Every day, companies face internal and external challenges that can shift and evolve with little notice. As a result, it is increasingly difficult for them to understand the leadership skills and capabilities they will need to meet their strategic goals.

This tracks with our recent report that found only 13% of CEOs and board members are entirely confident their organisation will deliver on its strategic plan this year, and nearly half have little or no confidence that their executive development and retention strategy is positioning them well for the future. The gap between the leadership organisations have now and the leadership they need has never mattered more, and I believe it is time to acknowledge how data-driven insights have become vital in this domain.

At board level, this is now a risk question, and one likely to become more urgent in the coming year. For example, a larger proportion of the global workforce will reach retirement age this year than in any previous year on record, accelerating the loss of experienced institutional knowledge.

At the other end of the spectrum, AI is quickly absorbing entry-level functions, reducing opportunities for junior employees who traditionally moved into leadership roles. At the same time, roles and functions are changing and evolving faster than ever, leaving many people’s capabilities misaligned with what organisations now require.

Boards need to know whether their organisations have the leadership to deliver growth, sustain high performance and mitigate risk. Despite this, leaders consistently indicate they need to understand their talent at a much broader and deeper level than they do today. They want visibility into who they have at all levels, their capabilities, and how the internal talent pool compares to the external market.

Crucially, leaders need insights that can be constantly and consistently updated as needs change. When companies have usable, enterprise-wide data on these topics, they are significantly better positioned to attract, develop and retain the leaders they need and to engage in data-driven decision making.

Yet most organisations are far from this point. One chief people officer described executive succession planning as “Excel hell”: a reflection of how fragmented and inaccessible most leadership assessment data remains. At many organisations, results are not linked to development opportunities, leaving leaders with no easy way to extract meaningful enterprise-wide insight, limiting their ability to make effective decisions about leadership capability or organisational readiness.

Consistency beats complication

Some organisations have made progress by solving one critical challenge. A transatlantic industrial company with 400,000 employees had generated vast amounts of assessment data, but it was dispersed across systems and underpinned by a complicated leadership framework. Workers at different levels were assessed using different methodologies. Leaders could not see where high-potential talent sat or create consistent development pathways into critical roles.

By applying a consistent assessment methodology across all levels (including using technology-enabled tools for junior employees and higher touch in-person assessments for senior roles), the company gained clear, comparable insights into its talent. Leaders quickly identified a looming gap in the company’s middle layers nearly five years down the road, and as a result, succession planning was aligned with strategy rather than responding to it, demonstrating the power of connected insight to support data-driven decision making.

Boards should also be aware of how leadership expectations are changing. Many companies have relied on linear career paths and rotational assignments, but leaders today often prioritise the challenge and impact of a role over accumulating more senior titles.

Meanwhile, companies are shifting focus away from deep technical specialisation towards broader capabilities such as agility, curiosity, external orientation and the ability to lead across boundaries. These shifts make consistent assessment data essential for tracking progress and ensuring development paths reflect new strategic realities. Without this data, boards and executives alike will struggle to support data-driven decisions on leadership development and succession.

Cultural insights

Leadership data is proving particularly valuable for cultural insights. One global pharmaceutical company with strong scientific capability found that its culture was slow to market, driven by consensus and perfectionism. After losing several leaders to faster-paced biotech competitors, the company used assessment data to understand its remaining leadership more deeply. It identified the need for leaders who looked externally, were intellectually curious, and were committed to developing others. This allowed the organisation to refine development priorities and retention strategies—another example of how connected data enables more effective planning.

The most forward-thinking companies place accessible, connected data at the heart of their leadership pipeline strategy. They cultivate leaders across multiple strategies and time horizons and use consistent processes to turn insights into action.

Increasingly, companies are embedding leadership capability data into board and executive reporting in the same way they report financial or risk data. This discipline is becoming a hallmark of good governance, allowing boards to engage in informed data-driven decision making about one of their most critical responsibilities: organisational leadership.

For boards, the question is no longer whether leadership data matters—it is whether the organisation has the clarity and consistency needed to navigate the volatility ahead.

Sharon Sands is a partner in consultancy Heidrick & Struggles’ London office and regional managing partner for Heidrick Consulting in Europe & Africa.