2023 was the warmest year on record, with Earth’s temperature recently, albeit briefly, reaching 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels for the first time. This is something climate scientists have long warned will create catastrophic effects, should it become the new normal. The increasing likelihood of this possibility makes starkly evident the profound reliance we all have on political and business leaders to act responsibly. The reality is we can’t live without leadership, but if the decisions leaders make are unwise or unjust then many die because of leadership.

While this has long been the case, contemporary challenges — such as climate change, the existence of weapons that can inflict large scale death and destruction, and pandemic diseases that can spread globally in just weeks — have clearly raised the stakes when it comes to the need for competent and ethical leadership and the risks incompetent or unethical leaders pose to people and the planet.

As just one example of this, a lack of progress in reducing CO2 emissions in accordance with the international treaty on climate change, known as the Paris Agreement, led the UN Environment Programme to warn in 2022 that “urgent system-wide transformation” was now the only means left to avoid a “climate disaster.” While the 2023 Global Climate Action Summit in Dubai, COP28, delivered the historic UAE Consensus to accelerate climate action and put forward a plan to close the gap to the Paris 2030 goals, it remains to be seen whether the signatories will put action behind their words.  Given  it is clear that much more should have been done much sooner, skepticism seems warranted. Indeed, even now still moving in precisely the wrong direction, Aotearoa New Zealand’s recently formed conservative-libertarian-populist coalition government  has said it will reverse the current ban  on new offshore oil and gas exploration. Too often it is scientists and activists who are leading the way in advocating for changes needed to ameliorate global warming and environmental degradation, while political and corporate leaders — who actually have the power and authority to effect such changes — drag their feet.

If our efforts are to serve the greater good, those of us engaged in the leadership industry ought to be clear-eyed that leadership is far too often part of the problem humanity collectively faces, rather than part of the potential solution, as we would hope it to be. Further, because the industry is these days largely psychologized in its orientation and focused on behavioral and cognitive considerations, we typically avoid considering the substantive issues leaders face and the impact of the choices they make, ceding this territory to experts in fields such as public policy, political science, or corporate strategy and performance. This orientation, however, risks ignoring the broad characteristics and consequences of contemporary leadership. The unpalatable reality — that leaders are in many cases merely upholding political, social, and economic systems that are inequitable and unsustainable and doing little to transform those systems — deserves more of our attention.  

To help develop that broader perspective I believe we can find inspiration in the longer history of our field, something which I’ve sought to explore in earlier work. In the medieval era, for instance, a genre of books called “Mirrors for Princes” were a key vehicle through which scholars sought to advise heads of state on all aspects of how they should lead. While at times such advice merely pandered to the status quo, at its best it sought to challenge absolutist monarchs to act wisely and justly. The disciplinary boundaries that we now take for granted did not exist, leaving scope for a more holistic consideration of behavioral, processual, moral, political, and substantive policy matters involved in leading a nation. This required scholars to build a broad understanding of the work of leadership and a rich sense of the context in which it took place. These days, multi- and transdisciplinary approaches could help forge a more holistic approach to understanding leadership.

It is also notable that as a community today we mostly focus on what makes for good leadership — and generally have far less to say when it comes to bad leadership. A recent search on Amazon books for “good leadership” offered “over 40,000 results,” while a search for “bad leadership”  generated just “over 3000 results.” Perhaps also in part because of the tendency to now focus principally on leadership’s behavioral and cognitive aspects, we appear collectively prone to “romanticizing” leadership in ways that overstates its influence and underestimates its complexities by not paying heed to the substantive issues that leaders are grappling with.

The adage that “if you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail” seems apposite here. In focusing intently on leader and follower related variables, other wider influences shaping what happens are too easily ignored. Adherence to methodologies that emphasize precision over broad sense-making  gives rise to knowledge that is decontextualized, a problem I’ve also explored in earlier work.  In the effort to identify effective behaviors and formulate these into a parsimonious model the broader reality that all humans are inevitably flawed so easily fades from view, replaced by an idealized, “upbeat” prescription that only shows us the bright side of leadership.