The leadership desert: The unspoken enterprise IT talent problem

Bleak leadership prospects may lie ahead, as a growing number of CIOs and CTOs face a disturbing new trend: senior engineers quietly refusing promotions.

Dan Zaniewski, CTO at network monitoring firm Auvik, said he believes many IT professionals are already stretched thin by constant day-to-day demands, leaving little time to develop the broader capabilities required for a leadership role. “This can make a promotion feel less like an opportunity and more like added accountability on top of existing pressure,” he said.

Furthermore, many senior engineers no longer see leadership as an attractive path toward influencing business and technology outcomes, said Andy Miears, a partner at technology research and advisory firm ISG. “Their passions frequently lie in solving complex technical problems, and they often seek greater fulfillment, compensation and autonomy in technical leadership roles [rather] than in managing people, budgets and organizational complexity.”

Diagnosing the rejection of new responsibilities

Lack of ambition has not led senior engineers to reject leadership roles, said Daniel Koch, vice president of research and development at cybersecurity firm Oasis Security. “They’re actually rejecting the version of leadership that many enterprises are offering them.”

Koch noted that for many years, an implicit career contract existed for technology professionals: if you’re technically strong, you’ll eventually manage people. This is no longer true. “Many have watched that path drift away from technical direction and toward meetings, escalation, budget pressure and political negotiation,” he said.  For hands-on engineers, a promotion can seem like a loss of craft with no gain in real influence.

Burnout also tends to drive qualified leaders away from assuming leadership roles. “CIOs need to treat burnout as a design failure, not a wellness issue,” Koch said. What many tech professionals see is a loss of benefits if they take a promotion. “There will be no more mental-health days or Friday afternoons off.”

Senior engineers are watching what AI’s promises have done to leadership expectations, said Syeda Sultana, CEO of SEO services firm Vettted. “Their output bar keeps rising, while their authority over resourcing stays flat — that’s a trap, not a promotion,” she said. “In my experience … the engineers most likely to resist leadership are the ones who have already calculated that the math doesn’t work in their favor.”

The best CIOs are embracing dual career paths for their key talent, an approach that values technical leadership and human leadership equally, Miears said. “The goal is not to force great engineers into management, but to ensure accountability and decision-making capabilities continue to develop.”

Is AI favored unfairly over humans?

AI increased expectations for speed and productivity well before many organizations built the practices needed to realize those promises, Zaniewski said. “Leadership roles can become less appealing to IT pros if every budget or headcount conversation starts with the assumption that AI should already be making the team cheaper, faster and more productive.” Such assumptions often disregard the work required to make AI useful.

Moreover, the technology receives a fair amount of leeway despite its growing pains. AI often gets credit for speed, while humans get blamed for failure, Sultana said. When a senior engineer steps into a director role and an AI-assisted project misses targets, the conversation rarely starts with “the model underperformed.” It starts with “Who owned this?” “That asymmetry is not lost on people who’ve spent years executing at a high level without a title protecting them,” she said.

Corrective therapy for IT leadership

One way to strengthen the leadership pipeline is to relieve some of the pressure and create room for future leaders to step beyond technical execution, Zaniewski said. “This can include helping shape multi-year programs, leading cross-functional initiatives and cultivating external partnerships.”

With technology now touching every business activity, it’s an exciting time to be in a technology leadership role, according to Zaniewski. “Looking forward, many IT professionals will still aspire to leadership — the challenge is making sure they don’t burn out before they get there,” he said.

“Recruiting technology leaders isn’t just a talent issue — it’s also an operating model issue,” Miears said. He noted that many leadership roles were designed for supervising people and projects. Yet this is no longer true, as leaders increasingly find themselves orchestrating teams of humans, AI agents, platforms and service providers. “This is actually a good shift when it comes to recruiting senior engineers for leadership roles, since it doesn’t force them into what they may perceive as the negative elements of corporate leadership,” Miears said.

CIOs who want a healthy future need to act now, Koch said. “They should build real technical leadership tracks, expose senior engineers to business operations earlier, reward mentorship, encourage architecture leadership, reduce burnout and stop treating management as the only path to influence.”