What Future Leaders Want
What changing C-suite aspirations can teach us about retention, growth, and leadership design
The 2025 CREW Network benchmark study includes a finding that should prompt thoughtful discussion across the commercial real estate (CRE) ecosystem. In 2025, 30% of both men and women reported aspiring to C-suite roles. For men, that represents a decline from 43% in 2020. For women, it represents a smaller decline from 32% in 2020. CREW Network also reported that younger women’s interest in senior vice president or partner roles remained steady, even as their interest in C-suite roles declined.
That data should not indicate that ambition is declining. It may mean something more nuanced. Professionals may be asking whether traditional senior leadership roles offer enough authority and support. They may also be weighing flexibility, compensation, and meaning against the tradeoffs those roles require.
This question extends beyond commercial real estate. McKinsey and LeanIn.Org’s 2025 Women in the Workplace report found that women and men are equally committed to their careers, yet women are now less likely than men to want promotion. LeanIn.org reports that 80% of women want to be promoted to the next level, compared with 86% of men. Importantly, when women receive equal career support, that ambition gap disappears.
For companies trying to build leadership pipelines, that finding matters. If people are less interested in a particular advancement path, the issue may not be motivation. It may be the design of the path itself. Professionals may be evaluating whether a larger role comes with enough authority, sponsorship, flexibility, compensation, and organizational support to justify the cost.
For companies across the commercial real estate ecosystem, the practical question is not simply, “Who wants the C-suite?” The better question is: What kinds of leadership do our people want to exercise, and how can those aspirations create value for the business?
Some professionals may want enterprise leadership. Others may want principal, partner, or regional leadership. Some may want to lead through clients, technical expertise, project strategy, advisory work, ownership, or entrepreneurship. Those paths are not all the same, and they do not replace the C-suite. But they may reveal where talent, influence, and value are actually moving.
Broader workforce research suggests that many workers and employers are rethinking linear career paths. Randstad’s 2026 Workmonitor found that only 41% of workers surveyed still want to follow a traditional career path. It also found that 72% of employers surveyed said the linear career ladder is outdated. Deloitte’s 2026 Global Human Capital Trends survey found that 7 in 10 business leaders identify speed and nimbleness as their primary competitive strategy for the next three years. Deloitte emphasizes that organizations need to orchestrate people and resources quickly as business needs change.
Together, these findings point to a clear business need: companies need better intelligence about leadership aspiration. They need to understand what people want to build, what support they need, and where their leadership creates measurable value.
A practical framework is to ask, map, and align.
Ask what people are aspiring to. Do they want executive management, ownership, client leadership, technical authority, advisory work, or project leadership? What would make a larger role worth pursuing? What authority, sponsorship, flexibility, or compensation would make that role sustainable?
Map where leadership value is already being created. In commercial real estate, value often sits in relationships, judgment, and trust. It also sits in technical expertise, project memory, market insight, and emerging fluency with AI or data tools.
Align roles, rewards, and pathways with business value. If someone protects a major client relationship, reduces delivery risk, sponsors rising talent, or opens a new market, that contribution should not remain informal. It should be visible in role design, compensation, advancement, or economic participation.
Leadership roles should be designed with the same care companies bring to capital strategy, client strategy, and succession planning. Organizations that ask better questions about aspiration will make better decisions about retention, compensation, sponsorship, and growth. They will be better positioned to keep talented people engaged, preserve institutional knowledge, and connect leadership value to the bottom line.
