The leadership shift

What we learned from two years of coaching data

Something is shifting, we are not just watching leaders build new skills. We are seeing them recognize and change the deeper patterns in their own thinking and behavior that have limited those skills, and understand how those patterns shape the people, teams, and organization around them. The data is starting to show it clearly.

We’re not just watching leaders build new skills. We’re watching them address the deeper patterns that were holding those skills.

At BTS, we’ve been anonymously analyzing thousands of coaching conversations through our MBIR framework (Mindset, Behavior, Impact, Results), tracking what leaders are working on, what’s changing, and what it means for organizations.

When we compared 2024 data to 2025, a clear pattern emerged: the work is getting deeper. Leaders aren’t just building new skills, they’re confronting the underlying internal patterns (mindsets) that have been quietly limiting them all along: perfectionism, conflict avoidance, disempowerment, self doubt, and over-control.

That’s happening for a reason. Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report finds that global employee engagement dropped to 20% in 2025, its lowest point since 2020, costing the world economy an estimated $10 trillion in lost productivity. The sharpest decline? Manager engagement, which has fallen nine points since 2022. The environment leaders are navigating has fundamentally changed, and it’s accelerating the urgency of mindset work that can no longer be deferred.

This paper shares what we’re seeing in the data and what it means for organizations investing in leadership development right now.