Leadership Development Must Change

I spent two years researching narcissistic leadership for my master's degree, because my experiences with leaders seemed to be peppered with trying to get past people's sense of self-importance. There was the CEO who told me they needed to establish their personal brand before even familiarizing themselves with the organization. A friend told me about how his CEO demanded to be the “face” of the organization in all marketing collateral and media. A couple of leaders that I ran across showed no compunction about bullying colleagues whom they believed received too much public attention.

Sure, these could be written off as annoying behaviors, but my research told me that I wasn't imagining things. It has become abundantly clear that leadership development must change.

With their volatile emotions and lack of empathy toward others, narcissistic leaders have a tendency to penalize those who don’t "play ball" with them.

Matthew Sowcik and Austin Council wrote a 2018 article called “Developing the Next Generation of Narcissistic Leaders”. They argued that “the social shift toward individualism” has caused increased levels of “overconfidence, ambition, perfectionism, and entitlement” among college students. As a possible result, narcissistic students may have become highly motivated to seek out leadership education and training opportunities. Sowcik and Council feared that the leadership recruitment process had unwittingly bent in favor of narcissistic students disproportionately because of their penchant for assertiveness, showing confidence and talkativeness in classroom situations. As a result, they noted, this has caused a domino effect in classroom literature, which has focused too much on leadership development geared toward the interests of the individual. To me, the college students in this study are pretty likely to be a reliable sample for society’s overall challenge.

The toxicity of narcissistic leadership

Even in its mildest form, narcissistic leadership can have a toxic impact on the follower, which I explored in my master’s professional project. With their volatile emotions and lack of empathy toward others, narcissistic leaders have a tendency to penalize those who don’t "play ball" with them. So, it's no coincidence that narcissistic leaders neither like rules, policies nor processes that are designed to level the playing field for others. All the narcissistic leader can think is, “What about me and what I want???” As a quick aside, there is also no coincidence that narcissism, bullying, and racism align pretty well.

Perhaps the real issue is that our view of leadership is unclear.

My main thing is that this flaw in leadership development enforces rewarding self-centered behavior in critical leadership roles. When the current University of Colorado football coach left Jackson State University, I was one of the unpopular folks who had the unmitigated gall to criticize the narrative that he was the "hero" that Jackson State (and other Historically Black Colleges and Universities) needed. My harshest critic wrote to me on social media, “The Champion is a little bit arrogant, a little bit cocky but most of all the Champion is CONFIDENT!” They went on to write that the HBCU where I was working could use a “narcissistic hero.” Unfortunately, many see a highly effective leader as someone who centers personal audacity as the key to moving organizations in productive directions while criticizing the collective for perceived weaknesses.

Maybe it's us and not them?

A major part of the problem is Western society’s infatuation with individual success, writes Alexander Burgemeester. We tend to align power, material possessions and charisma with success. At some point in my career, folks who intended to help me tried to encourage me to do a better job of “talking a good game.” Being the values-driven person that I am, I found it really hard to understand that, for our society, competence and community often just aren’t enough.

Perhaps the real issue is that our view of leadership is unclear. Leadership scholar Gayle Avery holds the view that most people have trouble putting leadership in specific contexts. Traditionally, we’ve seen leadership mostly centered on the individual(s) with executive authority or absolute power. When diverse communities’ voices become louder, however, more people rise to leadership opportunities.

Ronald Heifertz sees leadership as a practice, not a position, and he sees leadership being anchored in the work to be done as opposed to the person with the authority. I see leadership as a people-centered process. However, I think that society’s appetite for individualism, mixed with the infatuation with success, keeps us enamored with titles and the perceived glamor of leadership. I mean, yeah, titles are mad sexy until you have to do the actual job.

None of this is to say that focusing on the individual is a bad thing. And I’m surely not ignoring a leader's need for self-care. My beef is with leadership development that prioritizes the individual, processes, results and profits in a way that ignores the humanity of the follower. We can have both: confident leaders with swagger who engage in personal leadership in service to the collective and the mission.

Leadership development training should put ethics first. To get ethical leaders, however, people need tools to determine who will practice leadership morally and competently. It’s time to stop churning out self-serving heroes and start creating community-minded leaders who want the best for all.