Early career leadership gaps and executive development principles

The leadership gap is often flawed in early career design.

Most organisations talk about leadership gaps as though they start at Director: succession benches are light and senior-ready talent is rare. Something to consider is future leaders, do they see leadership as worth the cost? Does the organisation make it look like an appealing pathway with a supported staged development plan in place?

Let’s start with what younger talent is telling us.

In Deloitte’s 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey, only 6% of Gen Z say their primary career goal is to reach a leadership position.  That is often misread as a lack of ambition. The same data suggests the opposite: learning and development sits in the top reasons they choose their employer, and many feel their managers are “missing the mark” on development.  Put simply: they want to progress; they are just less convinced that “leadership” is the pathway to do it.

KPMG’s Gen Z intern data reinforces this: around nine in ten say access to training in soft skills / professional skills is important when considering an employer.  This is a group explicitly asking for the capabilities that sit beneath senior performance: communication, presence, judgement, stakeholder management and the “how” of influence, not just technical delivery.

And the mobility pressure is there too. In PwC’s UK analysis, 27% of Gen Z professionals say they’re likely to change jobs in the next 12 months, and these individuals are described as most likely to ask for both a raise and a promotion in that period.  Ambition is present; so is impatience with slow career ladders.

Next, let’s overlay the pipeline data.

The most decisive structural barrier in leadership progression is still the “broken rung”: the first step from entry level into manager. In Women in the Workplace 2025, for every 100 men promoted to manager, only 93 women are promoted, and the ratios are lower for women of colour (82 Asian women and Latinas; 60 Black women).  That early deficit compounds for years; you can’t “fix” senior representation only at VP/Chiefs because the feeder system has already been thinned.

The report also shows early‑career outcomes diverge before the manager step. Entry‑level women are significantly less likely than entry‑level men to have been promoted in the last two years (30% vs 43%).  They are less likely to receive career‑advancing support from senior colleagues (e.g., being put forward for promotion or recommended for stretch assignments).  This is what pipeline leakage looks like in reality: a steady narrowing of opportunity and visibility.

What are leaders missing? The “ambition gap” is not simply a personality difference. It is often a rational response to career support.

McKinsey/LeanIn report that career support is strongly linked to desire to advance; when women and men have sponsors and receive similar support from managers and senior colleagues, enthusiasm for promotion equalises and “the gap in desire to advance falls away.”  In fact, the same report indicates entry‑level women under 30 are highly ambitious, more likely than entry‑level men under 30 to want promotion (92% vs 85%).  So, the problem is not “young women lack ambition”. The problem is that many organisations unintentionally design a system where ambition becomes costly, especially for those who receive less sponsorship and less development early on.

So, if early careers are vital to future leadership, what should organisations change?

The provocation is this: we reserve “executive development” for the top, then wonder why the pipeline is thin.

The answer is to introduce executive development principles early, principles that build promotion readiness, decision quality and stakeholder maturity before the first promotion gate determines who gets on the path. This could be mentorship, coaching, or future leadership programmes, tailored to individual needs and aligned to organisational expectations.

What are executive development principles in an early‑career format?

They are mechanisms that include, clear contracting (goals, behaviours, measures), regular reflection that converts experience into learning, behavioural experimentation under pressure, stakeholder management and sponsor alignment (ensuring early‑career talent is not developing in a vacuum).

Workplace coaching has a meaningful evidence base. A meta‑analysis focused on workplace coaching (excluding manager‑direct report coaching) found coaching had positive effects on organisational outcomes overall (δ=0.36), including skill‑based and affective outcomes.  A broader coaching meta‑analysis reports significant positive effects across individual outcomes, with effect sizes ranging from g=0.43 (coping) to g=0.74 (goal‑directed self‑regulation).  These are precisely the capabilities that show up in promotion panels as “readiness”: resilience under pressure, self‑regulation, judgement, and confidence in ambiguity.

The timing logic is equally important. A major leadership training meta‑analysis reports a “transfer problem” that is significantly worse at higher levels: transfer effects are approximately four times weaker for high‑level leaders, possibly due to more entrenched behaviours.  If the goal is behaviour change that sticks, earlier is definitely easier.

What to do.

Embed executive development principles into early leadership programmes, then measure the pipeline as a system:

Promotion to first managerial roles; readiness ratings at promotion decisions; retention at 12/24/36 months; distribution of stretch assignments and senior sponsorship; and (critically) whether the broken rung narrows. This is where the premium standard remains intact: executive‑quality development is defined by rigour, contracting, supervision, and measurement, not by seniority of the participant.

The leadership gap is not waiting for you at the board table, it’s starting when potential leaders join and can’t see a way to progress and succeed in leadership.

If you want more senior leaders later, start treating early executive development as a start-point. Make them an early‑stage design choice and invest in future leaders early.