As organisations enter 2026, many are reassessing how they attract, retain, and develop leadership talent. Strategies are refreshed, priorities reset, and new expectations set. Yet one critical moment in the employee lifecycle continues to be underestimated: the transition into a new leadership role.
Most organisations invest heavily in onboarding, ensuring new hires understand systems, policies, and processes. However, when leaders step into more senior roles, particularly internal promotions or executive appointments, onboarding alone is insufficient. What is required is upboarding: a deliberate process that supports the psychological, relational, and identity shifts that leadership transitions demand.
What Is Upboarding?
The intentional enablement of leaders stepping into more senior roles — internally or externally — to recalibrate how they think, lead and operate before confidence and effectiveness are compromised.
While onboarding integrates individuals into an organisation, upboarding supports leaders as they adapt to a new level of responsibility, complexity, and influence. It is both preventative and developmental, designed to reduce transition risk and accelerate impact.
Why leadership transitions are high-risk moments
Every promotion or role change represents a psychological transition, not just a structural one. Leaders crossing into new roles encounter what organisational psychologists describe as a role boundary, a shift that often triggers uncertainty, self-doubt and a renegotiation of identity.
Research consistently shows that during transitions, leaders experience pressure across three core psychological needs:
- Autonomy: Familiar sources of control diminish as expectations change.
- Competence: Past success does not automatically translate to success at a higher level.
- Relatedness: Relationships shift — former peers may become direct reports, and executive roles require broader stakeholder influence.
Without structured support, this disruption often results in reduced confidence, slower performance ramp-up, and defensive leadership behaviours such as micromanagement or overextension.
This is not a capability issue. It is a transition enablement issue!
Why traditional onboarding falls short
Most onboarding programmes are designed for operational efficiency rather than leadership effectiveness. They focus on compliance, access and orientation — essential but insufficient elements for leaders stepping into more complex roles.
The data is telling:
- Only 12% of employees strongly agree their organisation does a great job onboarding (Gallup).
- Nearly 60% of new managers underperform in their first two years.
- Around 40% of executives fail within 18 months of appointment (Harvard Business Review; Center for Creative Leadership).
The primary reason is a gap between capability and identity. Leaders are promoted based on past performance, yet success at higher levels requires different ways of thinking, influencing and leading.
By the time performance concerns surface, confidence and credibility are often already eroded.
The Leadership Identity shift
Effective leadership transitions require identity work. This is the process of letting go of what previously defined success and adopting new leadership behaviours aligned to greater scope and responsibility.
This shift is particularly evident when leaders move from “Head of” roles into executive positions. At this level, success depends less on functional excellence and more on enterprise stewardship.
In our work with senior leaders, we consistently see five critical shifts that determine executive effectiveness:
The Five Lifts of Executive Upboarding
- Thinking:
From functional optimisation to enterprise-wide perspective. - Time:
From immediate operational demands to long-term strategic impact. - Relationships:
From team advocacy to collective organisational stewardship. - Voice:
From subject-matter expertise to integrative influence and sense-making. - Focus:
From control to collective momentum — designing the conditions that enable strong decisions without direct intervention.
These shifts are not intuitive, and they do not occur automatically. Without support, leaders often revert to familiar behaviours that no longer serve them or the organisation.
The role of mattering in leadership transitions
Beyond skills and behaviours, leadership transitions are deeply human experiences. Leaders want to feel that they belong, that their contribution is valued, and that their role has purpose.
Research on mattering shows that individuals perform better and adapt faster when they feel:
- Noticed — seen and acknowledged early.
- Affirmed — recognised for their strengths and potential.
- Needed — clear on how their role contributes to organisational success.
Upboarding that intentionally incorporates these elements builds resilience, accelerates trust and strengthens leadership identity during periods of uncertainty.
What effective upboarding looks like
At Career Pivots, upboarding is delivered through a combination of:
- One-to-one coaching or small group cohorts, short tailored sessions over a period of 4-6 months.
- Structured reflection, action and leadership simulations.
- AI-enabled coaching nudges that reinforce learning over time.
- A diagnostic Upboarding Questionnaire that clarifies expectations, stakeholder dynamics, and transition risks.
This approach is proactive, not reactive. It supports leaders before confidence dips and performance is questioned — at the moment when support has the greatest impact.
Why 2026 is the year to do this differently
As organisational complexity increases, leadership transitions are becoming more frequent and more consequential. The cost of failed transitions, in lost talent, engagement, and momentum is significant.
In 2026, organisations that succeed will be those that:
- Treat leadership transitions as strategic investments.
- Move beyond onboarding to intentional upboarding.
- Support identity shifts, not just role changes.
- Enable leaders early, rather than intervening too late.
Upboarding does not need to be extensive or costly. But neglecting it is.
Every transition is a pivot point
At Career Pivots, we believe that every leadership transition is a pivot point, one that can either accelerate growth or quietly undermine it.
By supporting leaders to step up with confidence, clarity, and capability, organisations build stronger leadership pipelines and healthier cultures.
2026 is an opportunity to stop assuming leaders will “work it out” and start designing transitions that help them thrive from the start.
