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DDI’s Global Leadership Forecast 2025 highlights that global disruptions have created an ‘impossible role’, leading to widespread stress (71%) and a potential leadership exodus (40% considering leaving). Crucially, trust in immediate managers plummeted to 29%. Organizations must strategically invest in human-centered support, prioritize transparency regarding technological shifts like AI, and focus on building genuine connections and interpersonal skills to strengthen organizational resilience.
The Global Leadership Forecast 2025, representing DDI’s eleventh forecast in 24 years, synthesizes responses from 2,185 human resource professionals and 10,796 leaders across 2,014 organizations worldwide. This extensive research, spanning more than 50 countries and 24 major industry sectors, examines talent and leadership issues and best practices amidst a challenging environment. The introduction notes that leadership has become exponentially more complex due to the convergence of global disruptions, including the pandemic and artificial intelligence (AI), which are fundamentally redefining workplace expectations.
The study exposes a profound leadership credibility crisis. Trust is rapidly deteriorating, with trust in immediate managers seeing a dramatic 17-point decline, falling from 46% in 2022 to just 29% in 2024. This decline is so significant that trust in immediate managers has now fallen below the 32% trust level expressed toward senior leaders, a striking reversal of traditional assumptions. This crisis is amplified by external factors such as economic shocks, job insecurity, and geopolitical tensions, which lead employees to scrutinize leadership decisions.
This complexity is contributing to a potential leadership exodus. A significant 71% of leaders report experiencing increased stress since beginning their current roles, rising from 63% in 2022. A major factor driving this stress is time scarcity; only 30% of leaders feel they have sufficient time to execute their responsibilities effectively. Consequently, 54% of stressed leaders are concerned about burnout, and 40% are considering abandoning their leadership roles entirely.
Furthermore, the data reveals a dangerous organizational disconnect between senior and frontline leaders concerning purpose and technology. Frontline leaders’ sense of purpose declined by 20% compared to 2020, whereas C-level leaders’ sense of purpose is thriving (up to 67%).
This gap is exacerbated by AI adoption challenges: frontline leaders, on whom the burden of AI adoption falls heaviest, are 3 times more likely to be concerned about AI compared to senior leaders. This resistance is strongly linked to trust; only 28% of frontline managers report high trust in senior leaders. Leaders who trust their senior leadership are 2.2 times more likely to feel excited about using AI at work. Finally, leader quality ratings remain persistently low, hovering around 40%. Interestingly, there was a spike during the pandemic year of 2020, when nearly 50% of leaders rated the leadership quality in their organizations as high. Leaders’ ability to adapt to unprecedented circumstances and their empathy for their employees during trying times boosted perceptions of leadership quality. In the post-pandemic years, however, leadership quality ratings have fallen back to their typical 40% range.
Organizations must proactively rebuild the foundations of trust and support to stabilize their leadership pipelines and ensure organizational resilience.
Leaders can rebuild credibility by consistently practicing four key behaviours: responding with genuine empathy, encouraging a psychologically safe environment for speaking up, transparently sharing the rationale for decisions, and encouraging challenges to existing paradigms. Employees with effective coaching managers are nine times more likely to trust them, highlighting the link between development support and confidence.
To mitigate the risk of burnout, effective leaders proactively use strategies such as self-reflection (74%), open discussions (71%), and engaging with learning resources (46%). Leaders who use at least three stress management methods are 1.9 times less likely to experience burnout, thus offering a roadmap for leaders on the brink of burnout and considering leaving the organization.
To restore a sense of purpose to frontline leaders, organizations must prioritize their well-being, deepen their connection to customer impact, develop their interpersonal skills (such as emotional intelligence), and ensure senior executives act as purpose ambassadors. Enhancing the employee experience is also important. When these strategies are implemented, leaders are 17 times more likely to have a positive, purpose-driven perception of their organization and three times more likely to stay.
In implementing AI, radical transparency and communication are vital. Senior leaders must build trust to counter resistance; those who build trust are 2.8 times less likely to encounter resistance to AI. Frontline managers should be involved as co-creators in shaping AI implementation frameworks, not just passive recipients of strategy, to ensure buy-in and success.
Finally, the perception of high leadership quality is strongly correlated with employee experience as 54% of leaders who believe their organization delivers a best-in-class employee experience rate leadership quality as high. Other influencing factors include strong interpersonal skills (19 times more likely to rate quality high), highly rated leadership development experiences (15 times more likely), and prioritizing employee well-being (12 times more likely). Focusing on these areas will enable organizations to break free of traditionally low leadership quality ratings.
Stephanie Neal’s profile at Development Dimensions International
https://www.ddi.com/about/bios/stephanie-neal
Rosey Rhyne’s profile on LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/roseyrhyne/
Matt Paese’s profile on LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-paese-8519543/
Bruce Watt’s profile at Development Dimensions International
https://www.ddi.com/about/bios/bruce-watt
Verity Creedy’s profile at Development Dimensions International
https://www.linkedin.com/in/vcreedy/
DDI Global Leadership Forecast 2025. Stephanie Neal, Rosey Rhyne, Matt Paese, Bruce Watt, and Verity Creedy. Development Dimensions International (2025)
https://www.ddi.com/research/global-leadership-forecast-2025
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