What companies can do to fix the leadership gap?

Companies often talk about a leadership gap as if it is caused by a shortage of talent in the market, as if there simply are not enough capable leaders to go around. That explanation is attractive because it shifts the problem outward. Yet in many organizations, the gap is not something discovered. It is something created. It forms when teams grow faster than decision making, when management becomes an afterthought, and when companies promote people into leadership roles without building the conditions that allow leadership to succeed. Over time, this produces the familiar symptoms: managers who struggle, teams that feel unsupported, work that slows down, and a growing belief that strong leaders are rare. The more accurate truth is that leadership is not rare. What is rare is a company that treats leadership as a system that can be designed, maintained, and improved.

One of the most common causes of a widening leadership gap is the way promotions are handled. Many companies promote based on visible performance in an individual role, then assume the skills that made someone a high performer will automatically translate into managing people. In reality, leadership is a different job, not a reward for past output. Individual contribution is largely about personal speed and precision. Leadership is about multiplying the output of others by creating clarity, building trust, developing capability, and preventing the leader from becoming the bottleneck. When organizations promote without acknowledging this difference, they set up new managers to fail. The newly promoted leader often falls back on what they already know, which is doing the work themselves, holding the most important decisions tightly, and trying to protect outcomes by controlling details. The team then experiences less autonomy, less growth, and more friction. Performance dips, and the company concludes the manager was not “leadership material,” when the real mistake was treating leadership as something that appears naturally rather than something that must be developed intentionally.

Fixing the leadership gap begins with replacing the idea of ad hoc promotions and occasional training with the discipline of a leadership pipeline. A pipeline assumes that leadership capability can be cultivated through stages. It requires companies to define what readiness looks like at each level, not as vague traits, but as observable behaviors tied to real outcomes. A first time manager is not simply someone who is respected by peers. They need to show they can set priorities, run a steady cadence, handle conflicts early, and give feedback that improves results within a reasonable time. As the level rises, the demands shift from supervising tasks to designing roles, building systems, and strengthening decision quality across teams. When organizations make these expectations explicit, leadership stops being a mystery and becomes a craft with clear markers of progress.

A pipeline also prevents a common organizational trap: waiting until a management vacancy appears to start thinking about leadership. By then, the company is pressured to choose quickly, often relying on personal impressions and internal popularity. A stronger approach is to give potential leaders opportunities to practice the job before they receive the title. If a company wants better managers, it should create environments where people can run projects, coordinate across functions, onboard new hires, and learn to handle accountability in situations that matter. These experiences reveal who naturally brings clarity, who can hold a team steady under stress, and who can make tradeoffs without collapsing into indecision. They also offer a safer space to coach and correct mistakes early. In this way, the company stops gambling on promotions and starts building readiness through deliberate exposure.

Selection itself needs to be redesigned, because most organizations still rely on weak signals when choosing leaders. Confidence in meetings, high visibility, and strong individual performance can all look like leadership, but they do not guarantee it. A more reliable approach is to evaluate candidates through scenarios that simulate the real job. Instead of asking abstract questions about leadership style, companies should watch how a candidate handles a difficult team dynamic, a slipping deadline with unclear ownership, or conflicting stakeholder demands. These situations require the core mechanics of leadership: diagnosing what matters, communicating clearly, making decisions with incomplete information, and balancing people needs with business realities. Companies should also pay attention to motivation, because not everyone who wants management wants it for the right reasons. Some seek leadership for status or control, while others want to build people and systems. The difference becomes costly when the wrong motivation shapes behavior over time.

Even strong selection and training will not close a leadership gap if the manager role is structurally broken. Many companies overload managers with too many direct reports, too many meetings, and too little real authority. In that environment, management becomes reactive. Instead of coaching, managers spend their days triaging issues and pushing information upward. When decision rights are unclear, managers are reduced to messengers rather than owners. When spans of control are too wide, individual coaching becomes impossible and team development slows down. When managers are expected to deliver both high individual output and full people leadership, they end up doing neither well. Fixing this requires the same discipline companies apply to other forms of capacity planning. Leadership cannot be demanded without being resourced. If organizations want managers to develop others, they must create roles that allow time and authority for that work.

A key part of building real leadership is establishing a coaching cadence that turns leadership from a vague expectation into a measurable practice. Without cadence, leadership becomes reactive, and feedback only appears when something breaks. A steady rhythm of one on ones, team reviews, and structured growth conversations gives managers the repeated opportunities to clarify priorities, surface obstacles early, and develop talent continuously rather than in annual bursts. The point of cadence is not to create more meetings. The point is to create consistent moments where leadership happens. Over time, these moments generate visible results: fewer surprises, faster conflict resolution, smoother onboarding, and stronger performance stability. Leadership then becomes something the organization can observe and improve, rather than something it only notices when it is missing.

This is also the point where metrics can support leadership without turning it into a cold scorecard. Companies can track indicators that reflect leadership quality, such as regrettable attrition, internal mobility, onboarding time, engagement patterns, and delivery predictability. These measures are not perfect, and they should not be used to punish managers. They are useful because they show whether leadership behaviors are producing healthier teams and more reliable execution. When organizations use these signals as feedback for coaching and development, leadership becomes more concrete and less dependent on personal opinions.

Another reason leadership gaps persist is misaligned incentives. Managers do what they are rewarded to do, even when those incentives contradict stated values. If the company rewards only short term output, managers may squeeze teams, avoid tough coaching, and push people toward burnout. If it rewards empire building, managers may optimize for headcount rather than impact. If it rewards the appearance of calm, managers may hide problems until they become crises. Closing the leadership gap requires incentives that support durable performance, not just quarterly wins. Companies need to recognize and promote leaders who create new leaders, who stabilize teams, and who build systems that let others succeed. Culture reinforces these incentives as well. When senior leaders celebrate heroics and tolerate chaos, they teach the organization that firefighting matters more than clarity. When they undermine managers publicly or override decisions without explanation, they signal that authority is fragile and accountability is optional. These patterns quietly expand the leadership gap because they discourage managers from developing real ownership.

Ultimately, the organizations that close leadership gaps do so by treating leadership the way they treat critical infrastructure. They stop assuming it will emerge naturally and start designing it. A useful way to think about this is to treat leadership like a product the company builds for itself. Products have users, onboarding, feedback loops, and quality standards. Managers and teams are the users of the leadership system. New managers need structured onboarding. Leadership practices need feedback loops through skip level conversations, retrospectives, and coaching reviews. Leadership quality needs to be monitored through both performance and people outcomes. When the system falls short, the solution is not to blame individuals and replace them repeatedly. The solution is to improve the design so the organization can consistently produce capable leaders.

A leadership gap is rarely solved through one training program or one hiring push. It is solved when leadership becomes an operating discipline. Companies that make this shift look different in daily life. Decisions happen closer to the work because authority is clear. Teams move faster because priorities are stable. Managers coach because their job is designed to make that possible. People grow because development is continuous rather than occasional. These companies do not appear to have magically better talent. They appear to have fewer preventable breakdowns, because leadership is built into the way they run. In the end, the most practical way to fix the leadership gap is to stop treating leadership as an individual trait and start treating it as a system the company is responsible for building.