Why Good Leadership Can Go Bad
We know a lot about good leadership. Probably more than at any other point in history.
There are decades of research, thousands of books, leadership programmes, coaching, feedback tools, competency frameworks and enough LinkedIn advice to keep us scrolling until retirement. And yet poor leadership behaviour isn't exactly hard to find. That's the bit I find fascinating.
Because the obvious explanation, that leaders simply don't know any better, doesn't really hold up. Plenty of intelligent, well-intentioned leaders know exactly what they're supposed to do. We understand trust. Delegation. Coaching. Empowerment. Psychological safety. We can explain why micromanagement is unhelpful and why people need space to think, contribute and challenge.
But then the pressure goes up. The responsibility feels heavier. The consequences feel bigger. And somehow the leader in us, who knows better doesn't always behave better.
So if we know all this, why do we lose access to it when we need it most?
That's the territory I explored recently with Dr. Amar Dhall, a psychotherapist and leadership researcher whose work sits at the intersection of psychology, nervous-system regulation and organisational life. His perspective gives us a useful way of understanding why good leadership can deteriorate without requiring us to believe that the person doing it has suddenly become a terrible human being.
🎧 Listen to the full episode here:
📄 Prefer to read instead? The full transcript is available below.
Knowing what to do isn't the same as being able to do it
Leadership development tends to concentrate heavily on capability. What skills do I have?
What do I know? Can I coach? Delegate? Give feedback? Set direction? Deal with conflict? Build trust? These are all important. But Amar makes a useful distinction between capability and capacity.
Capability is what we're able to do. Capacity is our ability to access those capabilities when it really matters. That's a deceptively important distinction.
Imagine a leader who is perfectly capable of coaching rather than telling. Give them time, headspace and a straightforward problem and they can probably do it beautifully. Now give them three missed targets, a board demanding answers, two vacancies they can't fill, a difficult customer and someone on their team making another mistake. Same leader. Same capability. Different access to it.
Suddenly the thoughtful coaching question becomes:
“Just give it here. I'll do it.”
That's not necessarily a knowledge failure. It may be a capacity failure. And if that's true, it raises an awkward question about how we approach leadership development. When we struggle as leaders, our instinct is often to look for more. Another framework. Another course. Another book. Another tool. But, as Amar puts it:
“you can't solve a capacity problem by building more capability”
Sometimes we don't need another source of answer. We need enough capacity to access the answers we already have.
The strengths that build your career can eventually trap you
Here's where it gets even more interesting. A lot of bad leadership behaviour doesn't begin badly at all. Take responsibility. That's a good thing, right? Early in your career, being the person who takes responsibility gets noticed. You're dependable. You don't wait to be told. You sort things out. People trust you with more. So you do more of it. And it works. Until, gradually, responsibility stops being simply something you do and becomes something you believe you are.
I'm the responsible one.
I'm the one who gets things done.
I'm the one people can rely on.
Now the stakes have changed.
Letting go no longer feels like a simple management choice. It can start to feel inconsistent with who you believe yourself to be. Responsibility becomes over-responsibility. Being dependable becomes doing everything. High standards become control. The person who was promoted because they could always be trusted to sort things out slowly becomes the bottleneck everybody has to pass through.
Amar describes how a positive early-career adaptation can become identity, get overplayed and eventually contribute to stress, resentment, micromanagement and reduced capacity.
That's why I think we should be careful with the language of “strengths and weaknesses” in leadership. Some of our most troublesome leadership behaviours may not be weaknesses at all. They may be strengths we've forgotten how to regulate.
Good intentions are not a reliable safeguard
This matters because leaders often experience their own behaviour very differently from the people around them. Micromanagement can feel like maintaining standards. Control can feel like protecting the outcome. Taking over can feel like helping. Working ridiculous hours can feel like commitment. Not delegating can feel like sparing someone else the pressure.
We can give remarkably noble explanations to behaviours that aren't producing noble consequences.
That's one reason Amar's reference to the Jungian idea of enantiodromia is useful. In simple terms, something pursued far enough can begin to turn into its opposite. His bigger leadership point is that this isn't necessarily evidence of poor character. It demands something more difficult: psychological maturity. Because maturity isn't merely knowing that a behaviour can go too far. It's noticing when your behaviour has. That's much harder.
Pressure can make certainty feel safer than curiosity
When pressure rises, we like to imagine that our leadership training will kick in. Sometimes it does. But pressure can also make us narrower in our thinking and actions. One of Amar's most interesting observations is that, under stress, we can become increasingly convinced by our own thoughts. Certainty drives action. Action feels useful. Doing something feels safer than sitting in uncertainty wondering whether we're wrong.
So the stressed leader may not be thinking:
“I'm depleted. Perhaps I should question my judgement.”
They may be thinking:
“I can see exactly what needs to happen here. Why isn't everybody else getting it?”
Amar describes that movement towards certainty as an adaptive response rather than simply a cognitive choice. To me, that creates a fascinating leadership tension. We want confidence from leaders. When things are difficult, we want somebody who won't crumble and who can make decisions. But confidence and certainty aren't the same thing.
Confidence can hold:
“Here's my judgement, and I'm prepared to act.”
Maturity adds:
“And I could still be wrong.”
The less capacity we have, the harder that second sentence may become.
When helping becomes Rescuing
This is where Amar's idea of the Superhero Reflex connects particularly strongly with something I use in my own work: the Drama Triangle.
The Rescuer is an interesting character because Rescuers aren't necessarily selfish, controlling people. They help. That's the problem. Helping feels good. It's socially rewarded.
And in the short term it often works. There's the problem. I step in, the problem disappears, result. But what happens when that becomes the leader's default?
Amar talks about founders who care enormously about the businesses they've built. Their instinct to step in can come from genuine commitment and a powerful sense of vision. Yet repeatedly defaulting to “I can do this” can still create what he calls the Superhero Reflex.
The intentions can be excellent. The system that develops around them may be less so. And that's where I think leaders need to ask themselves a harder question than:
“Why won't my people take more ownership?”
And should maybe try:
“What am I doing that might be teaching them not to?”
If every important decision eventually comes back to you, your people will learn something. If you rewrite every piece of work, they learn something. If you step in whenever they struggle, they learn something. If your preferred answer always wins, they learn something. Things work if we default to the Boss. Eventually the leader can point to everyone's dependency as proof that they were right to remain indispensable. That's one hell of a self-reinforcing loop.
Power changes the room before you've said a word
There is another reason that good intentions aren't enough. Power. Leaders don't experience organisational relationships in the same way as the people they lead. That's sounds obvious when you say it out loud, but I think it's surprisingly easy to forget when you're the person with the power.
You might think you're approachable. And you might genuinely be approachable. You might have drinks together on Friday and know everybody's dog's name. None of that removes the fact that one person has more power over the other's working life.
Amar recalls his teacher Arnie Mindell describing power as being like oxygen: you tend to notice it when you don't have it.
That's a useful image.
If you're sitting comfortably in a meeting wondering why nobody is challenging you, perhaps the problem isn't that everyone agrees. Perhaps challenging you costs them more than being challenged costs you. That's why “my door is always open” has never struck me as much of a psychological safety strategy. An open door isn't the same as a safe conversation. We have to do more than grant permission for challenge. We have to become people whose behaviour repeatedly demonstrates that difficult truth can survive contact with our authority. Because if nobody ever tells us anything uncomfortable, we have two possible explanations.
One is that we're doing absolutely everything brilliantly. The other is rather more likely.
Leadership is like dancing
We also need to stop pretending leadership happens entirely in the head. This is where one of Amar's simplest analogies landed so hard with me.
“Leadership is like dancing.”
You can study tango for years. You can know its history. Understand the steps. Read every technical manual available. Then you get onto the dance floor and discover that knowing everything about dancing doesn't necessarily mean you can dance.
Because now there's another person involved. There's timing, rythmn, movement, attention, response, adjustment. You have to embody it, feel it as well as know it.
As Amar says:
“Leadership is an embodied skill, not a cognitive one.”
That matters enormously in organisations that still promote people into management primarily because they're technically excellent. Technical expertise can help you succeed as an individual. Leadership adds a different challenge.
Now your effectiveness increasingly depends on what happens between people. Can you build trust? Can you recognise what somebody else needs? Can you challenge without crushing someone's spirit? Support without rescuing and unintentionally supressing talent? Hold authority without needing to prove it? Stay curious when your instincts are screaming certainty?
These are power skills, because they have to survive real human interaction. You don't become good at them simply by knowing the steps. You have to practise the dance.
Good leadership needs enough space for reflection
So where does that leave leadership development? I'm not suggesting some anti-learning place where books and training suddenly don't matter. Capability matters. Amar makes that clear too. You can't regulate or meditate your way into knowing something you simply haven't learned. Capacity and capability both matter. The problem comes when we assume every leadership difficulty must be solved by adding more knowledge.
Sometimes the more useful work is subtractive. Take a pause. Take time to notice. Ask a question. Reflect.
I said during our conversation that I see reflection occasionally get dismissed as a bit “woo woo” by participants in programmes I lead or am associated with. I don't buy that.
If leadership involves understanding yourself, the people around you and the effect you're having on them, then creating enough space to notice what is actually going on is hardly weird, etherial or indulgent. It's part of the job.
But that doesn't mean endless navel-gazing, either. It can mean asking some fairly practical questions:
What am I carrying that someone else should own?
Where am I mistaking certainty for confidence?
Which behaviour made me successful but is now being overplayed?
What happens in me when somebody challenges my authority?
Is my team genuinely dependent on me, or have I trained them to be?
When did I last change my mind because someone below me challenged me?
And the aim isn't to become perfectly self-aware. Good luck with that pursuit. No, the aim is to become curious enough to notice the patterns before the bill comes due. Amar's phrase, not mine, and a pretty good one at that.
Learning to live at altitude
Perhaps the biggest trap in leadership is assuming the way forward must look like the way up. More effort got me here. So I'll work harder. Taking responsibility got me here. So I'll carry more. Being the expert got me here. So I'll provide more answers. Driving standards got me here. So I'll tighten my grip. Except eventually the conditions change.
What got you promoted may not help you lead. What helped you climb may not help you stay effective once you're carrying more complexity, more responsibility and more power.
One of Amar's closing thoughts captures that beautifully:
“The first half of your career was to learn to climb mountains. The second half is to learn to live at altitude.”
And perhaps the next stage requires something that feels deeply counterintuitive to people whose success has been built on effort:
“Maybe the thing that's going to help you move to the next level isn't more effort.”
That, for me, brings us back to the real question behind good leadership.
It's not simply whether you know what good looks like. Most experienced leaders do. The harder test is whether you've developed enough capacity and psychological maturity to recognise what is happening to you when your strengths get overplayed, your resources run low and your power makes it increasingly difficult for other people to tell you the truth.
Because good leadership rarely goes bad with one dramatic change. More often, a useful behaviour gets dialled up a little too far. Then a little further. Until one day the thing you still experience as commitment, care or responsibility is having a very different effect on everybody else.
Knowing better is important. But the leadership work is being able to notice, access and choose better when it actually matters.
Andy Goram is the owner of Bizjuicer, an employee engagement and workplace culture consultancy that's on a mission to help people have more fulfilling work lives. He's also the host of the Sticky From The Inside Podcast, which talks to experts on these topics from around the world
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