Museum TrendsWatch 2026: The Looming Leadership Crisis

Each year, the Center for the Future of Museums (part of the American Alliance of Museums) releases its TrendsWatch report, with a focus on the shifting landscape of the field. To help distill these big ideas into museum-scale action, this series will break down the Center’s findings, the challenges we face, and how they connect to our ongoing work.

We will tackle the three main trends covered in this year’s report: The Philanthropic Future, The Looming Leadership Crisis, and Securing the Future of the Nonprofit Sector. This post continues our series with Trend #2: The Looming Leadership Crisis.

Executive Summary: The Heat is On

The traditional image of the museum director is being dismantled by a reality where the old rules of business no longer apply. We are moving away from a single, successful model of leadership toward a landscape defined by:

• Diversified Business Models: There is no longer a one-size-fits-all approach to institutional success.
• The Pressure Cooker: Leaders face a perfect storm of soaring demand for services, sharp declines in government funding, and a rise in partisan political attacks.
• Systemic Burnout: The emotional and physical toll of modern leadership is leading to a widespread exit of experienced talent.
• The Appeal Gap: High-level positions are no longer as attractive as they once were, leading to a thinning pool of qualified applicants.

We’re seeing a fundamental shift: leadership is no longer just about managing an institution, but about navigating an increasingly volatile human and political landscape.

The Questions to Answer

As we look toward the next generation of leadership, we have to ask ourselves whether we’re building ladders to positions that people actually want to hold. The TW 2026 report challenges us with three central inquiries:

How can museums create new pathways for training and supporting future leaders? What new skills will these leaders need? How can museums continue to support equitable development of the next generation?

Solving this crisis requires us to rethink not just who we hire, but how we cultivate a culture that makes leadership a sustainable career choice and not a sacrificial one.

Navigating the Hurdles to Healthy Leadership

The path to leadership is currently blocked by systemic gaps and new, complex stressors that the field has yet to fully address:

• The Training Vacuum: There’s a lack of meaningful or consistent leadership training across the field.
• Emotionally Unprepared: Many current leaders feel unprepared for the modern shift toward managing intense staff emotions and navigating interpersonal conflict.
• The Values Friction: Organizations are struggling to embrace core values in a fraught environment where those very values can alienate staff or the public.
• Broken Pipelines: Traditional career paths and succession planning are often unclear or underdeveloped, leaving institutions without clear frameworks for the future.
• The AI Factor: AI is disrupting the pipeline by reducing roles for lower-level entry staff and altering the nature of human mentorship.
• The Silver Tsunami: According to AAM’s 2024 Museum Board Leadership report, more than 70% of directors are age 50+, signaling a massive wave of retirements and vacancies on the horizon.

From the disruption of AI to the lack of clear succession frameworks, these hurdles represent a significant breakdown of the leadership pipeline that requires an immediate and collective intervention.

Past Trends Inform Future Realities

The Looming Leadership Crisis identified in the TW 2026 report builds on years of reporting on workplace instability. This current stress point is the direct evolution of:

• 2019: Self-Care. This early signal highlighted the expensive toll of employee burnout and high turnover, which we know has only worsened since the COVID-19 global pandemic.
• 2025: Pulled in All Directions. This short take examined how competing expectations from boards, donors, and the public have made museum leadership roles increasingly unsustainable.

These previous reports are the building blocks of our current reality. By tracking these signals over time, we can see that the leadership crisis isn’t a sudden shock, but the inevitable result of long-simmering workplace instability. Understanding this lineage of instability is crucial for anyone trying to fix the pipeline today. It reminds us that we aren’t just solving a new problem but finally addressing the deep-seated cultural and structural shifts that have been gaining momentum for years.

The Leadership Perception

Beyond the structural issues, we face a cultural crisis in how leadership is viewed. The TW 2026 report highlights a troubling shift in sentiment:

• The Vilification of Management: Managerial roles are increasingly seen as undesirable or the enemy.
• The Trust Gap: Trust in supervisors is plummeting—dropping from 46% in 2022 to just 29% in 2024.
• The Value Deficit: A prevailing sense that moving up simply means more work for the same salary, without the corresponding support or authority.

When trust in leadership erodes to these levels, institutional change becomes nearly impossible to implement. Addressing this perception and reversing the value deficit are prerequisites for any meaningful stabilization of museum leadership positions.

Strategic Advice: Build a New Ladder

To stabilize the ship, the TW 2026 report offers clear directives for current leaders and, crucially, for museum boards.

For the Museum:

• Democratize Strategy: Incorporate all levels of staff in financial and strategic discussions.
• Cultivate Opportunity: Facilitate and encourage leadership growth both within and outside the museum.
• Meaningful Advancement: Develop career paths that offer genuine satisfaction, not just more tasks.
• Real Investment: Dedicate actual time and budget to staff development.

For the Museum Board:

• Redefine Qualifications: Educate the board on the shifting nature of what a qualified leader looks like in today’s environment.
• Level Setting Expectations: Challenge the board to reform performance expectations and success metrics.
• Succession is Strategy: Prioritize succession planning as a core board responsibility to ensure institutional continuity.

Addressing the leadership pipeline challenge requires a unified front between day-to-day management and the governing board. Implementing these directives is no longer optional—it’s a survival strategy. By treating leadership development as a core institutional priority rather than a luxury, we can begin to transform these roles from holding unsustainable burdens into compelling opportunities for the next generation.

Connections and Insights: The Think Clearly Blog Archive

My previous posts provide a historical roadmap of the labor issues that have culminated in today’s leadership vacuum. These posts help highlight the multifaceted issues present for museum leadership and staff at large:

• The Broken Pipeline: My 2022 and 2023 museum forecasts highlighted a dangerous trend: the accelerated elimination of stable, entry-level roles in favor of precarious, term-limited, or gig labor. This directly supports the TW 2026 finding that younger workers aren’t just unable to climb the organizational ladder—they no longer want to.
• Persistent Burnout and Atrophy: Since Museum Forecast 2024, I have tracked pervasive burnout as a primary driver of field-wide atrophy. As noted in my A Year in Review 2024, this exhaustion is fueled by a toxic combination of inequitable pay and high-stress work environments—factors that make the jump to leadership feel more like a liability than an achievement.
• Unsustainable Roles: The TW 2026 report quotes current leaders who describe their positions as emotionally unsustainable. This mirrors the data in my 2025 and 2026 museum forecasts, which documented how leaders are being pulled in impossible directions by the competing demands of boards, donors, and a hyper-critical and politically divided public.

These past observations underline a sobering reality: we cannot solve the leadership crisis without first fixing these foundational labor issues.

The Structural Cracks in the Pipeline

The leadership crisis is about more than vacant offices—it’s a fundamental challenge to the health of museum labor. If we want the next generation to step up, we have to transform these roles from sacrificial to sustainable. By prioritizing internal mentorship, diversifying our idea of what a leader looks like, and fostering a culture of mutual trust, we can rebuild a pipeline that is both resilient and equitable.