3 Reasons For The Coming Leadership Deficit—And How To Fix It

With a third of employees now saying they never want to become a manager, we have to ask: What is making leadership roles so unattractive?

In my early days in the workforce, career advancement was the goal of everyone I knew. We were all looking for that next promotion, that next step up the corporate ladder as a measure of our career success. So naturally, there was never a lack of candidates jockeying to fill leadership roles as they became available. The biggest challenge most companies faced in this arena was finding and developing talent that was truly leadership material.

But organizations today are facing a different challenge: Sourcing employees who are not only the stuff that leaders are made of, but who actually want to take a leadership position.

The 2024 Randstad Workmonitor study found that a third of employees (34%) never want to become managers. Like, never. Not only that, but 39% don’t even want to be promoted. Fifty-one percent are content with no advancement opportunities, if they’re in a role they like.

This is a huge shift, and one that many Baby Boomer leaders like myself could find hard to grasp. I hail from a day when promotions were courted and coveted, when you went above and beyond to impress the powers that be with your ability to take charge—when the corner office was the ultimate career destination that signaled a simple truth: you’d arrived.

The rise of Gen Z at work—and their new emphasis on finding fulfillment outside of their professional lives—is likely just one factor driving the leadership deficit. In 2024 and beyond, the question is not ‘how do we narrow down to the best leaders?’, but rather, ‘how do we motivate our talent to reach their leadership potential?’

3 things workers don’t want

Before organizations will be able to motivate talent to step into leadership roles, they must understand why these roles have become so unattractive to so many people in recent years. The Randstad data offers 3 reasons why people are rethinking ambition in a post-pandemic world—all of which could contribute to a future leadership deficit.

1. They don’t want more money if it means less work-life balance. When workers are considering a new job, they prioritize having better work-life balance (57%) slightly higher than making more money (55%). For the first time in this study, workers rank work-life balance in their current role as highly as pay, outstripping all other considerations (93%).
2. They don’t want work to become their identity. Their personal life was rated as more important than work by 60% of respondents. Perhaps these workers see their managers swallowed up in work-related concerns and fear the same thing would happen to them if they moved up the ranks.
3. They don’t want inflexible work arrangements. Nearly 2 in 5 respondents won’t compromise on working from home, and 37% would consider quitting if they were forced to spend more time in the office. The implications for leadership ambitions are obvious: if organizations require managers to work specific hours or only onsite, that’s an immediate deal-breaker for workers who prize flexibility and the ability to work from home.

Incisive questions, real answers

In addition to these data points, organizations may need to ask themselves some incisive questions about why a leadership role in their specific context may not appeal to a large segment of the workforce.

• Are our current leaders happy? If not, why not?
• Do we frequently ask our current leaders to make personal sacrifices for the company?
• Do our middle managers feel supported—or scapegoated—by upper-level management?
• Are we offering our current leaders the ongoing L&D opportunities they need?
• Do we play politics or favorites amongst our leadership team?
• Do we fairly compensate our current leaders?
• What’s our leadership turnover rate, and what is the biggest factor in why leaders quit?
• How can we support our culture influencers who don’t want to be formal leaders?

To expand on that last question, imagine an employee who likes their job and has no desire to manage people, but has great relationships with fellow employees at all levels of the organization. This individual is a culture influencer—and may have more clout than we’d think. Leaders should think creatively about how to support the positive influence such employees have, without formalizing it into an official management position.

Not everyone is cut out to be a leader in the traditional sense of becoming a manager—and that’s ok.

Making leadership appealing

So if those are some potential reasons employees don’t want to make the leap to management, what might make such a move attractive in their eyes? Based on Randstad’s findings, I’d offer several pieces of advice to make a leadership role more appealing.

• Don’t just talk about a healthy work-life balance for leaders—model it. Making healthy work-life boundaries a part of your culture is important, but it must go beyond being just a talking point. Upper-level management must also model work-life balance in their own lives. If they don’t, the message sent will be that having time for your personal life is just for the rank and file—not really for leaders.
• Offer robust skill development opportunities for leaders, especially in emerging technologies like artificial intelligence. Randstad found that 72% of respondents want to stay on top of new skills and value an employer that supports their growth.
• Be as flexible as possible. Every company has different needs, but flexibility is a non-negotiable benefit for a growing segment of the workforce. It may be time to step back and really evaluate any areas where a little extra flexibility could significantly enhance the leader experience.
• Give leaders the ability to make a positive difference. Today’s younger generations in particular care a great deal about social and environmental causes. Part of reframing management as an attractive career path may be emphasizing their ability to make a positive difference within the organization—and the world.

If we don’t develop leaders

What happens if the leadership gap continues to grow wider? Many companies are already struggling with weak leadership benches and may eventually find themselves with no one on the bench at all. Aside from that, a leadership shortage could lead to catastrophic burnout for the leaders who do remain. As in education, the workforce at large may find itself killing the survivors among its leadership.

It’s vital for organizations to be proactive about making leadership roles once again an attractive proposition for high-potential employees who are no longer motivated by just money or a fancy job title. To accept the burden of leadership, individuals must see that they can make a positive difference within the organization—and still have a life outside work.