires.
The other bad habit showing up everywhere right now is the repackaging of old management as new strategy. Return-to-office mandates sold as "collaboration" initiatives. The elimination of DEI infrastructure framed as "getting back to basics." Surveillance tools, such as productivity monitoring software, badge tracking, email analytics, are installed and euphemized as "engagement data." These are not growth strategies. They are control strategies. And control and growth are, over any meaningful time horizon, in direct opposition to each other. Unless, of course, their ultimate goal is employee rebellion.
Psychological research on motivation is unambiguous on this point. When people are surveilled, their intrinsic motivation drops. When they feel controlled rather than trusted, their creativity narrows. You can monitor someone's keystrokes and still have no idea whether they are doing their best thinking. And their best thinking is what you actually need if you want to grow and drive innovation that is built to last.
The Ugly: What is being extracted from people in the name of growth
This is the part that doesn't make it into the earnings call.
The human cost of how businesses are pursuing growth right now is significant, specific, and falling unevenly. The workers carrying the heaviest load are not the ones at the top making the decisions. They are the mid-level professionals, many of them women, many of them caregivers, many of them the people who kept organizations running through the instability of the last five years. These women are are now being asked to do more, in harder conditions, with less support, and with the implicit threat of replacement always somewhere in the background.
The ugly truth about the AI disruption narrative is that it is being used, consciously or not, to create a workforce that is too afraid to push back. If you believe your role could be automated at any moment, you don't negotiate. You don't set limits. You don't take the leave you're entitled to or leave at a reasonable hour or raise the concern that's been sitting in your chest for six months. You perform availability and hope it's enough.
This is not a sustainable growth strategy. It is a slow bleed that shows up first in engagement scores, then in turnover numbers, then in the quality of work, and eventually in the client relationships and reputation that took years to build.
The ugly truth about return-to-office mandates is that they are dismantling caregiving arrangements that took years to construct, disproportionately impacting women, and sending an unambiguous message about whose lives the company actually designed its policies around. Women are leaving. Not loudly. Not with ultimatums. Just quietly recalculating, updating their resumes, and taking their institutional knowledge with them to organizations that haven't yet decided that presence is the same thing as performance.
The ugly truth about the DEI rollback is that belonging was never a luxury program. It was infrastructure. It was the set of conditions under which people who had historically been excluded from full participation in professional life could actually do their best work. When you remove it, you don't return to neutral. You return to prior baseline that existed before, which was already not working for a significant portion of your workforce.
And the ugliest truth of all is that most of this damage is invisible until it isn't. Burnout doesn't announce itself in a quarterly report. The slow erosion of trust doesn't show up in your NPS score. The woman who finally stopped trying to make it work took the severance, signed the agreement, and moved on and she doesn't file an exit report that says "I left because leadership optimized me into exhaustion."
She just leaves. And six months later someone is wondering why the team dynamic feels different, why client relationships aren't as strong, why institutional memory seems to have evaporated. And bit by bit, the alumni network grows with people who feel more and more aggrieved by how they were treated, refusing to recommend, buy from, or engage with the company where they once worked.
What growth actually requires in 2026
The companies that will look back on this period as a turning point — the ones that will have built something real while their competitors were burning through people in pursuit of short-term numbers — are the ones making a different set of bets right now.
They are betting that trust and patience and even measured progress is a long-term growth asset. That a workforce which believes leadership is honest with them, even when the news is hard, will outperform a workforce that is kept in the dark and managed through fear.
They are betting that sustainability and conscious leadership is a competitive advantage. That the team that is still intact in three years, still engaged, still carrying the knowledge and relationships that took years to build, is worth more than the quarterly savings from a reduction in force that turned out to cost more than it saved.
They are betting on their people: not as a platitude, but as a core operating strategy. They are investing in leadership development not because it sounds good in a press release but because they have done the math on what a dysregulated, undertrained manager costs them in turnover, in team dysfunction, in the slow leak of talent that happens when people realize no one is actually invested in their growth.
And they are being honest about what this moment is actually asking of people. Not performing optimism. Not papering over the instability with all-hands meetings full of corporate language about "exciting opportunities."
Telling the transparent truth, making decisions that reflect actual values, and building the kind of culture where people feel safe enough to do their best work even when everything around them is uncertain.
It’s the hardest and most sophisticated growth strategy available right now.
And almost no one is doing it.
At Executive Unschool, we work with leaders and organizations who are ready to build something sustainable — not just something that looks good until the next restructuring. If this article hit a nerve, that's probably worth paying attention to.
The information in this article is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice.
