“Resentment,” “competition,” and “blame”; “aggressive” and “pushy.” These are a sample of the words that respondents in our recent study associated with stepping up to lead. Despite the fact that most organizations desperately need people with leadership skills — and many employees and job candidates say that they are interested in leadership — when we asked people anonymously about pursuing opportunities to step up and lead, they often seemed reluctant.

This lines up with many of our lived experiences: it is fairly common to see someone choose not to lead, whether it’s a capable coworker who passes up an opportunity to guide a team project, or a manager who, when confronted with a challenging situation, simply waits for things to happen instead of taking charge. Strong leadership is essential for both organizational and personal growth — so why don’t more people step up when they have the chance?

We conducted several quantitative and qualitative studies to explore this reluctance: First, we interviewed and surveyed more than a hundred working adults, asking them to describe times when they had considered stepping up to lead but did not end up doing so. Second, we conducted a field study following more than 400 MBA students working in consulting project teams, in which we used a series of surveys to assess team members’ perceptions of the risks associated with leadership, as well as their ratings of each other’s actual leadership contributions in these projects, at several points during the semester. Finally, we surveyed approximately three hundred managers and their employees, asking about the risks they associated with leadership, as well as their assessments of their colleagues’ leadership capabilities.

Three Kinds of Risk

[Here are the first two.]

Based on this research, we found that there are three specific types of perceived risks that deter people from stepping up to lead:

1. Interpersonal Risk: The first concern people mentioned over and over again was that acts of leadership might hurt their relationships with their colleagues. For example, when asked why they were hesitant to step up to lead, one respondent explained that “sometimes you don’t want to risk that friendship and hurt other people’s feelings.” Another said they were afraid that if they stepped up, other people could “start to dislike you and talk about you behind your back.” The fear of leadership harming interpersonal relationships was one of the most consistent themes we found throughout our interviews and surveys.
2. Image Risk: The second common concern people described was that leading might make others think badly of them. For example, one respondent said they were reluctant to lead because “I don’t want to seem like a know-it-all.” Similarly, another interviewee worried that “it can come across as a little bit aggressive, maybe, to the rest of the team members.” Despite the fact that both organizations and employees generally claim to admire leadership, people worry that actually engaging in leadership acts might make them look bad in the eyes of their peers.