Leaders have got it tough right now. A number of factors are adding and prolonging the pressure they are under. A continually unstable economic climate, developing technology changing ways of working, and adapting to changing customer preferences – to name a few.
When you’re a startup, arguably those challenges become even more acute. Revenue is more fragile and there’s increasing pressure to stay ahead of the curve.
So, leaders can be forgiven for not being full of confidence. Indeed, our research found that only approximately two thirds (70%) of leaders have confidence in their leadership abilities.
Interestingly, confidence is higher amongst younger leaders (74% for those aged 18-34) compared to their older counterparts (66% for those aged 55+).
Similarly, when asked how they feel about their leadership team, about two thirds 63% said they had confidence in their leadership team. And, again, confidence dipped amongst older workers (70% for those aged 18-34, 60% for those aged 35-54, 49% for those aged 55+).
This means that, for a significant proportion of organisations, their leaders aren’t confident in themselves, and teams don’t have confidence in their leaders. This lack of confidence has a direct impact on performance, because we all perform at our best when we feel confident in ourselves and those that we are working with.
Leadership challenges
While the broader economic and business challenges mentioned above cannot be solved by any one person, facing a daunting and complex workload tends to manifest in much more practical ways, for example:
Having too much admin, not enough time to lead, facing conflicting priorities and an unclear role, suffering with a heavy workload and constant meetings, feeling limited empowerment or authority, trying to lead change without support, difficulty developing and coaching teams, poor communication with senior leadership or resource constraints.
It is when these challenges are left unaddressed that leaders become frustrated at their lack of progress and impact. Left unresolved they lead to stress, burnout and emotional fatigue.
Eventually, when left to struggle with no prospect of things getting better, leaders will likely make the choice to look for opportunities elsewhere. 24% of respondents to our research said they are actively looking for a new job and 29% said they would like to change jobs before the end of 2026.
The key is to solve these issues before they become too serious. Ineffective and disengaged leaders will ultimately have a wider impact on their teams and on their organisation as a whole.
This is particularly the case for smaller organisations where negative feelings will spread much more easily. It makes financial sense for businesses to ensure all their leaders are supported to flourish. In addition, early intervention means problems are much easier to solve before they escalate.
Addressing leadership challenges
There are four key areas that leaders should seek to improve to make a significant difference in how they perform themselves and how they can develop their teams:
Improve how they manage their time as a manager – focus on the respect for their own time, and ensure they’re getting the best output from the time they’re putting in.
Evaluate their team’s performance – identify gaps, instigate processes and training to improve and then measure impact.
Foster team wellbeing with positive intent and continuous opportunities for feedback.
Manage up – focus on honesty and transparency, use the Minto pyramid method to communicate clearly and efficiently.
Ultimately, everyone benefits when leaders perform well – organisations, leaders themselves, their teams, and the organisation’s customers and stakeholders. For startups in particular, it is important that leaders are effective.
Their approach and energy set the tone for their company as a whole and with market share hard fought, and external challenges aplenty, there’s no room for leaders that are not performing at their best.