Leadership at companies is at an all-time low across industries and the world

The international work community has a leadership problem: They don’t have enough of them. At least that’s what the 2021 Global Leadership Forecast revealed in its new report about the state of managerial classes around the world.

Leadership benches are weak

Only 11% of organizations surveyed for the new analysis reported that they have a “strong” or “very strong” leadership bench—a term that denotes the competence and number of employees ready to fill vacant leadership roles at a given firm.

This 11% figure marks a 10-year low. The highest global average rating for bench strength ever reported in the Global Leadership Forecast was 18% all the way back in 2011. This figure was also appreciated as an extremely low figure at the time by industry insiders.

Many of the executives involved in the new report cited a stressful transition as a primary reason for their lack of success as company leaders. Other respondents reported a lack of leadership development tools and transition training for newly hired and current executives.

“We found that organizations with high-quality leadership development programs not only have higher-quality leaders, but a significantly stronger bench,” the researchers said in a media release.

How the data was gathered

The report is based on a new survey conducted by Development Dimensions International (DDI). Responses were collected between February 2020 and July 2020; the company polled more than 15,000 leaders and 2,100 human resource professionals, representing 1,740 organizations in 24 different industries globally.

The authors allude to a “lost generation of leaders” that sees companies hiring executives who are not fully prepared to drive up company profits and productivity.

“Whether someone becomes a first-time manager or is stepping into a C-suite role, the transitional period has a huge impact on their leadership brand, their team’s performance, and long-term effectiveness,” the authors write.

Success rates for executives hired internally were found to be roughly 25% higher than external hires. In both cases, leadership developing programs dramatically improved leadership benches.

Gender and stress are factors in leadership

Generally speaking, executives who gave themselves low ratings said that they lacked support, feedback, development, and assessment tools to effectively lead their team members.

Out of the vast majority of organizations involved in the report, 86% are still using formal leadership development programs even though 43% say they fail to properly diagnose leadership strengths and identify needs for development.

The report determined that men are 13% more likely to receive leadership skills training, 19% more likely to be formally assessed, and 22% more likely to be assigned a formal mentor compared to women.

Moreover, only 55% of women reported that they have strong, updated development plans, compared to 61% of men.

“Women are also less likely to have clear expectations for success in their new roles compared to men,” the authors continued.

Alongside biases and poor/non-existent leadership development programs, work tensions appeared to severely affect executive confidence down the road.

Just about 50% of leaders polled who reported stressful transitions rated themselves as average or below-average leaders. Conversely, only 16% of leaders who had low-stress transitions gave themselves comparably low ratings.

All of these figures were impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic to varying degrees.

The authors report that 61% of leaders received leadership skills training as they stepped into new roles before the pandemic, but that number dropped to 48% in 2021.

Assessments are crucial

Habitual objective assessments seemed to yield the biggest influence that helps leaders transition quickly and successfully into their new roles. Nearly 40% of organizations with both high-quality development and assessment had a strong bench of leaders ready for critical roles.

Assessment and development allowed new leaders to anticipate executive challenges before they became overwhelmed by them.

“People moving into leadership roles should expect to feel some growing pains, but we found that their struggles are continuing on well past their transitional period.”