Tomorrow's managerial skills, illuminated by neuroscience

On 28 May 2026, Valeur Plus brought together around fifty executives, managers and HR professionals around a central question: what will tomorrow's managerial skills be? And what can neuroscience teach us about them? Because behind the ways we manage, decide and interact, an actor we often forget is at work: our brain. To explore this territory, we designed and led a conference together with Nelcy Bovet and Emily Papaux, experts in behavioural neuroscience at Neuroly Sàrl. The aim was not to pile up concepts, but to connect what research teaches us about how the brain works to the everyday reality of organisations. In an environment that has become fragile and unpredictable, the most decisive managerial skills are no longer purely technical. They relate to our ability to understand, and sometimes to tame, our own brain.

Why look at management through the lens of the brain?

The context is no longer what it once was. We now operate in a BANI (brittle, anxious, non-linear and incomprehensible) world, where managerial bearings no longer hold as they used to. Yet, faced with this growing pressure, the human brain reacts according to a well-documented mechanism. It constantly switches between two modes: an automatic mode, fast and instinctive, and an adaptive mode, slower and more nuanced. Under pressure, it is the former that takes over.

The problem is that this automatic mode does not primarily seek accuracy: it seeks predictability. The brain prefers a reassuring answer to an exact one, fills gaps of uncertainty with interpretation, and readily confuses cognitive relief with clarity. The case study presented during the conference illustrates this perfectly: an HR director, alerted by several signals concerning a loyal manager – a deteriorating atmosphere, a resignation, a client complaint – and pressed for time, turns to AI to prepare a delicate conversation. The result: a mechanical approach, without solid factual grounding, in the face of which the manager digs in. By seeking to soothe his own discomfort rather than understand it, the HR director addressed the wrong problem.

What are the four managerial skills of tomorrow?

From this neuroscientific reading, four key skills emerge. They do not stand in opposition to technical expertise: they complement it and together form an integrated system.

• Emotional regulation: The ability to identify, name and regulate one's emotions in order to act with discernment. An unidentified emotion influences our decisions all the same. The manager's first skill therefore consists in becoming aware of one's own unease before acting, rather than seeking a quick way out that merely defuses the tension of the moment.

• Relational intelligence: The ability to read interpersonal dynamics and weak signals, beyond words. The social brain reads relationships before facts, and fills the gaps with interpretation. In many workplace tensions, the problem does not come from the facts, but from the speed at which our brains interpret the other person's intentions. With a struggling team member, the first step is to explore how they are experiencing the situation, before confronting them.

• Situational critical thinking: The ability to analyse information rationally, distinguishing facts, biases and emotions. The tired brain loves answers that relieve it and sometimes confuses fluency with truth: a neatly structured five-point answer seems relevant because it is comfortable. Faced with the growing delegation of tasks to machines, critical thinking means creating a space before the conclusion. The skill of tomorrow's manager may be less about quickly finding an answer than about remaining clear-headed amid all those being offered.

• Situational agility: Often reduced to the ability to adapt continuously, it is redefined here as the ability to deliberately choose when to speed up and when to slow down. Because the problem today is no longer change: it is accumulation. The brain can adapt, but not to everything, all the time. A saturated brain becomes rigid and tensions build up. Deliberately regulating the pace means taking back control before saturation does it for us.

How can these skills be developed day to day?

These skills cannot be decreed: they are built through simple, repeated practices. The conference proposed several of them, immediately actionable:

• Systematically block out 15 to 30 minutes before and after important meetings, to give the adaptive mode time to work.

• Use the RIBA method (Reasons – Impact – Benefits – Action) before turning to AI, in order to think for yourself before delegating.

• Practise neurocognitive micro-resets: release the tongue from the roof of the mouth, widen your field of vision, slightly lengthen your exhalation, and so on, to signal to the brain that it can leave emergency mode.

• Explicitly communicate thinking time to teams, so that stepping back is not perceived as inaction.

These four skills are part of a broader framework of 21 skills, organised into three clusters – to steer, to think, to connect – which structures our understanding of managerial development. The challenge, in practice, is not to add further pressure on already overstretched managers, but to give them bearings so they do not fall victim to the workings of their own brain.

What if we took a step to the side?

Ultimately, the message of this conference was paradoxical in a world that prizes speed: lasting performance depends on the ability to slow down at the right moment. Managing tomorrow will not mean going ever faster, but preserving enough clarity, stability and recovery for the human brain – ours as well as our teams' – to keep functioning fully.

At Valeur Plus, we are convinced that these skills are built over time, through training, coaching and managerial support. This is precisely what we place at the service of organisations that wish to navigate uncertainty without losing their coherence or their talents. And what if the real question, for 2026, were not “how to decide faster?”, but “how to decide more wisely?”

Written by Cassandra Kunkel, Communications Manager