No One Wants This

“Why would I want that promotion?”

I didn’t have an answer. It just seemed obvious to me that stepping into a senior leadership role would be my client’s next career move.

I kept hearing this sentiment, from talented and dynamic workers, turning down the opportunity to step into leadership, preferring to stay individual contributors, doing what they do best.

Was this a trend or coincidence? It turns out, more and more workers are saying no to management. Fewer than 30% of workers surveyed said they were interested in moving into a management role, seeing it as “overwhelming and undesirable.” And among Generation Z workers, almost three-quarters of those surveyed preferred staying in individual contributor roles than stepping into a middle management role.

Not only are people more reluctant to become managers, more leaders than ever before want to leave their roles altogether.

Leading is an incredibly stressful job. Long hours, high pressure, terrible work life balance.

But there’s something else.

Leaders are targets for hostility and aggression.

Leadership has always invited scrutiny. Skepticism toward authority is, in fact, one of democracy’s great virtues. It keeps power honest and leaders accountable. But in recent years, it’s shifted. We’re not just seeing skepticism, but hostility, bullying, death threats, even murder and kidnapping. Mocking and tearing down those in authority—whether presidents, CEOs, university presidents, even local school administrators has become normalized. And that means it’s not just a stressful job, but a dangerous one.

Of course, hostility and cynicism don’t arise out of nowhere. There are increasing instances of power abuse and moral failure in government and in corporations. We live in a gilded age of billionaires, media empires, and corporate overreach. Distrust is understandable, and so is outrage.

But there’s a fine line between holding people accountable and enacting revenge and retaliation. It’s easy to give ourselves a pass to bully “up.” As long as the target holds more power, our aggression feels justified. Blaming “them” absolves “us.”

Yes, there are corrupt and villainous leaders, but the collective belief that all leadership is corrupt, assuming bad faith as the default, is worrying. It discourages capable, ethical people from stepping forward. Most worrying, it erodes the capacity for leadership and public service, because it favors the worst actors. Those most willing to step into leadership in this climate, are likely to be those least capable.

So we’re at a paradox: we want better leaders but we’re also making leadership unbearable.

The way out of this is uncomfortable: it’s easier to punch up when we don’t believe we hold any power. But we do. Each of us exercises power, through our words, our tone, our votes, our participation, or our silence.

Dehumanizing those who leads dehumanizes ourselves as well. Because we’re disowning our own power, our responsibility as citizens, employees, colleagues, and members of a shared system.

Leaders aren’t a separate species. Leaders are you and me. And if we want better leaders, we need to cultivate the conditions that make good leadership possible, to stay engaged even when disappointed, to question without cruelty, and to hold ourselves accountable for the power we do have.

Because what choice do we have? Someone must still lead. And if good people keep opting out, we’ll get exactly the leaders we deserve.

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