Takeaways from Gallup’s Global Leadership Report (2025)
2025.03.13
Headlines from a recent Gallup report1 are making the rounds, highlighting that hope, trust, compassion, and stability are what followers want from their leaders.
Gallup has a global audience, and often reports top-line findings as a global aggregate. This makes perfect sense.
However, as a leader in the US, it’s easy to overlook that bit of information when scanning headlines.
Since you probably didn’t download and digest the whole report, here’s what you need to know as a leader in the US.
Study Basics
This is the third study on this topic. The first was in 2005 and surveyed 10,000 adults in the US. The second study took place in 2008 and included 10 countries (sample size was not reported). The results you are hearing about are from surveying 30,000 people across 52 nations in 2024.
Takeaway 1: Pay attention to whether the stat you are reading is for solely the US. If it doesn’t specifically say otherwise, it is likely the GLOBAL aggregated number which may or may not be similar to the US result.
Study Questions: Leader Identification
The first question in the survey was What leader has the most positive influence on your daily life?
We want to point out a few things here. First, that the framing of the question is not work-specific. People are free to choose any leader in their life, and many do.
Globally, for people employed at an employer, 44% cited a family member, 21% said their manager, 9% said an organizational leader, and 4% listed a colleague. The US-specific breakdown was not included in the report.
Takeaway 2: Globally, only 34% of respondents listed anyone from work as a leader who positively impacts their lives. From this report, we don’t know the stat for the US.
Additionally, like in all surveys, some data is omitted. In this survey, 10-30% of responses in each nation were dropped because of people who listed themselves as a leader they admired, listed “no one, no leader, or no leader I look up to”, or didn’t provide any answer. We don’t know what percent of the data was dropped for the US.
Finally, notice that the question is framed in the affirmative. There is nothing wrong with this, but imagine for a moment if the survey had also asked about a leader that has the most negative influence on one’s daily life.
Study Questions: Leader Contributions
After identifying a leader, the following prompt was given. Now, please list three words that best describe what this person contributes to your life.
People were allowed to say any three words. As you can imagine, the survey collected lots and lots of words.
What researchers do in that situation, is to group similar words together. Research is an art and a science and this kind of judgement call is a great example of that.
Groups of Descriptors for Leaders
In this case, the researchers identified 8 groups (they called them attributes) that could reasonably encompass all of the survey responses.
- Inspiration, vision, and personal integrity
- Growth, learning, development, and achievement
- Financial growth, support, and independence
- Communication, approachability, and trust
- Collaboration, teamwork, and compromise
- Emotional intelligence, compassion, and wellness
- Service, altruism, mentorship, and support
- Stability, structure, accountability, and responsibility
That is, all words related to inspiration, vision, or integrity would be lumped into the first group.
Categories
From the 8 groups, the researchers further distilled the words into 4 categories, giving each a definition.
Hope
In this study, hope is defined as the "need to feel positive about the future and for leaders to provide a clear direction". The first three groups in the list above make up hope in the study.
Specifically, the hope category includes words such as: love, happiness, confidence, help, joy, good, faith, smart, work, wisdom, education, hope, strength, harmony, company, and counselor, life, counsel, motivation, security, brave, worth, protection, strong, advice, courage, leader, positive, health, attention, gratitude, diligent.
Trust
The study defines trust as the "need for honesty, respect, and integrity". The fourth and fifth items in the group list are trust attributes.
The trust category includes words such as: caring, cheerful, concern, family, friendship, gentle, honesty, integrity, kindness, loving, positivity, reliable, respect, responsible, safety, sincerity, support, tenderness, trust, understanding, values, and welfare.
Compassion
The "need to feel cared about and listened to" is how the study defines compassion. The two categories of attributes that make up compassion include the sixth and seventh groups on the list above.
The compassion category includes words such as: peace, patience, balance, calmness, charity, compassion, generosity, grace, guide, loyalty, mercy, prayer, sacrifice, tolerance, and tranquility.
Stability
Stability is defined as the "need for psychological safety and secure foundations during times of uncertainty". The eight group on the list is the attribute group for stability.
The stability category includes words like: responsibility, stability, calm, reliability, discipline, intelligence, home, clever, guaranteed, obedience, order, persistence, serious, self-discipline, seriousness, guardian, and authority.
Takeaway 3: Respondents used a wide variety of words used to describe leaders. It’s not that hope, trust, compassion, or stability were the most frequently used words – rather those results are a product of research design.
And one final note here, the researchers made the decision to call the categories “needs”.
Takeaway 4: The survey asked what positive qualities that a leader contributes to a respondent’s life. The reported results are framed as what respondents need from leaders and the title of the report frames it as what followers want.
US Results
The bulk of the results are not broken out by country, at least in the public report. But here’s what we do know about respondents from the US.
For whatever leader the person named (we don’t know if it was family, manager, org leader, etc.), the words they used to describe the leader were sorted as follows.
- 57% of descriptors fell into the Hope category
- 32% of descriptors fell into the Trust category
- 8% of descriptors fell into the Compassion category
- 3% of descriptors fell into the Stability category
Takeaway 5: Without knowing what kind of leader (family, manager, org, etc.) the US respondents were referring to, there’s not much actionable insight from this report for US leaders within companies.
Parting Thoughts
The intent of this article isn’t to bash Gallup – they’re not doing anything wrong.
Rather, we wanted to highlight for you that by skimming headlines or grabbing a statistic without really understanding it, you might be incorporating erroneous information into your knowledge base as a leader.
1 Citation: Global Leadership Report: What Followers Want (2025). World Governments Summit 2025 in collaboration with Gallup. https://www.gallup.com/analytics/656315/leadership-needs-of-followers.aspx
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