Here is a number I keep coming back to.
In its 2025 report, DDI surveyed 13,000 leaders and HR professionals across more than fifty countries. Not employees – leaders. People who run teams, departments and businesses. They asked them whether they had confidence in the senior leadership of their own organisation.
Only 32% said yes.
Around two-thirds of the people already inside the leadership structure don’t have faith in the people above them. And that figure hasn’t moved – it was the same the last time DDI asked.
What has moved is trust in your own boss. The proportion of leaders who trusted their immediate manager fell from 46% in 2022 to 29% in 2024. A 17-point drop in two years.
Which means something has flipped. People used to trust the manager they knew more than the executives they didn’t. That’s no longer true.
It looks the same from the bottom
You might expect employees to be more forgiving. They aren’t.
Gallup has been tracking this for years. Only about one in five US employees strongly agree that they trust the leadership of their organisation. That’s down from a peak of 24% in 2019, and it hasn’t recovered.
So the picture is this. Employees don’t trust senior leaders. Leaders don’t trust senior leaders. And leaders increasingly don’t trust their own boss either.
Now the awkward question
If that many people are unconvinced, how many leaders are actually doing well?
I want to be careful here, because this is where the numbers get slippery. You’ll see a lot of figures quoted about leadership failure rates, and they range from 40% to 70% depending on who’s selling what. Many of them trace back to studies that are twenty years old, or to firms with a course to sell. I’d rather give you the ones that hold up.
Around four in ten newly promoted managers and executives struggle badly in their first 18 months. That figure has been roughly stable for at least fifteen years, which tells you something in itself.
Leadership IQ tracked more than 20,000 new hires and found 46% failed within 18 months – while only 19% achieved what they called unequivocal success. Fewer than one in five clearly succeeding.
CEB found that nearly 40% of internal moves involving people identified as “high potential” end in failure. These are the people the organisation specifically picked out as its best bets.
And the wider research on managers derailing puts the base rate somewhere between 30% and 67%, averaging around half.
The exact number is arguable. The shape of it isn’t. Somewhere around half of the people we promote into leadership don’t succeed there – and this has been true for as long as anyone has measured it.
And the pipeline looks thin
You’d hope this was balanced out by a strong queue of people coming through. It isn’t.
DDI’s research found that 80% of organisations lack confidence in their leadership pipeline, and only 20% of HR leaders say they have people ready to step into their most critical roles. When those roles do come open, organisations can fill only about half of them from inside.
Meanwhile the leaders currently in post are running on empty. In the same study, 71% reported significant stress since stepping into their role, half of those were dealing with burnout, and 40% were thinking about leaving.
What we usually do about it
Put all of that together and the conclusion looks obvious. Not enough good people. Not enough development. Invest more, train harder, build a bigger programme.
And that is broadly what the market does.
But look at the numbers again. Organisations have been investing heavily in leadership development for decades. The failure rate hasn’t moved in fifteen years. Trust has gone down, not up. Bench confidence has been declining since at least 2011.
When you spend that much, for that long, and the number refuses to move – it’s usually a sign you’re solving the wrong problem.
A different question
Here’s what I’d ask instead.
We talk endlessly about whether we’re developing people well enough. We almost never ask whether we’re choosing the right people in the first place.
Think about how your organisation actually decides who has leadership potential. Most of it comes down to a manager putting a name forward, and a performance rating. That’s not a criticism of anyone – it’s simply what nearly every organisation does. Recent research found that around nine in ten HR professionals and leaders use exactly those two inputs.
So we pick people using a method almost nobody has validated, we’re not sure it works, roughly half of them struggle, and our response is to spend more on developing whoever came out of it.
I don’t think the core problem is that we’re bad at developing leaders. I think we’re not very good at spotting them.
In my next piece I’ll look at what the evidence says about how organisations identify leadership potential – including a study of nearly 30,000 employees, published this year, which found that the potential ratings driving most promotion decisions don’t actually predict who goes on to do well.
Sources
- DDI, Global Leadership Forecast 2025 (survey of 13,000 leaders)
- Gallup, workplace trust and engagement tracking
- Leadership IQ, Hiring for Attitude study (20,000+ new hires)
- CEB/Gartner research on high-potential internal moves, reported in Harvard Business Review
- Talogy (2025), global study on high-potential identification
- Published managerial derailment base-rate estimates