Why don't people want to be leaders?

Many employees are not excited about moving up the corporate ladder and this might represent a future crisis for organizations. 

According to a recent survey — done by people analytics company Visier — only 38% of current employees yearn to become leaders.

The remaining 62% would prefer to stay as individual contributors. When broken down by gender, 44% of men are interested in becoming people managers at their current organization versus 32% of women.

Maybe that’s because employees are shifting their priorities away from work. Workplace-related ambitions do not even crack the top three ambitions for respondents, finds the survey of 1,000 U.S. employees in August. Instead, the list includes:

• spending time with family and friends (67%)
• being physically/mentally healthy (64%)
• traveling (58%).

So, does this represent a true crisis and is there a succession gap organizations need to become concerned with?

Pandemic influences on leadership

“Everything we went through as a society during the pandemic, I think a lot of people have come out the other side realizing that there’s more to things than just their jobs, and that while their work is important, and they can derive meaning from their work, that there are other things in their life that are important to them as well, that they want to derive meaning from and enjoy,” says John Trougakos, professor of organizational behaviour and HR management, department of management, at the University of Toronto in Scarborough, Ont.

In addition, people leaders also went through challenging times during the pandemic, which may have tempered employee ambition, he says.

“I’m sure that employees seeing their leaders stressed out, and how far they were stretched, maybe it was an indicator or a wake-up call to them that maybe those kinds of positions are not all they’re cracked up to be.”

Around 500,000 workers take time off every week in Canada due to various stressors, found another survey.

Changing the conversation around leadership

The problem might not be a lack of ambition from the younger cohort of workers such as millennials or generation Z, says another academic.

“It’s largely opinion, we don’t have a really strong research to draw on, but it starts with a framing issue. If you speak to a younger generation, and talk to them about ‘Would you like to mentor someone? Would you like to help someone progress in their career? Would you like to teach people? Would you want to facilitate a team and their performance?’ Because a lot of the weight to deal with things does fall on leaders and executives and so it’s not inconceivable that part of this is attributable to that factor,” says Adam Presslee, associate professor, co-director of the Centre for Sustainability Reporting and Performance Management at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ont.

Speaking about his own set of 4th-year students, perspectives around work are changing.

“I’m not seeing this issue where students don’t want to have that responsibility, whether it’s middle manager or above, but rather they want to skip that early stage where a lot of growth is needed. They want to jump right into the spaces of responsibility,” says Presslee.

Saying young workers crave more free time is not accurate, he says.

“There’s evidence and research that shows that they want freedom instead of not necessarily free time; they don’t want to work less but they want to have freedom with their time.”

Leading with empathy is seen as the best way to engage with the workforce, according to another study.

Return to office for management unappealing

Some frontline employees who are used to working at home for a large part of the week might not want to change this aspect right away, says Trougakos.

“If you were to say to people, ‘Are you going to take this managerial position?’ and that means that person has to get onboard with being in the office more, that can be another thing that triggers them to say, ‘I’m not that interested in that, and I’m happy having my balance here,’ and this means giving up two days or three days a week being able to work remotely, then there’s not something they’re really that keen to explore.”

Because many young workers missed the in-office interaction after they were hired during the pandemic, it’s time to give them some of the personal interaction that older generations took for granted in pre-COVID times, he says.

“We do know from decades of working that effective mentoring, effective organizational socialization, effective career development initiatives by organizations are important to strengthen employee skills; and maybe people have a lack of confidence in some generations… the generation that would have had the interruption in their career development,” says Trougakos.

“Companies were quite bogged down just getting through the pandemic, and then other kinds of initiatives could have fallen by the wayside and so hopefully, these initiatives are restarting and being reimplemented, as we normalize the way we work here.”