In my last piece I looked at how organisations decide who has leadership potential — and at a study of nearly 30,000 employees which found those potential ratings didn’t predict who went on to do well.
That tells us a group of people is being missed. It doesn’t tell us who they are.
This piece is about that. And it’s the one part of this where I’m not relying on somebody else’s research.
Where this comes from
Since 2016 we’ve been working with people sitting just below the first rung of leadership – and measuring them every month.
Not a survey once a year. Every session, in the moment, while people were working out what to do about their own careers. Dozens of questions, several of them repeated years apart to completely different groups. Thousands of written answers.
Let me be straight about what that is and isn’t. It’s people describing themselves, which isn’t the same as being observed. And the vast majority chose to join a development programme, which makes them unusual. It isn’t a representative sample of any workforce and I won’t pretend it is.
But it has one thing I haven’t found anywhere else. Most research in this area looks at leaders who already made it, or at pipeline numbers from the top down. This looks at the people everyone is arguing about – from the inside.
And what it describes is remarkably consistent.
They’re relied on constantly, and they say nothing about it
When we asked how often colleagues come to them for help, around half said “all of the time.” That was 50% in 2022 and 51% in 2026 – four years apart, different people, same answer. Almost nobody said never.
Around 85–90% believe the help they give is valued.
Then we asked whether they regularly make sure others know the value they bring.
The proportion who strongly agreed: 9% in 2021. 8% in 2022. 12% in 2024. 8% in 2026.
Five years. Four different groups. The number barely moves.
In 2026, only 9% said they actively manage how they’re seen at work.
It isn’t a confidence problem
This is the bit that surprised me most, because it runs against what we’re usually told.
Ask these same people how well they do their job, and the answer is confident. We gave them a scale of one to ten. In 2024, 86% put themselves at seven or above. In 2021, 74%.
Now look again at the number from a moment ago. Fewer than one in ten strongly agree that they make sure others know the value they bring.
Confident in the work. Silent about it. Those are two different things, and we’ve spent years treating them as one.
It also isn’t an ambition problem. When we asked whether they wanted to lead, 94% either already did or said yes. Only 6% said no thank you.
Under pressure, most of them go quiet
Most of us know the phrase “fight or flight.” It’s become shorthand for how people react under threat, and it’s incomplete. There are four responses, not two – and the two nobody talks about are the common ones.
All four are automatic. Nobody chooses them in the moment.
Fight. Pushing back. Arguing, blaming, needing to be right. The other person is wrong, end of story. Sometimes it shows up afterwards, as telling other people – “you’ll never guess what so-and-so did.” At its core it’s an attempt to regain control. Ironically, it usually does the opposite.
Flight. Changing the subject. Redirecting attention somewhere else as fast as possible. Talking faster than usual, going off on tangents, glossing over the reasonable points the other person is making. The goal isn’t resolution. It’s escape.
Freeze. Not standing still – shutting down emotionally. You become very logical. You focus on process and accuracy. You insist you’re correct, often in more formal language than you’d normally use. The underlying thought is: if I stay rational and controlled, you’ll stop pushing. Please leave me alone.
Appease. The one most people don’t realise they default to. Avoiding the discomfort. Agreeing quickly, saying yes without following through, keeping your thoughts to yourself, putting others first at the expense of your own boundaries. It’ll be easier if I just go along with this.
We asked people which of the four they recognise most in themselves.
In 2023: freeze 51%, appease 25%, fight 17%, flight 7%.
In 2026, three years later with a different group: freeze 44%, appease 31%, fight 20%, flight 5%.
Roughly three-quarters go into logic, or go along with it. Only one in five does the thing we all picture when we say “fight or flight.”
Then we asked a second question: which response do you find hardest to deal with in other people?
Half said fight. 51% in 2023, 49% in 2026. The response almost nobody uses is the one that shapes how everybody experiences pressure at work.
I want to be clear that none of these four is a good response. I’ve spent years helping people recognise their own pattern and manage it, because every one of them costs you something. Freeze makes you unreachable. Appease means nobody ever knows where you stand.
But here’s the line from our session that matters most for how we spot potential.
Freeze is often misunderstood. It isn’t calm – it’s emotional shutdown.
From the outside, though, calm is exactly what it looks like. And appease looks like agreement. Fight and flight you can watch happening. The other two you cannot.
So when an organisation forms a view about how somebody handles pressure, it is mostly forming a view about the one in five whose response shows.
They deliver rather than perform
Asked whether they’re better at strategy or execution, execution wins every time – by around two to one.
Asked whether they’re more comfortable being humble or heroic, humble wins overwhelmingly. In 2020 it was 87% to 13%.
And we ask people whether they see themselves mainly as a fixer, an encourager or a visionary. Across four separate rounds over six years, the proportion choosing visionary has sat between 10% and 22%. Fixers and encouragers take almost everything else.
One more. In 2025 we asked a simple question: do you lead a team or other people at work?
29% said yes. 29% said no.
And 31% chose the third option: “kind of – unofficially.”
Nearly a third are already leading people. It just isn’t written down anywhere, which means it counts for nothing when the next role comes up.
Now hold that against the criteria
Put the pattern together. People who deliver reliably. Who’d rather be useful than impressive. Who go quiet under pressure rather than loud. Who are relied on by everyone. Who describe their own contribution at a rate that hasn’t shifted in eight years. And a third of whom are already leading without the title.
Now think about what high-potential criteria actually reward.
Being visible to the manager who nominates you. Having already been given stretch work. Coming across as decisive and assertive. Having “executive presence.” And being able to give a confident account of yourself.
There isn’t a single point of contact between those two lists.
That’s not a story about bias, or about managers getting it wrong. It’s simpler and more fixable than that. We’ve built criteria that detect one way of being capable, and a large group of capable people doesn’t present that way.
What I’d take from this
I’m not suggesting quiet people make better leaders. The research doesn’t say that, and neither does my experience. Sometimes the person who takes charge loudly is exactly who you need.
What I am saying is that if your criteria can only see one kind of person, you’ll keep finding one kind of person – and then wonder why your pipeline looks thin.
So here’s where I’d start. Think of the people in your organisation everyone relies on. The ones who hold things together, who solve problems before anyone notices, who are the first port of call when something goes wrong.
Now look at where they sit in your talent review.
If most of them are parked in the middle, that’s worth a conversation. It may be entirely right. But it’s worth knowing which.
In my next piece I’ll look at why this is about to get harder. Organisations are starting to hand these decisions to AI – and there’s a particular problem with asking people to describe themselves when one group consistently undersells itself.
Sources
- Elevate Talent participant data, 2018–2026
- Benson, A., Li, D. and Shue, K. (2026) ‘”Potential” and the Gender Promotion Gap’, American Economic Review, 116(2)
- Grant, A., Gino, F. and Hofmann, D. (2011) on introverted and extraverted leadership, Academy of Management Journal