Last week I told you about the couple I met at an airport gate who asked me where all the great leaders had gone. I said they are not at the top. They are everywhere else—unnamed, unrecognised, holding the whole thing up.

This week: the other half of that conversation. The half we actually spent the most time on, if I am being honest with you. Because they had stories.

Everybody has stories.

The bit nobody wants to hear

So why are so many people at the top such poor examples of leadership?

Here is the uncomfortable answer. It is mostly not a character problem. It is a system problem—and the system is breathtakingly consistent about it.

One. We promote for entirely the wrong thing.

Research from the Chartered Management Institute found 82% of new managers enter the role with no formal management or leadership training whatsoever. A 2026 American Management Association study found 51% were promoted into people leadership with no formal training at all.

We call them accidental managers, as though they wandered in by mistake. They did not wander in. We put them there. We handed a brilliant technician eleven human beings and a spreadsheet, wished them luck, and then acted astonished when it went sideways.

Two. Then we exhaust them.

Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace found manager engagement has collapsed from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025. Managers have lost the engagement premium they always held over everyone else. And middle managers now report burnout at more than three times the rate of individual contributors.

Three times. Read that again. The people we ask to carry the culture are the people we are quietly crushing.

Three. And it cascades. Of course it cascades.

Managers account for roughly 70% of the variance in their team’s engagement.

A depleted manager does not produce a neutral team. They produce a depleted team. And that team produces the next generation of depleted managers, who are promoted for surviving it.

Four. And on the way up, the truth quietly disappears.

The more senior you become, the less anybody tells you anything real. By the time someone reaches the executive floor, they may not have had a genuinely honest conversation about their own behaviour in a decade.

Nobody set out to isolate them. Everybody did.

Now the good news, because there is some, and it is buried in the same Gallup data: the best organisations recorded manager engagement of 79%—nearly four times the global average. And here in Australia, Culture Amp’s current benchmark has 69% of employees engaged.

This is not weather. Nobody is having leadership done to them by the climate. These are choices, and some organisations are very obviously making better ones.

One more, because it is the point most boards miss entirely. Great Place To Work Australia found that trust predicts retention, innovation and performance more reliably than an engagement score does—and the patterns only appear once you break the data down by team and by manager. The single headline number is doing an outstanding job of hiding the exact thing you need to see.

Your brain on bad leadership

Three mechanisms explain almost everything that couple described to me at the gate.

Emotional contagion is not a metaphor. Our nervous systems synchronise with the people around us, and they synchronise upward — we read the most powerful person in the room first, and hardest. Which means a leader’s internal state is the team’s weather. Walk in carrying dread and you are not hiding it. You have never hidden it. Eleven people caught it before you opened your mouth.

The threatened brain simply cannot do leadership. The amygdala treats social threat — to status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness, what David Rock calls the SCARF domains — much the way it treats a physical one. Under threat, resources move away from the prefrontal cortex. Which is, inconveniently, the exact region responsible for perspective-taking, impulse control, judgement and empathy.

So the leader who snaps, micromanages, hoards information and cannot tolerate a dissenting view is very often not a monster. They are a threatened human being running on a brain that has quietly taken its best equipment offline.

That is not an excuse. It is a diagnosis. And a diagnosis is infinitely more useful, because you can actually treat one.

Trust is chemical, and it is measurable. Paul Zak’s work on oxytocin found that people in high-trust workplaces show markedly higher energy and productivity, and dramatically less burnout and sick leave, than people in low-trust ones. Trust is not the fluffy bit at the back of the culture deck. It is a physiological operating condition for performance.

And here is the mechanism that matters most if you actually want to fix any of this: behaviour change is a wiring problem. Repetition, reflection, and feedback close to the moment are what lay down new pathways.

One two-day offsite in March cannot rewire a human being. It never could. We have been buying the wrong intervention for thirty years and then blaming the leaders when it didn’t take.

Early in my career, I was on Hayman Island, working in HR, when a new HR Director arrived. Within days it was clear he had no idea how to lead. So he led the only way he knew how: through fear. Doors slammed. Voices raised. People walking into work already braced for it. He lasted two weeks.

I thought that was the end of the story. Years later, I discovered he’d become Head of HR for a government agency and was causing exactly the same pain there.

That’s the part that stays with me. He wasn’t found out. He was promoted. Fear-based leadership doesn’t fix itself, and it doesn’t stay in one place. It travels, it gets a bigger title, and it lands on more people.

Which is exactly why I built Worksparks

Coaching is the single most reliable thing we have ever found for turning a human being into a better leader. It works because it is frequent, specific, honest, and delivered close to the moment of need—which is precisely what the brain requires.

And we have rationed it to roughly the top two or three percent.

Both of the people I met at that gate manage more human beings than most executives ever will. Neither of them has had a coach. Not once. Not ever.

That is not a gap in the market. That is the entire problem: sitting in row 34 with a lukewarm coffee.

So we built Worksparks: an AI coaching platform designed to put continuous personal development in the hands of everyone at work, not just the people with a leadership budget attached to their name. Daily prompts that adapt to what someone is genuinely facing. Weekly reflection. Monthly pattern summaries so people can finally see themselves clearly. Development at the point of felt need—not a workshop in March that has nothing whatsoever to do with the conversation you are dreading on Thursday.

And for People and L&D teams, anonymised themes—so an organisation can see what its workforce is actually experiencing, without ever exposing a single individual.

I did not build it because coaching doesn’t work. I built it because it works, and almost nobody gets it.

The reframe

“Where are all the great leaders?” is the wrong question, and it took me a long-haul flight to work out why.

It assumes great leadership is a shortage of people. It isn’t. It is a shortage of conditions.

The better question—and the one I would put to any executive team I walk into — is this:

Who in this organisation is already leading well, and what on earth have we actually given them?

If the honest answer is a title, a bigger inbox and an annual engagement survey, then we know exactly where the great leaders went.

We buried them under the work. And we never once asked how they were coping.

To the couple at the gate — and to you

You asked me where the great leaders are. My honest answer, now that I have had a full flight to think about it: one of you almost certainly is one. Nobody has told you, because we are extraordinarily bad at telling people that.

Three things you can do this week, whatever your title says:

• Ask one person on your team a question you genuinely do not know the answer to — then do not fill the silence. Count to seven if you have to. It will feel like a year. Do it anyway.

• Ten minutes of reflection a week. What did I do that helped someone? What did I do that cost someone? Written down, not vaguely mulled over in the car.

• Name a leader who shaped you, and tell them. Most of them have no idea. Ninety seconds for you. They will carry it for years.

Great leadership has never been rare. Recognised, supported, and developed leadership is what is rare.

That is a fixable problem. It is the one I have given my career to. And it is why I keep saying we do not just need great leaders—we need great leaders AND great humans.

Now go and be the leader you have been waiting for somebody else to be.

If your leaders deserve better than one workshop a year, come and talk to us at leadershiphq.com.au.

Sonia McDonald | CEO, LeadershipHQ | Founder, Worksparks