By Darcy Eikenberg
Once upon a time in our world of work, a young professional might dream of a long-term career in a large, respected organization. There, she would increasingly take on more responsibility, expanding her opportunities to grow. She’d become a key contributor to the organization’s success. In return, she’d have the chance to build personal and generational wealth, while also making a positive impact on the lives of colleagues, teams, and even customers or clients.
While these dreams still exist for some, senior executives and their boards are increasingly faced with a dangerous trend—the growing choice by smart, able professionals to decline opportunities to move into advanced managerial and leader-level positions.
In the past two years, many of the senior leaders and boards wrote this trend off as a temporary reflex to the dramatic lifestyle changes many employees made during the COVID-19 pandemic. Others believe it’s generational, a symptom of digital-first, iPad-raised Gen Zers who simply don’t want to get more involved.
It’s dangerous to live in these assumptions, since now, five years later, many leaders and boards struggle—and often, express surprise—because they don’t have obvious, ready-now successors for senior leaders who are retiring or need to be replaced.
Plus, it can be challenging to fill this huge gap by hiring from the outside, since senior-level hires are not only more expensive to recruit and compensate but also have a higher chance of failing, with half leaving in the first 18 months, as I noted in my article in Chief Talent Officer (“Why Your Senior-Level New Hire Isn’t Working Out”).
The trend of opting out of higher management and leadership roles is creating a smaller pool of talent on the path to senior leadership. Gallup’s latest “State of the Global Workplace” report (2025) helps illustrate this trend. Its global research found that most U.S. managers—over two-thirds—report they would say “no thanks” if offered higher leadership roles.
That gap will soon become a crevasse as more than 11,200 people will turn 65 every day from 2024 through 2027, according to the Retirement Income Institute at the Alliance for Lifetime Income. While actual retirement ages vary significantly as people’s economic or health needs change, it’s clear that now is the time to fill those gaps—fast.
SURPRISING FORCES AT PLAY
Why do talented professionals with management potential self-censor or directly decline opportunities to step forward? And what can senior executives do about it, especially when the gap, left unattended, will grow?
It’s true that research from Deloitte (“2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey”) shows that Gen Z (born between 1997 and 2012; age 13 to 28 in 2025) and millennials (born between 1981 and 1996; age 29 to 44 in 2025) are not motivated by reaching elevated leadership positions.
However, this data is nuanced. These early- and mid-career professionals absolutely want to learn and succeed, and they want financial security that moving up in an organization can bring. What they are less willing to do, however, is compromise their personal well-being to get there and so hold less belief that both are possible.
To support those beliefs, employees see their own managers stretched thin, under pressure to deliver results while navigating endless tactics, bureaucracy, and distractions. AMA’s own research of approximately 1,100 managers, directors, VPs, and executives found that just 48% said they spent more than half of their workweek implementing the organization’s strategy—typically the work that feels rewarding or progress-making. In organizations with more than 10,000 employees, for 1 in 5 leaders, or 21%, that number dropped to less than a quarter of their time.
Based on work with both executives and their line teams, three core strategies have been uncovered that we can use now to help more professionals see what’s possible in upper-level roles—including flexibility and work-life balance—so that they’ll say “yes” more often when opportunities arise.
Strategy 1: Overcommunicate Your Leadership Story
In today’s hyper-connected workplace, employees aren’t just observers—they’re frontline witnesses to leadership in action, both the admirable and the alarming. More often than not, it’s the negative that grabs attention.
Employees see organizations such as Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft shedding mid-management roles they were anxious to fill just a few years earlier. In addition, Citigroup was preparing to eliminate five layers of management, according to its CEO Jane Fraser in an interview with Financial News of London. These moves, made to save costs, streamline processes, and allow artificial intelligence to do more, send a message that management is risky and ultimately can fail.
That means organizations must overcome the external noise which suggests that management is a waste or, worse, evil. This isn’t corporate communications’ job. It’s up to each executive and leader-level person to remember they are a role model for someone to see what’s possible.
It’s critical that organizational leaders regularly communicate what they’re doing, how they’re making decisions, and even more important, how they’re managing through change personally and emotionally. They need to continually talk not only about what they’re leading but also who they are striving to become in their role.
For example, I worked with Andre (name changed to preserve anonymity), an executive vice president at a large consulting firm. As he advanced in the organization, Andre was taught to tighten his communication style and be “efficient.” But recent 360-degree feedback revealed his team didn’t understand the decisions he made and didn’t trust who he was.
That led us to develop a personal communication plan to increase his level of storytelling, to resist the urge to keep everything brief and instead share more background regularly, and to voice his personal aspirations about the kind of leader he’s striving to be. Andre’s team is now excited and motivated due to these changes, and he’s painting an attractive and possible picture about what leading can look like.
This type of communication style is a huge change for many. It’s more personal and reflective—and more powerful. Now more than ever, leaders need to be able to signal how they’re handling their own well-being and what choices they’re making to not only do their work but also take care of their families and themselves.
Strategy 2: Reprioritize People Management
When coaching groups of up-and-coming leaders, it’s not unusual to hear a new or future leader say, “I’d love this job—if it wasn’t for the people.” We laugh, but that perspective is a sad one for today’s ambitious organization.
What we forget—personally and often organizationally—is that people aren’t our burden.
Working with people is the work, no matter what we make or sell. But too many of our “manager” roles are designed to prioritize managing products or processes, when in fact the most important role any manager has is in managing people.
Why does this happen? Organizations continually make the mistake of promoting the individual contributor who does the job best. But those professionals soon find that doing the work is substantially different from leading the work. In fact, according to 2023 data from ADP Research, almost 30% of employees left their employer within a month after a promotion. While some leave for better opportunities, others leave because they don’t have the tools to succeed. They feel exposed, isolated, and underprepared when they previously felt confident and competent.
Instead, smart executives and boards are actively rethinking the role of people leadership. While the model of the “working manager” isn’t going away, many companies are reexamining the balance of responsibilities to accurately reflect the added responsibility that’s required of most roles today: managing the emotional labor.
As explained in their book Emotionally Charged: How to Lead in the New World of Work (Oxford University Press, 2025), authors Dina Denham Smith and Alicia A. Grandey define emotional labor as the effort required to manage your own emotions—and the emotional experiences of others—to meet the expectations of your role. It’s not just about staying calm under pressure; it’s about intentionally regulating how you feel and how you express those feelings to influence others positively.
This pressure gets elevated in common but complicated contexts involving remote work, technological disruptions such as artificial intelligence, and diverse, non-office-based workforces. In fact, according to LinkedIn’s 2025 Workforce Confidence survey, about 30% of employees report having bosses who are too stressed to support them at work, which is direct evidence of emotional labor being left off the to-do list.
Rethinking and reprioritizing where managers spend their time requires a fundamental acceptance of this universal truth: Emotional labor is real, and people take time. When manager roles are stuffed full with tasks, there’s no room left for the emotional labor of people. And when we’re not focusing on our people, we won’t create environments where they want to stay and eventually lead.
Strategy 3: Create Cohorts of Future Leaders Now
Early- and mid-career generations share one thing: They’re lonelier than ever. Plus, in hybrid or remote-first workplaces, it’s hard to connect with co-workers on a personal level, much less build friendships and support networks that have been foundational in previous generations.
A simple solution is to create manager cohorts from across your organization. These cohorts, often with a common facilitator or coach across a period of 6 to 12 months, accelerate learning and connection by creating a structured opportunity for managers to share experiences, discuss challenges, and gain new perspectives from each other.
Cohorts help normalize the struggles that come with leadership, reminding participants that the learning curve is a shared experience rather than an individual burden. Having a regular, committed cadre of colleagues from across the organization allows us to not only get support and solutions for our challenges but also recognize we’re not alone in facing them. Manager cohorts also become powerful early-detection devices for failed business or people strategies, since the proof shows up first on the front lines.
Overall, creating manager cohorts is not just a development tool but a strategic investment in leadership continuity. It helps build a pipeline of capable, confident leaders who are better prepared to navigate the complexities of modern workplaces. Finally, building closer partnerships—and friendships—with people at similar levels or progressions makes it less likely your up-and-comer will make a big decision all alone.
THE LEAKS AREN’T PERMANENT UNLESS YOU FAIL TO ACT
If you’re concerned that your top talent is opting out of management roles, don’t make the mistake of waiting too long to take an action. It’s easy for a busy senior executive group or board to fall into the trap of confirmation bias and believe the gap is just a temporary blip.
Consider this your warning bell that unless we work now to create better ways of communicating the leadership story, reprioritizing people management, and connecting future leaders together, we won’t have the talent we need to take us into the future, especially as current leaders retire or leave for health and family reasons themselves.
We don’t need to lament about a leaky leadership pipeline. We need to patch the leaks, expand the funnel, and actively invite our amazing professionals into it.
Darcy Eikenberg is an executive coach, leadership speaker, and author of Red Cape Rescue: Save Your Career Without Leaving Your Job. She works with leaders and teams to help them lead better without losing themselves. For free tools and resources, visit her at RedCapeRevolution.com.