Leadership BS

Leadership BS Plot Summary

Introduction

For decades, the leadership industry has been a flourishing business, generating countless books, seminars, workshops, and development programs. Yet despite this substantial investment in leadership education, our workplaces remain filled with disengaged employees, toxic environments, and failing leaders. The central paradox explored is striking: as leadership development activities have expanded, actual leadership quality appears to have deteriorated. This disconnect reveals a fundamental flaw in how we approach leadership development and workplace dynamics. The hard truth is that many commonly promoted leadership qualities – such as authenticity, modesty, truthfulness, and trustworthiness – often fail to describe how successful leaders actually behave. By examining the evidence from real organizational settings rather than idealized leadership stories, we confront uncomfortable realities about power, success, and human behavior in the workplace. Through rigorous examination of social science research and organizational case studies, we strip away comforting myths to reveal why leaders so frequently act in ways that contradict conventional leadership wisdom, why these behaviors persist, and most importantly, what might actually be done to improve the situation for both leaders and those they lead.

Chapter 1: The Leadership Industry's Fundamental Failures

The leadership industry has grown into a massive enterprise worth billions of dollars annually. Business schools proudly proclaim developing leaders as their mission, companies invest heavily in leadership development programs, and countless books and articles offer leadership advice. Yet this thriving industry suffers from several critical flaws that severely limit its effectiveness. First, leadership development efforts consistently emphasize the normative—what leaders should do—while paying insufficient attention to descriptive reality—what leaders actually do. This creates a dangerous gap between aspiration and implementation. Many leadership prescriptions describe ideal behaviors that are rarely exhibited by real leaders, particularly those who successfully rise to power. The resulting cynicism undermines the credibility of leadership development efforts. Another fundamental failure lies in how leadership development is evaluated. Most programs are assessed through "happy sheets"—participant satisfaction surveys measuring how inspirational or enjoyable a leadership program was, rather than tracking tangible improvements in workplace conditions or leader effectiveness. This misalignment of metrics ensures that leadership development focuses on delivering emotional uplift rather than practical change. The industry also suffers from a severe lack of barriers to entry. Unlike medicine or other professions requiring certification and scientific knowledge, virtually anyone can become a leadership expert without demonstrating expertise, research credentials, or practical success. This allows charismatic personalities to promote unvalidated leadership theories based on exceptional cases rather than systematic evidence. Perhaps most problematically, leadership development typically ignores the diverging interests between individual leaders and their organizations. What enables individual leaders to obtain and maintain power often conflicts with what might benefit their organizations or followers. While leadership programs extol service and selflessness, the social systems inside organizations frequently reward self-promotion, political maneuvering, and looking after one's own interests. The industry's fixation on inspiration over evidence has created a vast disconnect between leadership rhetoric and organizational reality. By telling uplifting stories rather than confronting difficult truths, leadership development has become more entertainment than education, offering emotional comfort without producing meaningful change.

Chapter 2: Authenticity vs. Effectiveness: The False Choice

Authenticity has become a cornerstone concept in leadership discourse, with entire institutes, assessments, and development programs dedicated to helping leaders become more "authentic." The core premise seems intuitive: leaders should be genuine, self-aware, and true to their inner values and beliefs. Yet when we examine what authenticity actually means in practice, serious problems emerge with this seemingly virtuous prescription. The first issue concerns the practical impossibility of consistent authenticity. Human personalities are not fixed but highly responsive to situations and roles. Research shows that when people move into different positions—for instance, from union representative to management—their attitudes shift accordingly. If our values and perspectives naturally adapt to our circumstances, what does being "true to oneself" actually mean? Authenticity presumes a stable core self that may not exist in the way leadership advocates imagine. More problematically, leadership effectiveness often requires precisely the opposite of authenticity. Successful leaders must frequently display energy, confidence, and positivity regardless of their actual feelings. Consider the exhausted CEO who must inspire the troops, the introverted executive who must captivate an audience, or the uncertain leader facing crisis who must project calm assurance. In these situations, authenticity would be counterproductive. As one successful executive noted, "Sometimes to be effective, you need to be the opposite of authentic." The authenticity movement also ignores how leadership roles inherently demand emotional regulation and appropriate self-presentation. Just as many frontline workers must manage their emotions to serve customers effectively, leaders must manage theirs to fulfill their responsibilities. The ability to control emotional displays and adapt behavior to circumstances is not inauthenticity—it's a crucial leadership skill. Research on successful leaders reveals that many are masters of adaptation rather than authenticity. They understand which behaviors are required in different contexts and skillfully adjust their approach accordingly. Rather than remaining true to some fixed self, they demonstrate remarkable flexibility in responding to changing situations and audiences. The authenticity prescription ultimately represents a false choice between being true to oneself and being effective. Great leadership doesn't require choosing between these alternatives but recognizing that effectiveness often demands playing roles appropriate to the situation. Learning to act effectively in leadership positions—even when such actions don't feel natural—is not fakery but skill development. Paradoxically, by focusing less on authenticity and more on adapting to leadership responsibilities, leaders can become more capable of serving their organizations and their people.

Chapter 3: Truth and Lies: Why Leaders Often Deceive

The leadership literature consistently promotes absolute honesty and transparency as essential leadership qualities. Advocates argue that truthfulness builds trust, facilitates accurate information flow, and strengthens organizational culture. Yet research on leader behavior reveals a striking gap between this idealized prescription and actual practice: leaders frequently engage in various forms of deception, from outright lies to strategic misrepresentations and convenient omissions. This discrepancy demands explanation beyond simple moral condemnation. Careful examination reveals that lying persists in leadership contexts because it often produces valuable outcomes. When leaders misrepresent current realities or future possibilities—such as claiming "we're going to win this contract" despite uncertain prospects—they can create self-fulfilling prophecies. By generating confidence among stakeholders, these optimistic "distortions" can mobilize resources, attract talent, and ultimately make success more likely. Strategic deception also appears especially prevalent in competitive environments. In industries where rivals routinely exaggerate product capabilities or delivery timelines (the software industry's notorious "vaporware" problem), leaders face a difficult choice: match competitors' deceptive practices or suffer competitive disadvantage. Many conclude that survival necessitates playing by the prevailing rules of their ecosystem. The prevalence of deception among leaders connects to deeper psychological dynamics. Research demonstrates that power itself makes lying both easier and more frequent. Powerful individuals experience less stress when deceiving others, feel greater control over potential consequences, and show less sensitivity to social norms against dishonesty. These findings suggest that leadership positions themselves may create conditions conducive to increased deception. Significantly, leaders who engage in strategic deception often face minimal consequences. Despite occasional scandals, most deceptive practices go undetected or unpunished. Even when discovered, the benefits gained through deception frequently outweigh the costs. This favorable risk-reward ratio reinforces the persistence of dishonesty in leadership contexts. Most troubling is evidence that followers often tacitly cooperate with leadership deception through "moral decoupling"—separating judgments about a leader's morality from assessments of their performance. This psychological mechanism allows stakeholders to maintain relationships with leaders they know to be dishonest while preserving their own self-image as ethical individuals. The prevalence of deception in leadership reveals uncomfortable truths about organizational dynamics. Rather than simplistically condemning dishonesty or naively expecting perfect truthfulness, a more realistic approach acknowledges that deception has functional aspects within complex social systems. Recognizing this reality represents the first step toward developing more nuanced ethical frameworks for leadership.

Chapter 4: Trust: A Scarce Resource in Modern Organizations

Trust has been widely heralded as the foundation of effective leadership and organizational success. Leadership experts consistently argue that leaders must build trusting relationships to inspire cooperation, reduce transaction costs, and create engaged workplaces. Yet survey after survey reveals a striking reality: trust in leaders has reached dismally low levels across industries and countries, with fewer than 20% of employees reporting confidence in their leaders' honesty and ethics. This persistent trust deficit raises fundamental questions about conventional leadership wisdom. If trust is truly essential for organizational functioning, how do businesses continue to operate with such minimal levels of trust? The evidence suggests a counterintuitive conclusion: while trust might be desirable, it is not as necessary for organizational functioning as commonly presumed. Companies routinely achieve their objectives despite widespread distrust between employees and leaders. More problematically, the data reveal that leaders who violate trust often suffer remarkably few consequences. Consider the numerous business leaders who have breached commitments to employees, customers, or partners, yet continued to enjoy successful careers and lucrative opportunities. Rather than being ostracized for breaking trust, such individuals frequently maintain their professional networks, retain financial resources, and preserve their social status. The absence of meaningful sanctions creates weak incentives for trustworthy behavior. The organizational context itself undermines the norm of reciprocity that typically governs trust in personal relationships. Research demonstrates that people feel significantly less obligated to reciprocate favors in workplace settings than in personal contexts. This diminished reciprocity norm helps explain why implicit workplace "contracts" are so frequently violated without apparent remorse. Trust violations by organizations are typically viewed with less moral outrage than similar violations by individuals. Studies show that contract breaches by businesses are often interpreted as pragmatic "business decisions" rather than moral transgressions. This perception allows organizations to justify trust violations as economic necessities rather than ethical failures. Perhaps most critically, many leaders discover that strategic distrust can yield substantial benefits. By reneging on implicit promises regarding employee benefits, compensation, or job security, organizations can extract significant economic value. The prevalence of such practices in corporate acquisitions, bankruptcies, and restructurings demonstrates their apparent utility. Rather than naively trusting leaders or organizations, individuals would be better served by developing measured skepticism and establishing formal protections where possible. The evidence suggests that while trust remains a valuable aspiration, organizational realities often make calculated wariness the more rational approach. This perspective represents not cynicism but pragmatic realism about the inherent power imbalances and divergent interests that characterize modern organizational life.

Chapter 5: Power Dynamics: How Leaders Actually Succeed

Conventional leadership literature portrays successful leaders as humble, selfless individuals who prioritize others' needs above their own. However, systematic examination of how individuals actually attain and maintain leadership positions reveals a strikingly different pattern. Leaders who reach the highest levels of organizational power consistently demonstrate behaviors that directly contradict these idealized prescriptions. Research consistently shows that narcissistic, self-promoting individuals are significantly more likely to emerge as leaders in group settings. Their confidence, assertiveness, and willingness to claim credit create perceptions of competence that facilitate their advancement. In one revealing study, even when observers received clear evidence that overconfident individuals lacked actual ability, these individuals maintained their higher status within groups. This pattern helps explain why humility—while praised in leadership books—remains notably scarce among actual leaders. The relationship between narcissism and leadership success extends beyond initial selection. Studies of corporate executives reveal that more narcissistic CEOs receive significantly higher compensation than their peers and enjoy longer tenures in their positions. Rather than being penalized for self-aggrandizement, they are frequently rewarded for it. This dynamic creates a powerful selection pressure favoring self-promotion over modesty. Political skill—the ability to navigate complex social environments through relationship building, social astuteness, and strategic influence—correlates more strongly with leadership advancement than technical competence or ethical behavior. Leaders who excel at reading organizational power dynamics, building strategic alliances, and neutralizing potential rivals consistently outperform those who focus exclusively on task performance or moral leadership. Leaders also succeed through impression management strategies that may have little connection to their actual behavior. By controlling information flow, cultivating relationships with influential stakeholders, and managing public narratives about their performance, skillful leaders shape perceptions in ways that enhance their power regardless of objective results. This explains why leadership failures often go unrecognized until they reach catastrophic proportions. Perhaps most significantly, successful leaders demonstrate remarkable willingness to make difficult, sometimes ruthless decisions that conflict with idealized leadership prescriptions. They strategically eliminate rivals, terminate underperforming initiatives (and employees), and prioritize organizational outcomes over individual well-being when necessary. While such behaviors rarely appear in inspirational leadership accounts, they represent critical components of real leadership practice. These patterns reveal the fundamental disconnect between leadership rhetoric and reality. The qualities that enable individuals to obtain and maintain leadership positions often bear little resemblance to the virtues celebrated in leadership literature. This uncomfortable truth explains why decades of leadership development focused on idealized behaviors have produced minimal improvement in actual leadership practice.

Chapter 6: Self-Interest vs. Selflessness in Leadership Practice

The leadership literature consistently promotes selflessness and service to others as defining leadership qualities. Concepts like "servant leadership" have gained widespread popularity, encouraging leaders to put employees first, prioritize others' development, and subordinate personal interests to collective needs. Yet examining actual leadership behavior reveals a striking pattern: successful leaders predominantly act in ways that advance their own interests, often at the expense of others. This reality becomes evident when examining compensation patterns. While employee wages have stagnated for decades, executive compensation has skyrocketed, with CEO-to-worker pay ratios expanding from approximately 20:1 in 1965 to more than 200:1 today. When organizations face financial constraints, leaders typically protect their own positions and compensation while implementing workforce reductions, benefit cuts, and wage freezes for frontline employees. These patterns directly contradict the servant leadership ideal. The persistent self-interest displayed by leaders stems partly from fundamental psychological processes. Research demonstrates that humans naturally favor those similar to themselves, while feeling psychological distance from those who differ in background, experience, or status. As leaders rise through organizational hierarchies, they increasingly share little in common with frontline employees. This growing dissimilarity makes genuine concern for employees' welfare less likely, especially when leaders' interests conflict with employees' needs. Organizational systems further reinforce self-interested leadership behavior. Leaders are typically evaluated and rewarded based on short-term financial metrics rather than employee well-being or development. This incentive structure naturally encourages prioritizing financial outcomes that enhance leaders' compensation and career prospects over employee-centered approaches that might produce less immediate financial returns. The most successful leaders demonstrate remarkable skill at justifying self-interested actions as necessary for organizational survival or prosperity. When implementing painful workforce reductions, they attribute these decisions to competitive pressures or economic necessity rather than acknowledging how such actions advance their personal interests through improved financial metrics that enhance their compensation and status. Perhaps most significantly, leaders who genuinely prioritize employee welfare often find themselves at a competitive disadvantage. In environments where resources are limited and stakeholders demand continuous performance improvement, leaders face intense pressure to extract maximum value from human resources rather than investing in employee development or well-being. Those who resist these pressures frequently lose power to more ruthlessly self-interested rivals. This reality creates a profound challenge for leadership development. Rather than simply advocating selflessness, effective approaches must acknowledge the powerful incentives for self-interested behavior and create systems that better align leaders' personal interests with broader organizational and societal welfare. Without such structural changes, exhortations for selfless leadership will continue to produce minimal impact on actual leadership practice.

Chapter 7: Evidence-Based Leadership: Confronting Reality

After decades of leadership development efforts and billions spent on programs, books, seminars, and coaching, the evidence remains stark: workplaces continue to suffer from disengagement, distrust, and dysfunction, while leaders experience increasingly shorter tenures and frequent derailments. This persistent failure demands a fundamental reconsideration of our approach to understanding and developing leadership. The path forward requires embracing evidence-based leadership—a systematic approach that prioritizes empirical reality over wishful thinking. This begins with accurately measuring current conditions rather than assuming implementation of leadership ideals. Organizations must track not just leaders' self-reported attitudes or participants' satisfaction with leadership programs, but concrete workplace indicators such as trust levels, employee engagement, and retention rates. Without these baseline measurements, meaningful improvement remains impossible. Evidence-based leadership also requires acknowledging the divergent interests between individual leaders and their organizations. Rather than pretending these interests naturally align, we must design systems that genuinely connect leaders' personal success to organizational outcomes and employee well-being. This means creating metrics and incentives that reward leaders for developing talent, building ethical cultures, and fostering sustainable performance rather than merely producing short-term financial results. Perhaps most crucially, evidence-based leadership demands overcoming our preference for inspiring leadership fables. The leadership industry's emphasis on exceptional, heroic narratives has obscured the complex, sometimes uncomfortable realities of organizational power dynamics. By studying leadership as it actually operates—including its less appealing aspects—we gain valuable insights unavailable through sanitized success stories. Developing better leaders also requires creating more balanced organizational power structures. The evidence suggests that unilateral leadership power frequently produces suboptimal outcomes for organizations and society. Systems incorporating meaningful checks and balances—whether through employee representation, transparent governance, or distributed decision-making—can mitigate leadership excesses while preserving necessary authority. Ultimately, evidence-based leadership requires a fundamental shift in perspective. Rather than viewing leadership development as a quest to transform imperfect humans into idealized heroes, we must recognize leadership as a complex social practice operating within specific organizational and societal contexts. This more realistic perspective acknowledges that leadership behaviors emerge from and adapt to existing incentive structures, power dynamics, and cultural norms. The path toward better leadership begins with confronting these realities rather than avoiding them. Only by understanding the actual mechanisms that produce leadership behaviors can we design interventions that create meaningful improvement. While this approach lacks the emotional comfort of inspirational leadership tales, it offers something far more valuable: the potential for genuine progress in how organizations function and how leaders lead.

Summary

The fundamental disconnect between leadership rhetoric and organizational reality explains decades of failed leadership development efforts. While the leadership industry promotes authenticity, modesty, truthfulness, and selflessness, successful leaders consistently demonstrate nearly opposite qualities: strategic self-presentation, self-promotion, selective disclosure, and enlightened self-interest. This gap persists because the behaviors that enable individuals to attain and maintain leadership positions often directly contradict the idealized qualities celebrated in leadership literature. The industry's preference for inspiration over evidence has created a self-perpetuating cycle of ineffective interventions. Progress requires abandoning comforting leadership myths in favor of evidence-based approaches that acknowledge organizational realities. Rather than simply exhorting leaders to be more virtuous, effective leadership development must address the underlying power dynamics, incentive structures, and social systems that shape leadership behavior. By measuring actual workplace conditions, creating accountability for leadership outcomes, and designing systems that better align individual and collective interests, organizations can begin making genuine improvements. The path forward lies not in idealized prescriptions but in clear-eyed recognition of how leadership actually operates—only then can meaningful change begin.

About Author

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Jeffrey Pfeffer

Jeffrey Pfeffer is the Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University where he has taught since 1979. He is the author or co-author of thirteen books including The Human Equation: Building Profits by Putting People First; Managing with Power; The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge Into Action; Hidden Value: How Great Companies Achieve Extraordinary Results with Ordinary People; Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management; and What Were They Thinking? Unconventional Wisdom About Management, as well as more than 150 articles and book chapters. Pfeffer’s latest book, entitled Power: Why Some People Have It—And Others Don’t was published in 2010 by Harper Business.Dr. Pfeffer received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from Carnegie-Mellon University and his Ph.D. from Stanford. He began his career at the business school at the University of Illinois and then taught at the University of California, Berkeley. Pfeffer has been a visiting professor at the Harvard Business School, Singapore Management University, London Business School, Copenhagen Business School, and for the past 8 years a visitor at IESE in Barcelona.From 2003-2007, Pfeffer wrote a monthly column, “The Human Factor,” for the 600,000-person circulation business magazine, Business 2.0 and from 2007-2010, he wrote a monthly column providing career advice for Capital, a leading business and economics magazine in Turkey. Pfeffer also was a regular blogger for the Corner Office section of BNET (CBS Interactive), and currently writes for the Harvard Business Review website, Bloomberg Business Week online, Inc., and for the “On Leadership” section of The Washington Post. Pfeffer has appeared in segments on CBS Sunday Morning, 60 Minutes, and CNBC as well as television and radio programs in Korea and Japan and has been quoted and featured in news articles from countries around the globe.Pfeffer currently serves on the board of directors of the nonprofit Quantum Leap Healthcare. In the past he has served on the boards of Resumix, Unicru, and Workstream, all human capital software companies, Audible Magic, an internet company, SonoSite, a company designing and manufacturing portable ultrasound machines, and the San Francisco Playhouse, a non-profit theater. Pfeffer has presented seminars in 38 countries throughout the world as well as doing consulting and providing executive education for numerous companies, associations, and universities in the United States.Jeffrey Pfeffer has won the Richard I. Irwin Award presented by the Academy of Management for scholarly contributions to management and numerous awards for his articles and books. He is listed in the top 25 management thinkers by Thinkers 50, and as one of the Most Influential HR International Thinkers by HR Magazine. In November, 2011, he was presented with an honorary doctorate degree from Tilburg University in The Netherlands.

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