Careless Leaders

Unfortunately, our beliefs matter far more than we think. They eventually shape how we move through the world. What we believe about human nature influences what we expect from others, the behavior we tolerate, and accept as normal. The problem with acceptance is that it makes us turn away from opportunities to change something and to take action. Over time, cynical beliefs can become self-fulfilling prophecies. They lower our standards, narrow our imagination, and quietly drain the energy needed to act with courage, responsibility, and care.

I went through this myself. The moment I realized how deeply I had been pulled into that narrative came when I finally read Rutger Bregman’s Humankind. The book had been sitting in my library for almost two years while I had picked up other titles immediately.

I had bought it in German, my native language, and that title must have had a subconscious impact. It’s called Im Grunde Gut which roughly translates into Basically Good.

Knowing that the book explored human nature, that framing did not resonate with me at that time. I had seen too much bad behavior dressed up as ambition, too much carelessness, and too many examples of power being used in ways that felt like pure selfishness and completely detached from consequence.

What finally got me to read it was a gift from a friend.

Bregman’s newer book, Moral Ambition, led me back to Humankind, and became an even greater gift. It helped me step back from the stories I had been told and the ones I had started repeating to myself. More than anything, it made me realize how much cynicism had begun to undermine my belief that meaningful change is possible.

I learned that unless we review our beliefs and understand who and what they serve, we become passive consumers of a narrative that keeps us from seeing our own responsibility in sustaining it. And that is a dangerous mistake. Human nature is far more complex, and far more hopeful, than the dominating stories of our news and echo chambers suggest.

This shift becomes particularly important when we look at leadership.

Our own way of leading, the leadership we tolerate around us, and the kind of leadership we help to sustain.

When we look at harmful leadership behaviour and see it as proof of a darker human nature, we often overlook the complexity behind it. We reduce it to individual character and ignore the systemic conditions, the motives at play, and our own role in allowing it to continue.

By systemic conditions, I mean the operating systems we have created for our societies, our organisations, and ourselves. In leadership, that includes organizational structures, culture, management and belief systems, all reinforced through values, incentives, and rewarded behaviour.

These systems are genuinely complex. Hierarchy places decision-making in the hands of those furthest from the work. Competitive cultures undermine collaboration and short-term results are rewarded while long-term responsibility is deferred. With time, these dynamics compound in ways that make it increasingly difficult to see where we still have power and where our influence stops. Our willingness to challenge inconsistent, self-serving, and careless leaders keeps declining under fear of repression and consequences. At some point we eventually lower our standards for what we expect from leaders and normalise harmful trade-offs in the name of growth, efficiency, and innovation.

In Bregman’s book, it becomes fairly obvious that in ancient, smaller social groups, getting rid of unwanted leaders was much easier. A leader had earned the trust of the group, brought valuable experience or wisdom, and served the group instead of exploiting it. And if they turned towards the dark side of power and changed their behaviour, their role would change as well.

In our modern world, the dynamics and levels of power have changed tremendously. Complexity is real, and I do not want to dismiss it. The weight of it is one of the reasons why people start to feel less powerful, with only limited agency to challenge careless leadership.

We stay silent when faced with an authoritarian leader about to make a harmful decision because we know how easy it is to lose our job. We consume products despite knowing about their negative effects because everyone else is using them too. And we do not question the narratives repeated through our media channels because we rarely understand all the power dynamics behind them.