Debunking Leadership BS and Exposing the Truth Behind Common Leadership Myths
- 21 hours ago
- 7 min read
Barbara Suigo is a charisma expert, HR consultant, and author. Specializing in the development of soft skills, she has published the "Charisma Trilogy" and offers personalized training and coaching programs for leaders and professionals.
Over the past decades, an industry has emerged claiming to know how workplace relationships should function. A multimillion-dollar industry, generating staggering revenues through books, courses, seminars, and management programs. This system has built a shared language centered on motivation, authenticity, trust, and good intentions, presenting it as the primary path to improved performance and organizational well-being.
Yet, despite this vast production of theoretical knowledge and prescriptive models on managing people, workplaces continue to be environments where trust is fragile, stress is high, and power dynamics remain largely opaque. Competition, fear, and resentment persist as structural elements of professional relationships, not as marginal anomalies. This enduring gap between what is proclaimed and what actually occurs calls for moving beyond formulas and motivational slogans, toward an examination of the deeper social dynamics that govern power, influence, and relationships within organizations.
Jeffrey Pfeffer, Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business and author of several works, including Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time, has devoted years to analyzing this disconnect. The core of his critique is that much of what is taught as essential virtue in managing people does not align with how real social dynamics operate inside organizations. Many so-called “best practices” are grounded in hope, aspiration, and uplifting narratives, yet lack concrete evidence in the ways individuals actually influence one another, interact, or exercise power. When we teach idealized models, we ignore the real conditions of conflict, interest, competition, and perception that shape professional relationships.
As a result, those trained within these idealized frameworks often remain unable to recognize or manage real power dynamics and, in the worst cases, become vulnerable to individuals who know how to exploit those dynamics in manipulative and unscrupulous ways. This is why it is essential to critically examine some of the most deeply rooted assumptions about managing people and to show how far removed they are from observable reality.
Leadership and morality as a reassuring narrative
Among the most widespread beliefs is the assumption that qualities such as modesty, authenticity, altruism, and transparency are indispensable ingredients for creating healthy and virtuous workplaces. Many positive management models rest on this premise, treating these virtues as sufficient conditions for generating trust and collective well-being.
Pfeffer observes that many of these values, while morally commendable, are not what real organizational contexts actually reward. In competitive environments, those who perfectly embody these virtues may often be perceived as naïve, vulnerable, or incapable of defending themselves against inevitable power struggles and pressures. Teaching that morality alone can guide professional relationships means ignoring the existence of complex social systems in which individual interests, reputation, visibility, and perception frequently matter more than proclaimed virtue.
Morality on its own is not useless, but it is insufficient if it fails to account for the dimensions of power, conflict, and influence that permeate every human organizational system. Confusing what we wish would happen with what actually happens creates unrealistic expectations and, in many cases, leads to deep disillusionment.
The illusion of transparency
Another prevailing myth holds that total transparency and absolute honesty should always and everywhere be pursued without compromise. It is commonly believed that speaking the truth directly and without filters is the best way to build trust and mutual respect.
Pfeffer challenges this view by arguing that, in many situations, those who exercise authority and influence are precisely those who know what to say, how to say it, and to whom. Information management is a fundamental component of social and organizational relationships, and pure transparency does not always produce positive outcomes. Often, a context-sensitive understanding of internal dynamics enables individuals to advance, negotiate, and establish relational safety without exposing vulnerabilities that others might exploit.
This is not a justification for lying, but an acknowledgment that full truth can become a lever of power in the wrong hands. The choice of what information to share is a strategic act, and awareness of this fact distinguishes those who understand real social dynamics from those who merely repeat motivational slogans.
When altruism becomes a mask
A widely held narrative portrays those who manage others as individuals who should consistently place others before themselves, serving an ideal of operational altruism. Taken literally, this vision may sound appealing, but it risks ignoring the social and psychological realities of those who make decisions within complex structures.
Pfeffer notes that in many organizations, individuals in positions of responsibility have not shared the same work experiences, hardships, conditions, or limitations as those who report to them. The social and psychological distance between decision-makers and those affected by those decisions is often significant, and expecting this distance to translate automatically into altruism is naïve. In practice, personal motivations, individual incentives, and career structures frequently push those at the top to protect their status, mobility, and reputation before attending to the conditions of subordinates.
What is presented as altruism in academic narratives often turns out, in practice, to be a mask used to maintain consensus or avoid conflict rather than a genuine transformation of human relationships.
Authenticity as performance
One of the most pervasive mantras is that personal genuineness is a universal virtue: be yourself, be consistent, hide nothing. While this prescription may hold value at the level of aspiration, in the observable practice of professional relationships, the ability to interpret appropriate roles, modulate language, and manage one’s reactions is often more effective than “unfiltered authenticity.”
Pfeffer emphasizes that many behaviors labeled as inauthentic are, in reality, strategic responses to complex social contexts. Apparent genuineness does not always translate into real effectiveness, and those who can manage their image and others’ perceptions tend to build more durable relationships of influence than those who confuse spontaneity with effectiveness. Interpreting this as hypocrisy is a mistake, more often, it reflects a heightened awareness of the relationship between perception and reality.
Much noise, little impact
One of Pfeffer’s sharpest criticisms of the management formula industry concerns the lack of measurable, concrete effects. For years, companies, universities, and consultants have invested growing resources in training programs, coaching, and seminars under the implicit assumption that these efforts would improve engagement, relationship quality, and workers’ psychological well-being.
Yet the data show no significant large-scale change. Trust, workplace satisfaction, perceived well-being, and relationship quality have not increased measurably despite decades of “best practices” developed around reassuring models. This suggests that the dominant narrative has failed to account for the structural factors that shape human behavior in organized groups, such as individual incentives, reputation dynamics, and conflicts of interest.
Contexts, not recipes
Everything described so far leads to a simple but fundamental conclusion, there are no magic formulas or universal rules that can be applied everywhere. The complexity of social relationships and influence dynamics cannot be reduced to moral virtue lists or behavioral checklists. Every system, every organizational context, has its own specificities, and solutions must arise from a deep understanding of what actually happens, not from what we wish would happen.
Pfeffer urges us to set aside reassuring narratives and accept reality with all its conflicts, ambiguities, and contradictions. Looking at reality as it is, rather than as we would like it to be, is the first step toward understanding what truly generates distress, suffering, or, conversely, well-being within organizations.
Toxicity as a systemic outcome
The gap between what is professed in “virtuous” models and what actually occurs creates fertile ground for toxic power and manipulative forms of influence. Individuals who lack genuine empathy or authentic concern for others but skillfully master perception, narrative, and symbolic control of relationships often gain more influence, visibility, and power than those who sincerely strive to embody proclaimed virtues.
Under these conditions, charisma is not an irrational gift but a technique of narrative and perception. When dominant cultures reward appearance and the promise of virtue rather than deep observation of social dynamics, those who can manage impressions gain a significant advantage. In this sense, many manifestations of dark charisma and charismatic psychopathy observed in contemporary organizational contexts are not isolated anomalies, but predictable outcomes of environments that have stopped examining reality with a critical eye.
Recovering a critical lens
The failure of reassuring narratives is not a condemnation of morality or ethics, but a call for clarity and critical awareness. We cannot improve the quality of professional relationships if we continue to measure reality using ideal frameworks designed to express desires rather than to interpret observable social dynamics. At a professional level, this means developing the ability to read real interaction signals, not confusing presence with substance, and avoiding the projection of moral expectations onto empirical facts. At a cultural level, it means resisting the illusion that a behavioral panacea exists and learning instead to confront contradictions, conflicts of interest, and power structures that, when skillfully exploited, can cause significant psychological and relational harm.
Ignoring these dynamics does not eliminate them, it merely makes them harder to recognize and counter. Understanding these mechanisms means reclaiming a form of critical thinking that does not settle for motivational slogans but examines facts, power relations, hidden incentives, and implicit signals of influence. This is how organizations can move from a culture of good intentions to a culture of substantive awareness.
This article is drawn from Psychopathic Charisma – The Dark Side of Charisma, the book I am currently writing, in which I explore how reassuring narratives about human and organizational dynamics can, in unexpected and systematic ways, foster toxic power, manipulative charisma, and chains of influence sustained by the very illusions sold as “best practices.”
Read more from Barbara Suigo
Barbara Suigo, Senior HR Consultant, Author, Charisma Expert
Born in Italy and naturalized as a French citizen, Barbara Suigo is an HR consultant, author, coach, and trainer specializing in the art of charisma. With solid experience in corporate communication and extensive training in NLP, persuasion, and storytelling techniques, she supports professionals and companies by offering personalized coaching, training programs, and in-depth content.
Barbara is the author of the Charisma Trilogy, a work that deeply explores how to develop and harness personal influence and leadership presence. She has also published other books focused on personal and professional growth, solidifying her role as a leader in the field of soft skills development.
Sources:
Jeffrey Pfeffer, Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time
Jeffrey Pfeffer, Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don’t
