The bargain has changed
For most of the last century, the career bargain was straightforward. You got good at the work, then you got promoted to lead others. The title, the pay and the influence followed.
That bargain is losing its pull.
In a 2025 YouGov survey of more than 2,000 UK employees, commissioned by Investors in People, 52% of those in middle-leadership roles and below said they did not see leading others as an aspirational career path. Some said they actively avoid it.
The reluctance extends to people already in the role. A 2025 Gartner survey of 3,000 employees found that one in four people leaders would prefer not to lead people. Two years earlier it was one in five.
This is not simply a problem with attracting the next generation of leaders. It is also a problem with retaining the willingness of those already doing the job.
Most commentary treats this as a generational quirk. The evidence points at the role itself.
The reality of the role
The job has grown. Gallup puts the average leader's team at 12.1 direct reports in 2025, up from 10.9 a year earlier and around half as many again as in 2013. Organisations have removed layers to cut costs and speed up decisions. The work those layers did has not disappeared. It has moved to whoever is left.
The result is a role that carries more responsibility without necessarily offering more authority, support or time to fulfil it.
Engagement has gone the other way. Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2026 report found engagement among people leaders fell from 27% to 22% in 2025, the largest single-year fall it has recorded for that group. People leaders have historically been more engaged than the teams they lead. That advantage has all but gone.
Anyone deciding whether to step up can see this. They watch their own leader absorb pressure from above and below, carry personal targets and stay available at all hours. They set that against the extra pay. In the Investors in People research, 54% of those who did not want the role said it carried too much stress.
The reluctance to lead is not necessarily a people problem. It may be a consequence of how organisations have designed the role.
The skill that goes first
Leading people has many parts. The one most at risk is developing others.
It is also the slowest to learn. Developing someone means giving them work you could do faster yourself. It means asking a question when you already know the answer, and letting them get it partly wrong. It means being able to offer challenging feedback about why their last piece of work missed while at the same time keeping the person engaged in the outcome. The results take longer to show than quarterly reporting allows for.
Few people arrive knowing how to do this work well. Gallup says as much, and notes that many leaders have never been trained to coach. Robert Walters reports that three in five UK leaders have had no formal training at all. The skill is built by doing it, imperfectly at first, with real people and real stakes.
A stretched or reluctant leader doesn't necessarily decide to stop developing people. The activity simply gets put lower down the priority list. Delivery cannot wait and it's always tempting to take the fastest route to execution rather than taking the time to teach.
AI makes the deferral easier still. A leader can now produce more alone, often faster than they could by involving someone less experienced. Delegating becomes harder to justify against immediate delivery pressures. The stretch assignment that might have developed a future leader never gets handed over.
The efficiency gain is immediate. The capability lost is harder to see.
What the plan doesn't show
Every succession plan rests on two assumptions. There are people who have been developed for the next role. And they want it.
Both are weakening, and neither necessarily shows up on the plan.
Most succession plans are better at recording readiness than willingness. They identify who could take the role, but rarely establish whether that person has experienced the realities of leading others, or whether they actually want the responsibility.
A succession plan lists names against roles. It does not record whether those people have led a team through a difficult year, or whether anyone invested the time to get them ready. It does not record whether they would say yes.
The gap remains invisible until succession becomes urgent: an unexpected departure, a board decision, a restructure. The named successor turns out to be a strong individual performer who has never been developed as a leader of others. Or they decline. By then, the time to do anything about it has passed.
Development is how the pipeline fills. When the people doing the developing are fewer, more stretched and less willing, the pipeline thins long before anyone looks at the plan.
The assumption we haven't tested
The prevailing view is that the human side of leadership will matter more as AI absorbs routine work. That may well be right. But it rests on an assumption organisations have given surprisingly little attention to: that there will be people willing and able to lead others, and that someone has prepared them to do so.
Who in your organisation is getting better at developing other people, and how would you know?
If your strongest candidates don't want the role, what does your succession plan actually contain?
Sources: Investors in People and YouGov, The Broken Ladder (survey of 2,031 UK employees, February–March 2025); Gartner employee survey (3,000 employees, May 2025); Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2026; Gallup research on span of control (2026); Robert Walters research on UK manager training (2024).