Tomorrow's managerial skills, illuminated by neuroscience
Updated: Jul 31
On 28 May 2026, Valeur Plus brought together around fifty executives, managers, and HR professionals to explore a central question: What will tomorrow's managerial skills look like? And what can neuroscience teach us about them ? Behind the way we manage, make decisions, and interact with others, there is a key player we often overlook: the brain. To explore this topic, we designed and delivered a conference together with Nelcy Bovet and Emily Papaux, behavioural neuroscience experts at Neuroly Sàrl. Rather than simply presenting scientific concepts, our goal was to connect the latest neuroscience research with the everyday realities of organisational life. In an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable environment, the most critical managerial skills are no longer purely technical. They lie in our ability to understand—and sometimes tame—our own brain.
Why examine 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 traditional managerial reference points no longer provide the same guidance as before. 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, which is fast and instinctive, and an adaptive mode, which is slower and more nuanced. Under pressure, the former tends to take 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 often mistakes the feeling of relief for genuine 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 is a mechanical approach, without solid factual grounding, in the face of which the manager becomes defensive. By seeking to soothe his own discomfort rather than understand the situation, the HR director ended up addressing the wrong issue.
What will be the four key managerial skills of tomorrow?
From this neuroscientific perspective, 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, label 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 is therefore to become aware of their own discomfort before acting, rather than seeking a quick solution 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 gaps with interpretation. In many workplace tensions, the problem does not come from the facts themselves, 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 favours answers that relieve it and sometimes confuses fluency with truth: a neatly structured five-point answer seems relevant because it feels comfortable. As more and more tasks are delegated to machines, critical thinking means creating space before reaching a conclusion. The skill of tomorrow's manager may be less about quickly finding an answer than about remaining clear-headed amid all the answers 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 challenge today is no longer change itself: 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 takes over.
How can these skills be developed in everyday practice?
These skills cannot be decreed: they are built through simple, repeated practices. The conference proposed several immediately actionable approaches:
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, to ensure you have thought things through before delegating.
Practise neurocognitive micro-resets: relax the tongue away 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. In practice, the challenge is not to add further pressure on already overstretched managers, but to give them reference points so they do not fall victim to the workings of their own brain.
What if we took a different perspective?
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 those of our teams – to continue performing at their best.
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 people. And what if the real question, in 2026, were not “how to decide faster?”, but rather “how to decide more wisely?”
Written by Cassandra Kunkel, Communications Manager
