Who will want to lead tomorrow?

If organisations want strong leaders for the future, perhaps the answer is not developing more leaders, but redesigning the ask of leadership itself.

For decades, leadership was something many people aspired to. Work hard. Develop your expertise. Demonstrate your capability. Earn promotion. Lead others. Leadership represented progress. It offered influence, responsibility and the opportunity to make a meaningful difference. For many, it was the natural next step in a successful career.

Today, something feels different. Increasingly, organisations are asking a worrying question: Who will want to lead tomorrow?

Recent research suggests there is good reason to ask. Deloitte’s 2026 Global Gen Z and Millennial Survey, involving more than 22,500 respondents across 44 countries, found that just 6% considered achieving a leadership position their primary career goal.

At first glance, that might appear to confirm the familiar narrative that younger generations simply aren’t interested in leadership. But look more closely and a very different picture emerges.

More than three-quarters of Gen Z respondents and two-thirds of millennials said they were interested in pursuing senior leadership at some point in their careers. So, the ambition has not disappeared.

What has changed is their willingness to accept the trade-offs.

Around half cited stress and burnout and excessive responsibility as barriers to leadership, while work-life balance was another significant concern. That distinction matters.

The ambition to lead has not necessarily disappeared. The willingness to accept leadership at any personal cost may have. And perhaps we should listen to what that is telling us.

Leadership has become significantly more demanding. Today’s leaders are expected to deliver commercial success while navigating economic uncertainty, rapid technological change, geopolitical instability, skills shortages, changing employee expectations and the accelerating impact of artificial intelligence.

Alongside these commercial pressures sits another expectation that has grown enormously over the past decade. Leaders are no longer expected simply to manage people. They are expected to coach, mentor, communicate with empathy, create psychologically safe environments, champion inclusion, support wellbeing, build trust, develop careers and foster cultures where people can flourish.

These expectations are entirely reasonable. In fact, I would argue they are essential.

The problem is not that we expect too much humanity from leaders. The problem is that we often expect all of this while leaving the underlying systems largely unchanged. Targets continue to rise. Resources rarely keep pace. Budgets tighten. Time becomes increasingly scarce. And the emotional labour of leadership grows ever heavier.

Research into the manager experience supports this picture. Gallup has identified competing priorities, heavy workloads and interruptions, job stress and interference with family life among the pressures managers experience.

Many leaders therefore find themselves caught between competing demands. They genuinely want to care for their people while simultaneously being measured primarily on financial performance, productivity and delivery. They are expected to be resilient, calm and endlessly available, even when they themselves are struggling under the weight of competing priorities.

This creates one of the greatest organisational risks of our time: leadership itself is becoming unsustainable. And the consequences extend far beyond the wellbeing of individual leaders.

When leadership becomes exhausting, fewer people aspire to it. Succession pipelines weaken. Organisations risk losing experienced talent. Future leaders watch carefully and conclude that remaining a specialist or technical expert may offer a healthier and more rewarding career than taking on management responsibility.

This is not a criticism of younger generations. If anything, it may be one of the most rational responses to the workplaces they have inherited. Many still want meaningful work, they still want to contribute, and they still want opportunities to learn, grow and make a difference.

What they are questioning is whether leadership should require sacrificing their health, relationships or identity. Perhaps they are asking questions every generation should have asked.

One response is to conclude that people simply need to become more resilient. I believe that would be a mistake.

Resilience undoubtedly has its place. Life and leadership will always involve challenge, uncertainty and setbacks. But resilience cannot indefinitely compensate for systems that place unsustainable demands on people.

If leaders are constantly overwhelmed by excessive workload, conflicting priorities or chronic resource shortages, asking them to become even more resilient risks placing responsibility in entirely the wrong place.

Instead, perhaps we should ask a different question: What would leadership look like if it were designed for sustainable human performance rather than perpetual endurance, and leaders no longer had to choose between high performance and their own wellbeing?

It would mean leaders having sufficient time to coach rather than constantly firefight; their own wellbeing being recognised as an organisational priority because it directly influences their capacity to support others; leaders feeling psychologically safe enough to admit when they need support themselves; and being trusted to lead with both humanity and accountability.

These are not idealistic aspirations. They are practical foundations for sustainable organisational performance.

For many years we have focused heavily on developing leadership capability. That remains important. But capability alone is no longer enough. The next generation of organisations will need to pay equal attention to developing the conditions in which leadership takes place.

Because leaders cannot consistently create conditions that they do not experience themselves. If we expect leaders to create cultures based on trust, respect, compassion and psychological safety, they too must experience those things.

If we expect them to protect the wellbeing of their people, we cannot treat their own wellbeing as expendable, and if we expect them to lead sustainably, we must stop designing leadership around endurance.

One sentence has come to encapsulate my own thinking: Leadership should cost us effort, not ourselves. Leadership should stretch us. It should challenge us, and it should involve responsibility, accountability and difficult decisions. But it should not demand that people sacrifice their health, relationships or sense of self simply to succeed.

If fewer people aspire to leadership, perhaps the problem isn’t ambition. Perhaps it’s the way we’ve designed leadership itself. And if that’s true, redesigning leadership may become one of the most important responsibilities facing organisations over the coming decade.

I strongly believe the future of leadership will depend not simply on who is willing to lead, but on whether we have the courage to create leadership that talented people genuinely want to step into.

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