For 30 years, organizations have sold inspiration as a leadership trait. The 2026 data rewrites that.
We, as companies, have sold leadership the same way we sell gravity. It comes from the top, pulls everything down with it, and the higher you go in the org chart, the more of it you generate.
Here’s what Verus Global has learned working inside teams: inspiration flows differently.
We’ve asked this question inside hundreds of organizations: “who at work inspires you?” The answer rarely comes back the way the org chart predicts. Not often “my manager.” Not always “our CEO.”
More often, it’s the person sitting at the desk next to me.
Recent data across nearly 40,000 employees in 23 countries confirms what we’ve seen firsthand: 68% of employees say a coworker is their greatest source of inspiration at work.
Now look at where the development dollars go. Global spend on leadership development tops $60 billion a year. Investment in teams as units, the horizontal layer doing most of the inspiration work, is a fraction of that.
Sketch that on a chart and it tells you something important: the outcomes organizations say they want aren’t being generated where the investment is going. The question isn’t whether to invest in leaders. The question is whether you’re stopping there.
A peer cannot be explained away. When a colleague does something remarkable under the same conditions, same politics, same Monday morning stress, your people think “so that’s possible here. I want to experience that.”
We model behavior from people we see as like us. That’s how culture travels across the enterprise. Modeling from the top is essential, yet culture spreads sideways too, through what teams notice, celebrate, and repeat.
Every team has one or two people that others orbit. They set the tone without a title. They carry the community forward without a mandate.
The identity of your team, who they believe themselves to be and what they believe is possible here, lives in the space between colleagues.
When team members and leaders both practice inspiring behaviors, the odds an employee feels inspired jump 38 times (not 38 percent, 38 times). The leader sets direction. The team is the roots in the soil. And the inspiring colleague in the middle of your team? They are how that culture multiplies.
These culture carriers already exist inside your organization. Your job as a leader isn’t to create them. It’s to find them, activate them, and give them room.
Approach your next leadership meeting with this question: Who on each of our teams do other people say is inspiring, and what are we doing for them?
Build your culture for your leaders, your teams, and the inspiring colleagues who carry it forward, and watch it multiply.
Start a conversation with us about multiplying your culture
P.S. This 4th of July is a reminder of what people create when they inspire each other to believe something bigger is possible. That’s not just history. It’s your individuals in your team inspiring others to do big things.