- In case of a failed leadership, over time, people stop volunteering ideas, stop challenging bad decisions, and eventually stop caring, long before they stop showing up.
- For a future-ready workforce, in a future where work is increasingly distributed, dynamic, and digital, leaders who cling to hierarchy and authority will find themselves mismatched to the needs of their teams.
Failures and skills are often discussed for the employees in the lower levels of the workforce pyramid. The decision-making mistakes and failures by the top management often go unnoticed in a hierarchical setup.
However, more than the failures and skills gap of the frontline employees, the failures of the top management are what affect the businesses more. Because teams are asked to prepare for future-ready skills. But leadership competence is often treated as settled. What if the most consequential skill gaps in organisations sit at the top, and go undetected precisely because the system is working as designed?
A Boardroom Business blog states that effective leadership has a profound impact on organisational performance, with research indicating that companies led by effective leaders are up to 3.5 times more likely to outperform their competition and experience up to 38% increases in overall business performance.
The blog further suggests that effective leadership also affects employee retention directly. “These leaders provide a form of ‘insurance’ against talent acquisition challenges by creating environments where employees want to remain and contribute their best efforts,” it reads.
But how to detect leadership breakdown?
A report published on Research Gate defined failed leadership as “the subordinates’ perceptions of the extent to which a supervisor’s behaviour negatively affects their psychological, physiological, or behavioural being and how that behaviour could lead to impediment in their own and/or their organisation’s performance. Said hindrances may be relevant to the leader’s traits, situational factors, or as a result of the negative leader’s behaviours that include lacking vision, losing sight of what is important, being a micromanager, not being able to provide directions, engaging in the sustained display of verbal and nonverbal hostile behaviours, communicating poorly, not providing value to followers and the organisation, lapsing ethics/integrity, and/or being self-centered.”
When leadership fails in these ways, employee engagement erodes at the core. Engagement is often mistaken for a function of perks, policies, or pulse surveys, whereas in reality, it is correlated to the emotional response of a human.
Over time, people stop volunteering ideas, stop challenging bad decisions, and eventually stop caring, long before they stop showing up. In that sense, disengaged employees are not the root problem; they are the most visible symptom of leadership failure that has gone unchecked for too long.
Alarmingly, research shows that workforce engagement in India fell to just 19% in 2025, down from 24% in 2024, which is the steepest decline globally. Low engagement is linked to a weaker sense of direction, belonging and manager support, all of which reflect leadership effectiveness. And, why is it important?
According to an HR Morning report, leadership quality accounts for around 70 % of the variance in employee engagement scores. That means the biggest factor explaining why some teams are engaged, and others aren’t, is leadership behaviour and capability and not perks, work hours, or pay alone.
What does it mean for the workforce?
For the workforce, the stakes of disengagement are high. A Gallup study shows that globally, only about 21% of employees are engaged at work. Teams led by disengaged managers are far more likely to spread that disengagement to their direct reports, because 70 % of team engagement is attributable to the manager’s behaviour rather than perks or pay.
Yet another research shows that disengaged employees are significantly less productive than their engaged peers, contributing to an estimated 18% to 22% drop in work output and efficiency across organisations. It leads to missed deadlines, lower quality work, and slowed collaboration, which directly disrupts workflows and weakens team performance.
It is pertinent to note that 64% of employees said they would work harder if they were better recognised, making recognition a key driver of engagement. Remote workers reported to be 22% more engaged than in-office workers, with flexibility cited as the primary reason.
All these circle back to leadership and business decisions. How?
Productivity drops not because employees suddenly lose discipline or capability, but because leaders fail to design environments where effort feels worthwhile. When recognition is absent, flexibility is treated as a privilege rather than a performance enabler, and trust is replaced with control; employees tend to go quiet.
Missed deadlines, silos, and declining quality are not workforce flaws; they are organisational feedback. Leaders decide whether work is outcome-driven or presence-driven, whether appreciation is deliberate or accidental, and whether autonomy is encouraged or feared. In that sense, disengagement is not an employee behaviour problem but testimony of failed leadership, reinforced through policies, priorities, and what leaders consistently reward or ignore.
What needs to be done to cope with the failure?
As per TPB’s analysis, for once, organisations need to stop treating leadership failure as a soft issue and start treating it as a business risk. When productivity drops, quality suffers, or teams disengage, the reflex is to “fix” employees through training, incentives, or tighter controls. Thus, the first intervention should always be at the leadership layer, because that is where behaviour is modelled, decisions are made, and culture is reinforced daily.
Key measures to keep checks on leadership failure:
- Leadership isn’t just about delivery and outcomes. Hitting targets while burning out teams should no longer be seen as competence in a modern workplace. Leaders should be evaluated on clarity of direction, quality of communication, trust levels within teams, and their ability to create conditions where people want to contribute discretionary effort. If these indicators don’t improve, performance reviews and promotions shouldn’t either.
- Organisations need to deliberately design work around trust rather than surveillance. The data on recognition, flexibility, and autonomy is clear. People work harder when they feel trusted and acknowledged.
- Finally, leaders must be forced to confront the human cost of their decisions. Disengagement, silence in meetings, low innovation, and passive compliance are not neutral states, but rather warning signals. Until organisations are willing to confront this honestly, leadership failure will continue to impact business.
To rectify these, organisations must adopt evidence-based measures. For example, surveying the workforce for leadership feedback, motivation at work, productivity index, etc.
What is an ideal leadership as derived from the conversation above?
As per the conversation above, instead of depending on numbers and indices, an ideal leader should be human. It goes far beyond delivering results. It is about how those results are achieved and the effect leaders have on the people around them.
Emotional intelligence is looked at as the key component of effective leadership. Leaders who are self-aware, empathetic, and socially competent are better able to resolve conflict, build trust, and inspire commitment, which strengthens engagement and team cohesion.
In addition, leadership qualities like visionary communication, accountability, recognition, and trustworthiness are strongly correlated with higher engagement, turnover, and improved organisational outcomes.
TPB is of the view that the highest performing leaders are the ones who are capable of translating organisational purpose into clear expectations and daily experience for their teams. When managers are highly engaged, employees are far more likely to be engaged themselves, underscoring how leadership behaviour cascades down through every layer of the workforce.
Future of leadership for a future-ready workforce
Thus, for a future-ready workforce, in a future where work is increasingly distributed, dynamic, and digital, leaders who cling to hierarchy and authority will find themselves mismatched to the needs of their teams.
A future-ready workforce will not simply tolerate engagement as a “nice-to-have”. It will expect it as a baseline for trust, innovation, and growth. Leaders who understand this will invest early and deliberately in developing not just technical competence but human-centric leadership capabilities such as empathy, resilience, and ethical decision-making.
Multiple studies and research papers underscore that organisations with future-ready leaders are those that prioritise agility, continuous learning, and inclusive decision-making. These are also the leaders who can foster psychological safety and empower people to solve complex problems autonomously. These leaders act less as directors and more as architects of culture and conditions, understanding that the workforce of tomorrow demands flexibility, purpose, and opportunities to contribute meaningfully, not just compliance.
