The World Needs Better Leaders

No leader wakes up thinking, "Today I'm going to be average."

We all start out wanting to be the kind of leader people tell stories about years later—the one who saw what others missed, rallied a team through chaos, and left the world better than we found it.

Yet most of us never get there.

We settle. We manage. We keep the machine running rather than reimagining what it could do. And the cost is staggering: stalled innovation, disengaged teams, and billions of dollars quietly bleeding away in missed opportunities.

The ambition is there. The desire burns bright.

What's missing is a model of leadership development that actually works in the world we live in today.

Even before 2020, the cracks were showing. Great leaders were already in short supply. Then the pandemic hit, and everything changed overnight. Offices emptied. Teams are scattered across time zones. The casual hallway conversation—the lifeblood of trust and creativity—disappeared. Leaders who had thrived in person suddenly looked lost on Zoom.

Five years later, the dust has settled into a new normal. Today, 64% of companies operate in hybrid or fully remote environments that demand an entirely different kind of leadership—one that can build psychological safety through a screen, spark bold thinking without whiteboards, and turn ambiguity into forward motion.

Most leadership development programs have never caught up.

Companies still spend an average of 26% of their training budgets on initiatives that teach tactical skills while ignoring the deeper capacities human beings need to lead through complexity. The results speak for themselves: 40% of new CEOs fail within eighteen months, and 60% of first-time managers never make it past their second year.

I saw this up close when I worked with a property management firm in 2023. Their new Chief Operating Officer—a brilliant strategist with an Ivy League pedigree—was celebrated on day one. Seventeen months later, he was gone. The board called it "a culture fit issue." The truth was more straightforward and more troubling: he still made decisions the way a smart individual contributor does—seeking approval, avoiding conflict, and treating dissent as personal failure. He had never developed the self-authored mind required to lead hundreds of people through uncertainty. No amount of coaching on "executive presence" could fix that.

The developmental gap was too broad.

Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan has shown that only about 40% of adults ever reach the stage where they can hold conflicting perspectives, author their own values, and lead through nuance rather than rules. Most leadership programs pretend that stage doesn't exist.

But it does—and when leaders finally cross into it, everything changes: decisions get bolder, teams get braver, and results get bigger.

You don’t have to keep pouring money into programs that don’t deliver. There is a proven, developmentally grounded way to grow leaders who don’t just survive hybrid chaos—they thrive in it and turn it into a competitive advantage.

If you’re ready to stop settling for mediocre leadership and start building the kind of leaders your organization actually needs, let’s talk.

DM me or head to RaweLeadershipSolutions.com right now and book a 30-minute strategy call.

We’ll look at where your current approach is falling short and map out exactly how to close the developmental gap—fast.

The world needs better leaders.

Let’s build them—starting with yours.