The complaint reaches Nicholas Mukhtar from every direction. “It’s just the constant complaint,” he said. “Loyalty isn’t as common as it once was. There’s a lot of traits that I’m hearing a lot of these business owners and high-level executives complaining about, and it’s across the board. It’s engineering industries, wealth management industries, healthcare.”
Mukhtar, a Fort Lauderdale management consultant and founder of Tera Strategies, treats that breadth as the important detail. A problem confined to one sector points to something local. A problem showing up identically in engineering, wealth management, and healthcare points to something cultural. What he hears is the sound of an implicit social contract coming apart, and the disorientation that follows when leaders realize the rules that shaped their own careers no longer hold.
That disorientation is a burnout driver in its own right, separate from workload. DDI’s Global Leadership Forecast 2025 found that roughly four in ten stressed leaders have considered leaving their roles to protect their well-being, a figure that points toward a looming leadership exodus. The instinct to read younger workers as the cause is strong, and Mukhtar resists it. “It’s not that there’s not a willingness to work,” he said, “but I think it’s just they want to work differently.”
The gap rarely gets bridged because nobody attempts the crossing. Employees leave without explaining what they wanted. Executives never learn a departure was coming. Mukhtar’s framing puts the obligation on both sides, but he reserves particular attention for what leaders control. When workers do speak up, the response often goes missing: a November 2025 Eagle Hill Consulting survey found that 42% of employees who tell a manager they are burning out see no action follow. Silence from the top teaches people to stop raising their hands.
The decisive factor, in his reading, is the manager, and the research agrees. The 2025 Gallup Global Workplace Report found that managers account for up to 70% of the measurable difference between high- and low-performing teams. A burned-out, frustrated manager who has stopped asking questions shapes whether the people below them stay or go, and rarely for the better.
Mukhtar does not offer a tidy resolution, and the honesty serves the point. Whether the loyalty gap can be closed depends almost entirely, in his view, on whether leadership is willing to stop assuming and start asking. The data keeps pointing back to the same unglamorous answer he reaches in nearly every engagement. The fix is a conversation, and most organizations are still not having it.
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