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There is an undersupply in the world of leaders capable of both getting things done and doing what's right.

• In today's society, we suffer from a chronic deficiency of leaders mastering both the "what" and "how" of doing: Being able to determine not only how to get a pre-defined goal achieved as effectively as possible, but also what the goal should be in the first place. 
• These two dimensions can be seen as the speed (Y) and direction (X) of human action.
  

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This gap is leading to unnecessary and unproductive human suffering and frustration, as insecurity, confusion and fear have become the real leaders of many organizations.

• When we optimize only the "how" and not the "what", we may end up doing a lot of wrong things really effectively. That is a paradoxical situation many real-life organizations are at least partially facing today.
• We also fail to tap into the real problem-solving potential of humankind and thus are stuck with the same problems year after year, if we don't expect our leaders to grow spiritually and focus also on the what.

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This can and needs to be changed via a dramatic shift in incentive mechanisms and the institution of leadership - in business, the public sector, politics, arts, as well as in academia.

• The good news is: Spiritual maturity can be learned. It is a set of skills, just like "getting things done".
•  Like any other abilities, these skills need to be practiced, demanded and incentivized in order for them to grow. At the moment, we are lacking commonly acknowledged methods for developing skills such as genuine use of empathy and identifying when your ego is talking.
• Building these methods now and starting to expect their use is our responsibility, if we want a more healthy society tomorrow.

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Read more 

• about the situation and why it needs to be changed
• about what the project concretely will do about it
• about what on Earth this "spiritual growth" is, really?

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We are seeing consequences and examples of the Real Leadership Gap every day.

• Our top leadership universities teach curriculums aiming at advancement almost solely on the Y-axis 
• We encourage (over-)confident people to become leaders although humility is found to correlate more with successful leadership (e.g. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic's blog "Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?" in HBR)
• We prompt exceptionally highly driven young people to careers which almost inhibit spiritual/human development of any kind (e.g. Polly Courtney's column on investment banking internships in The Independent)
• We are not tapping into the latest research on what even really correlates with "getting things done" (Adam Grant's brilliant book Give and Take, discussed e.g. in this New York Times article)

• People wanting to develop themselves spiritually find it increasingly difficult to do so in the corporate world, even in companies known for their better-than-average working culture (e.g. Ellen Huerta's column "Why I Left Google" in Medium)
• Our formal and informal leadership incentive mechanisms in companies lack expectations of skills in e.g. genuine empathy and control of the ego
• We underestimate and thus underutilize people's intrinsic goodwill (e.g. Prof. Nava Ashraf on "altruistic capital" in HBS Working Knowledge)
• Explicit encouragement of X-axis growth is needed for leaders, as gaining power poses challenges to spiritual development (e.g. Digital Journal's article "Power robs the brain of empathy")

• In a changing environment, we cannot survive by merely doing the same thing a bit better and more effectively (e.g. the financial crisis in 2008 and its sequels)
• Spiritual maturity alone is not enough, either, if lacking skills/motivation in making change happen beyond the scope of the self (this is why the mere existence of yoga/Zen Buddhism /Christianity/Islam/the mindfulness movement/meditation haven't automatically saved the world just yet)