In boardrooms, governments, and public institutions, a quiet crisis is unfolding: leaders are burning out, being fired, or walking away- often within just a few months of taking the helm. From high-profile CEO exits to political resignations, the pattern is becoming too frequent to ignore. It raises a provocative question: Is leadership itself broken – or are today’s leaders simply not up to the job?
The answer may be more systemic than personal.
A Role No One Can Fill?
The modern leader is expected to be visionary, empathetic, decisive, inclusive, strategic, and resilient – all while navigating global complexity, digital disruption, and cultural volatility. It’s a job description that borders on the impossible. No wonder so many leaders are failing – or fleeing.
The truth is, we’ve designed leadership roles that no one can realistically succeed in. The expectations are contradictory: be bold, but cautious; be authentic, but polished; be decisive, but collaborative. Leaders are set up to disappoint someone, somewhere, all the time.
Poorly Chosen or Poorly Prepared?
Many leaders are still chosen based on outdated criteria: charisma, confidence, or past performance in unrelated roles. But what got someone to the top rarely prepares them for what they’ll face once they’re there. Leadership pipelines often reward conformity and political skill over adaptability and systems thinking.
Worse, leadership development programs often reinforce the myth of the heroic individual rather than preparing leaders to work with complexity, ambiguity, and distributed power. We’re training leaders for a world that no longer exists.
The Pace of Change Is Outrunning the People in Charge
In a fast-changing world, static leadership models are a liability. The shelf life of a strategy – or a leader – is shrinking. Organizations need leaders who can sense, respond, and evolve in real time. But many are still operating with 20th-century mindsets in 21st-century environments.
This mismatch creates fragility. Leaders who can’t adapt fast enough are replaced. Those who try to change too much, too quickly, are rejected. And those who succeed often do so by working around the system, not through it.
Is It Time to Rethink Leadership Itself?
Perhaps the problem isn’t just the people in leadership—it’s the idea of leadership. The notion that one person can – or should – carry the weight of vision, direction, and accountability is increasingly out of step with how complex systems actually work.
We may need to move from leader-centric to system-centric thinking. From command-and-control to sense-and-respond. From the myth of the exceptional individual to the reality of collective intelligence.
‘The lie of leadership’ isn’t that leaders are bad people. It’s that we’ve built a system that demands too much from too few – and then blames them when it breaks. Until we confront that, we’ll keep watching leaders fall, one after another, while the system stays the same.
Look out for a new podcast – ‘The Lie of Leadership’ – coming soon to you favourite place for podcasts.