Why is the leadership gap widening?

The leadership gap is widening because the nature of leadership has changed faster than the way organisations develop leaders. Many teams still speak about leadership as if it is a personality trait or a title you inherit once you reach a certain level of seniority. In reality, leadership today is a set of behaviours that must be learned, practised, and supported, especially in fast moving environments. When companies scale quickly, the demand for steady leadership rises sharply, but the supply of people who have had the time and space to grow into that responsibility does not rise at the same pace.

Speed is the first and most obvious driver. Startups and high growth teams compress timelines. What used to be a gradual journey from individual contributor to manager to senior leader can get squeezed into a year. Teams expand, new markets open, and expectations multiply. Yet leadership maturity cannot be rushed in the same way product iterations can. You can ship a feature faster with better tools, tighter feedback loops, and clearer sprints. You cannot shortcut the internal skills that allow someone to guide others through uncertainty, handle conflict calmly, give feedback without damaging trust, and make decisions that disappoint some people without falling apart emotionally. When the organisation grows faster than the people inside it, the gap starts to show.

This problem deepens when companies fill leadership roles faster than they can create leaders. A new team appears, a new product line launches, and suddenly there is a need for someone to “own” the function. The most common solution is to promote the highest performing individual contributor, the person with the most context and the most visible output. That can work in the short term, but it often creates a mismatch. Excellence at execution does not automatically translate into the ability to coach, align, and manage the work of others. A promotion can double someone’s responsibilities while removing the conditions that made them successful, such as uninterrupted time to focus and a clear definition of what good work looks like. The result is a manager who is stretched thin, not because they lack potential, but because the role was designed like an upgrade, when it is actually a different job.

In many organisations, leadership is assessed through competence rather than capacity. Competence is what you can observe in stable conditions. Capacity is what emerges when conditions become unstable. Some people look like leaders when the roadmap is clear, the team is calm, and the goals are straightforward. Fewer people look like leaders when the numbers miss, a key client threatens to leave, and internal tension rises. The widening gap is partly a measurement issue. Teams reward what is visible and measurable, then expect invisible leadership skills to appear later without recognising that those skills require deliberate development.

Founder led cultures can intensify the gap in a subtle way. In early stage companies, the founder often becomes the default source of direction, confidence, and decision making. This is understandable, especially when speed and stakes are high. The downside is that the team can become trained to orbit around the founder’s judgment. People wait for approval, align to the founder’s tone, and hesitate to act independently in moments of uncertainty. That pattern may feel efficient when the team is small, but it becomes fragile as the team grows. By the time you need delegation, you may realise you have built dependency. When independent decision making has not been practised, leaders do not emerge naturally. They remain hesitant, second guess themselves, and escalate decisions upward, which creates bottlenecks and slows everything down.

The gap also widens because modern workplaces have weakened apprenticeship. In more traditional environments, people learned leadership by proximity. They observed how senior leaders ran meetings, handled tension, negotiated tradeoffs, and communicated under pressure. Not all of those examples were healthy, but the exposure was real. In many modern teams, especially remote or hybrid ones, those moments are hidden in private chats, rushed through, or avoided entirely. A new manager can have the title without ever seeing what effective management looks like in practice. Without models, people rely on instinct, scattered advice, or leadership content that may not match their context. That creates inconsistency, and inconsistency is one of the fastest ways to erode trust.

Remote work adds its own pressure. Leading in person allows for small, frequent repairs. A quick check in after a tense meeting, a supportive conversation in a corridor, a shared meal that restores connection, all of these help prevent misunderstandings from hardening. Remote leadership demands deliberate clarity. Expectations must be written, rituals must be predictable, and silence must be interpreted carefully. Many first time leaders are not trained for that kind of intentional communication. Tools can support collaboration, but they cannot substitute for trust. When trust is thin, remote teams feel it earlier and more sharply.

Another driver is churn. Tenures are shorter, roles shift rapidly, and teams restructure often. This makes the middle layer of leadership unstable. That middle layer matters because it carries daily accountability, translates strategy into action, and keeps culture consistent. When churn rises, organisations often hesitate to invest in leadership development. Training feels like a risk if people might leave. But the lack of investment becomes one of the reasons people do leave. Many managers do not quit because they lack ambition. They quit because they feel isolated in a role that demands more than they were prepared for, and they do not believe the organisation will support their growth.

At the same time, expectations of leaders have expanded. Leaders are now expected to deliver outcomes, hire and develop talent, communicate constantly, carry culture, resolve conflict, and support well being, often without any reduction in the workload underneath. This is where many organisations create a trap. They ask managers to coach and execute, protect the team and push the team, maintain morale and enforce standards. If the role is not designed with realistic scope and clear priorities, the manager ends up failing someone no matter what they do. Over time, that produces burnout, reactivity, and avoidance. From the outside it looks like weak leadership. From the inside it is often a predictable result of too much pressure and too little structure.

Cultural context can also shape the gap in ways teams rarely name. In many Southeast Asian workplaces, people are trained to be polite, to avoid confrontation, and to maintain harmony. This can make feedback too gentle and conflict too delayed, until problems become too large to handle quietly. In other contexts, hierarchy can make upward feedback feel unsafe, leading people to wait for authority signals rather than take initiative. These patterns are not moral failures. They are environmental realities that leaders must navigate. If organisations ignore cultural dynamics, they end up blaming individuals for behaviours that are shaped by norms and incentives.

So the leadership gap feels wider now because the demand for leadership is rising while the conditions that produce strong leaders are weakening. Teams are scaling across regions earlier. Work is more volatile. Stakes are higher. Mistakes spread faster through internal channels and external networks. At the same time, employees have less patience for unclear, chaotic, or disrespectful environments. Younger talent in particular is less likely to stay somewhere that treats dysfunction as a rite of passage. The bar for leadership has risen, but the development pipeline has not kept up.

The uncomfortable truth is that many companies do not build leaders. They try to borrow them. They hire senior titles and hope experience will solve structural issues. Sometimes it helps, but often even experienced leaders struggle if the organisation lacks clarity, consistent decision making, and a culture that supports accountability. Leadership is not just expertise. It is the ability to create alignment under uncertainty and to maintain trust while holding standards. Without the right system, leadership becomes exhausting rather than effective.

A useful way to recognise the gap is to look at what happens when something goes wrong. Do people get clearer, or do they get louder? Do decisions become faster, or do they become political? Do managers coach, or do they avoid? Do leaders create alignment, or do they retreat into execution? These patterns reveal whether the issue is a lack of skill, a lack of structure, or a lack of support. The leadership gap is not widening because people are weaker. It is widening because organisations keep asking people to lead without giving them the time, training, and psychological safety to grow into leadership. Many managers are not failing because they lack talent. They are struggling because the system mistakes responsibility for resilience and calls it ownership, when it is often abandonment. If teams want the gap to stop widening, they must treat leadership as a capability to be built, not a trait to be discovered.