Trustworthiness is earned, so we don’t ask you to take Leadership is Resolution on faith. Here is the research beneath it — the numbers, where they come from, and how we read them — set out so you can check it for yourself.
Hope is what people most want from leaders.
Only 22% of managers are engaged — down from 31% in 2022.
Nearly half experienced conflict at work last year.
A good relationship beats policy 58% to 29%.
Manager engagement where the conditions are built.
Our proposition draws together published research from Gallup, Acas, DDI, CMI, Microsoft and CIPD, alongside established work in psychology and leadership — Snyder, Heifetz, Edmondson, Cuddy and others. None of it proves our approach on its own. The case is in the convergence: different bodies of evidence pointing at one recognisable human reality. Below, the argument in seven steps, each with the figures that support it and the caveats that keep them honest.
Asked to name the leader with the greatest positive influence on their lives, people describe hope above anything else — not optimism or reassurance, but a grounded sense that something worthwhile is still ahead, and that there is a way towards it.
Hope is the dominant attribute people associate with leaders who lift their lives — and it grows with responsibility. It is the job, not a soft extra.
How to read it: these are shares of the attributes people named, across 52 countries (76% of the world’s adults) — not the share of people who need each thing. We never say “only 7% need compassion.”
A widening gap has opened between the leadership people hope for, the leadership those carrying responsibility feel ready to provide, and the leadership people actually experience. Engagement is the indicator of that gap, not its definition.
What leaders believe they provide and what people actually experience are demonstrably different. Trust — the thing hope travels on — is falling fastest of all.
Honest note: the DDI 2022 baseline (~46%) is drawn from their Global Leadership Forecast series; we cite the direction and current figure (29%) with confidence and are pinning the exact baseline wording.
Leadership is not done by a secure class of “leaders” to everyone else. Responsibility runs through the system: those above affect what we can hold; those below and around look to us in turn. And the people we ask to carry hope are increasingly depleted.
Managers now sit barely three points above the people they lead. You can’t reliably give what no one is giving you.
Systems, policies and process matter — we build our own to support resolution. The question is what they are for: policy works best when it creates the conditions in which people can exercise judgement, responsibility and resolving capacity — not when it becomes a substitute for them.
Asked what enables informal resolution of conflict, senior decision-makers rate a good relationship twice as important as any policy (58% vs 29%). This doesn’t show policy is unimportant — it shows why human relationship and capacity must sit alongside good policy. And the missing move is human: 44% experienced conflict last year, 19% did nothing about it, and 35% of managers did nothing when the conflict was with a direct report.
People precede policy. Capacity precedes process.
Source: Acas / YouGov survey of 1,000+ senior decision-makers in British businesses (2025–26), and Acas’s nationally-representative prevalence study with NatCen. Full enabler list: relationship 58 · willingness 53 · culture 52 · time & space 47 · confidence 45 · support 38 · policy 29 · neutral mediator 28 · tools 17.
The capacity to bring hope and earn trust isn’t a temperament some are born with. It can be developed — formed and practised through experience and relationship, not simply taught as technique.
Hope has a measurable structure — agency (the will to move) and pathways (credible routes forward) — and both can be developed (Snyder). Trustworthiness is built from warmth and competence (Cuddy); candour is made safe by psychological safety (Edmondson). Trustworthiness is earned; trust is given.
Kept honest: hope-enhancement studies show real but generally modest gains, with limitations. So we say the capacities underlying hope can be developed — not that hope can be switched on.
That formed capacity has a name. Resolution is the turn towards reality, purpose and people that lets movement begin. It does not mean agreement — sometimes it means repairing, deciding, challenging, ending, or finding another way.
Resolution is rarely elaborate machinery. Very often it begins when someone creates the conditions for a useful conversation. And difficulty is not off to the side of leadership — it sits inside the everyday work of performance, expectations and contribution. This is why the capacities of mediation belong upstream, in everyday leadership.
Precise: the 94% is among the 252 managers who reported conflict with a direct report; capability/performance featured in 94% of those cases (respondents could select more than one topic) — not “94% of all such conflict.”
What leaders repeatedly bring becomes what an organisation learns to expect. Where reality is faced, voices heard, difficulty worked through and responsibility taken often enough, resolving becomes normal — and culture sustains progress beyond any one leader.
The story is not “leadership is failing.” It is that conditions and capacity matter enormously — different conditions produce radically different outcomes. Unresolved difficulty doesn’t only hurt people; it changes their willingness to contribute. The gap is not inevitable.
Leadership gives Purpose. Resolution brings People. Culture sustains Progress.
No pitch, no pressure — just a conversation about what’s happening, and whether we’re the right people to help.
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