About the paper
The report examines what FleishmanHillard calls a company’s “License to Lead” — the stakeholder permission leaders need to change course, move quickly and manage disruption without losing legitimacy.
It is based on original quantitative research: an online survey conducted by TRUE Global Intelligence from 15 December 2025 to 4 January 2026 among 5,550 respondents, comprising 4,000 engaged consumers, 1,400 executives and 150 policy stakeholders.
The data is global in scope, covering 15 markets across four regions: North America (US, Canada), Latin America (Brazil, Mexico), Europe & Middle East (UK, France, Germany, Brussels, Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, UAE, South Africa) and Asia Pacific (China, Japan, South Korea).
Length: 42 pages
More information / download:
https://fleishmanhillard.com/2026/01/license-to-lead-playbook/
Core Insights
1. What is the report’s central argument about leadership in an age of permanent uncertainty?
The core argument is that uncertainty is no longer a temporary disruption but the standing condition of leadership. On pages 2–3, the report says leaders now have to make high-stakes decisions faster, with less certainty, under greater scrutiny, and in environments shaped by political volatility, geopolitical change, technological acceleration, media fragmentation and rising stakeholder expectations.
Its main claim is that the real constraint on execution is no longer strategy quality alone. It is whether stakeholders are willing to let leaders act, especially when strategic shifts involve disruption, short-term pain or visible course correction. FleishmanHillard calls this permission structure “License to Lead”. On page 3, the report explicitly argues that organisations stall not because they lack strategic brilliance, but because stakeholders do not have enough confidence that the new direction is justified and worth following.
That framing is important because it shifts the leadership discussion from planning to permission. In this report’s logic, reputation is not a nice-to-have or a downstream outcome of success. It is a precondition for making strategy executable when conditions change.
2. What does the global survey reveal about stakeholder expectations of business leaders today?
The report shows that stakeholders increasingly expect leaders to be adaptable, clear, accountable and visibly fair. On page 5, 84% of engaged consumers and 82% of policy stakeholders say the current business environment is more unpredictable and disruptive than it was three years ago. Among engaged consumers, the top leadership quality for the next decade is the ability to adapt quickly to change, cited by 51%. Clear and simple communication comes next at 40%, followed by the ability to communicate effectively about changes and pivots at 37%.
Page 6 deepens this picture. Around half of engaged consumers say their expectations of companies have risen when it comes to acting with customers in mind (52%), doing the right thing (50%) and taking a balanced stakeholder approach (47%). More than 90% say several actions are key to confidence in leadership: clear communication of strategy, message consistency, transparency about difficult decisions, genuine listening, and accountability when things go wrong. The highest figure is 95% for taking accountability when things go wrong.
The report also shows that long-term loyalty is not driven by lofty rhetoric alone. On page 6, the top three loyalty drivers are the product itself (42%), the company’s mission and purpose (38%), and how the company treats employees and stakeholders (38%). That suggests stakeholders still value purpose, but they place it alongside product performance and treatment of people, not above them.
3. Where is the biggest trust gap between leaders and stakeholders?
The sharpest gap is between how executives assess corporate leadership and how engaged consumers assess it. Page 7 is the clearest evidence. While 49% of executives are very optimistic that large companies will address major challenges over the next 10 years, only 20% of engaged consumers say the same. Likewise, 51% of executives say they have “a lot” of confidence that leaders of large companies will act in the best interests of society, compared with just 19% of engaged consumers. On preparedness, 44% of executives believe large companies are very prepared to lead effectively during future disruption, versus only 15% of engaged consumers.
The report reinforces this perception gap on page 9 and in the appendix tables on pages 37–38. Engaged consumers place extremely high importance on integrity and honesty, accountability, transparency and consistency, but far fewer believe company leaders demonstrate those qualities often. For example, 76% of engaged consumers say integrity and honesty are very important, yet only 23% say leaders often demonstrate them. Accountability shows a similar gap: 74% say it is very important, but only 22% say leaders often demonstrate it.
This matters because the report is not merely saying trust is low. It is saying business leaders systematically overestimate how much trust and legitimacy they currently enjoy. That misreading, in the report’s view, is itself a strategic risk.
4. What are the practical consequences when companies lose this “License to Lead”?
The report argues that the consequences are commercial and operational, not just reputational. Page 8 is especially direct: 98% of engaged consumers say they are paying attention to corporate follow-through, and 48% say inconsistent or conflicting messages from leadership greatly decrease their confidence in the company. A further 44% say such inconsistency somewhat decreases confidence, meaning only a tiny minority are unaffected.
The behavioural consequences are significant. In the past 12 months, after losing confidence in a company, 58% of engaged consumers say they stopped buying from it or significantly reduced spending, 50% switched to a competitor, and 40% privately advised friends or family against the company. Those figures appear both in the key findings and in the appendix table on page 35.
The report’s broader argument is that poor alignment and weak explanation create friction that slows execution. Pages 10–11, in the “License to Lead Maturity Curve”, describe how low-maturity organisations become reactive, then merely stabilising, because stakeholders interpret abrupt pivots as instability rather than disciplined adaptation. The report’s implication is that execution failures are often self-inflicted: leaders do not sufficiently prepare stakeholders before and during change, so even necessary moves become harder to carry through.
5. What leadership model does the report propose as the answer, and what are its wider implications?
The proposed answer is a leadership and corporate affairs model built around five conditions and an integrated operating system. On pages 12–17, the “new leadership playbook” identifies five practices: simplification as an antidote to complexity, ruthless leadership alignment, campaigning the strategy, owning the “why”, and stakeholder relevance without shortcuts. These are presented not as communications tactics in isolation, but as interdependent conditions for sustaining permission to act.
The logic is consistent across these sections. Simplification means reducing complexity into a repeatable direction that stakeholders can understand. Alignment means leaders must resolve disagreements privately and present a unified public narrative. Campaigning the strategy means treating strategy as an ongoing effort rather than a one-off announcement. Owning the “why” means showing the logic, trade-offs and changed assumptions behind a pivot rather than presenting it as an unexplained verdict. Stakeholder relevance means proving fairness through operational decisions, not just values statements.
Pages 18–24 then elevate corporate affairs into an “operating system” built on three capabilities: insight, influence and adaptability. The report argues that insight helps leaders distinguish real external signals from noise; influence turns reputation into an active enabler of execution; and adaptability helps organisations maintain legitimacy across repeated cycles of change.
The wider implication, especially on pages 23–25, is that corporate affairs should no longer be treated as peripheral or reactive. The report claims that execution velocity is now partly a reputational capability. Strategy will keep changing; reputation must be built before it is needed; and corporate affairs now determines whether leaders can move quickly without losing stakeholder backing. In that sense, the report is not just about communications. It is an argument for repositioning corporate affairs as core leadership infrastructure in conditions of permanent volatility.