The Future Leader

1The Leadership Gap

How many leaders would you estimate are in your city? How about your country? What about all over the world? If we're going to look at the future leader, then it's important for us to know just how many of these individuals we have now, and how many we might have in the future.

In the United States alone there are roughly 25 million supervisors and managers, people who are responsible for others. This is about 1 in 6 Americans. In the UK this number is around 5 million, which also comes to 1 in 6 people. McKinsey predicts that in 2030 the global workforce will be around 3.5 billion people (McKinsey, 2012). In 2020 the International Labour Organization estimates a workforce that is 45% self-employed, which has actually been decreasing over the past few years (World Bank, 2019). If we assume that 50% of the total workforce will be self-employed by 2030, that leaves us with 1.75 billion employed people (OECD, n.d.). The number of employees per manager or supervisor is referred to as the “span of control,” and the suggested number of employees per manager varies from 4 employees per manager to upwards of 20. This means that around the world, there will be roughly between 87,500,000 and 437,500,000 leaders, which is actually a conservative range since many of the self-employed individuals also have full-time jobs. That is a lot of leaders! Leaders help make our world, so we’d better make sure we have the right people in those positions. We all deserve to like ...