Navigating the Dissonant Perceptions of Leadership Today and Tomorrow
Popular perceptions of leadership in much of the world today are fraught with dissonance. An August 2024 Gallup poll revealed that only 20% of employees trust their organizational leadership. Negative stories regularly appear concerning excessive executive compensation, unethical decision-making or influence, and corporate leaders who prioritize short-term profits over long-term sustainability concerns. At the same time, particularly in the United States and Western Europe, many executives offer visions of leadership rooted in shared purpose, inclusion, mutual development, and the cultivation of trusting, collaborative, and growth-oriented cultures. Management researchers and development specialists likewise prioritize leaders’ critical thinking, creativity, and empathy as skills that are essential for building flourishing individuals, cohesive teams, and thriving organizations.
Starker narratives circulate about political and governmental leaders. Many individuals are genuinely committed to public service, to building more equitable, just, and prosperous communities and countries. Yet to many citizens, these leaders in the public sector appear either limited by institutional constraints or, worse, trapped in their own echo chambers. As the most recent Edelman Trust Barometer has shown, barely half of respondents (50%) across 28 countries trusted career government officials as competent to integrate innovations into society. For political leaders in elective offices, public perception is worse. A 2023 Pew Research Center survey had 63% of U.S. respondents say that self-interest, especially the desire to make money, is a main reason politicians run for office. Another Pew survey from last year asked Americans to sum up their feelings about their political system and elected officials in a word or phrase: Very few (2%) used positive terms; 79% used negative or critical words, with “divisive” and “corrupt” coming up most frequently.
This creates a stunning paradox for those trying to make sense of leadership today: the simultaneous celebration of inclusive, emotionally intelligent, service-driven practices on one side, and a seemingly intractable climate of polarization, grievance, and self-interest on the other.
https://www.gallup.com/404252/indicator-leadership-management.aspx
https://www.edelman.com/trust/2024/trust-barometer
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/10/23/7-facts-about-americans-views-of-money-in-politics/
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/09/19/americans-dismal-views-of-the-nations-politics/
How should leaders operate amid these contradictory and often harshly critical perspectives? And how can those whose everyday lives compel them to balance working as organizational leaders while living as community members and citizens make sense of it? The persistent divide between collaborative aspirations and adversarial realities in leadership presents a profound challenge. However, as the 2024 U.S. Presidential election is taking place, it seems worth exploring how leaders and citizens alike should not only recognize but also begin to address this dissonance. To do so requires examining some of the tensions that arise when striving to model constructive values in environments often shaped by division. Ultimately, navigating this landscape demands an awareness of the larger socio-political and media forces at play, along with a steadfast commitment to building cultures that foster a deeper understanding and a common willingness to change.
Perceptions and Trust of Leadership
Leadership today is inescapably mediated, shaped by the images and perceptions constructed through a range of traditional, digital, and social media. In business, even leaders who maintain direct, face-to-face contact with their teams, clients, and members of the public often project, or are otherwise viewed through, the prism of public personas that diverge significantly from their everyday, on-the-ground activities. As historian Daniel Boorstin famously argued more than a half-century ago in his classic work, The Image (1962), the modern leader is often more a “celebrity” than a genuine figure of authority – someone whose constructed image overshadows their actual behavior and decisions. This divergence increasingly applies to corporate leaders today. It can create a gap between the leader’s perceived and actual influence, as the image takes on a life of its own, independent of the person’s actual, contextualized words or behaviors.
In politics, this phenomenon is even more pronounced. Campaigns construct idealized images of candidates that often contain strained resemblances to their fuller views or little relation to the complexities and compromises required for active and long-term governing. The curated images presented during elections emphasize values like strength, authenticity, and a commitment to change, particularly in service of specific constituencies, yet the realities of governance are often marked by the need for negotiation, pragmatism, and incremental progress. This disconnect between campaign imagery and the realities of sustainable leadership in office is emblematic of the broader challenge of navigating dissonant leadership narratives, particularly in government.
Worse is the complex problem of political polarization. As a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Working Paper from 2023 noted, the American public’s political views have indeed become more polarized – that is, marked by a greater and more consistent division between median party positions – since the 1990s. Counterintuitively, though, survey findings from the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group in 2021 found that Americans who held the least polarized ideological beliefs were actually the voting cohort least in favor of democracy and most supportive of a “strong leader” who did not need to bother with Congress or elections. In other words, despite many leaders’ seeming prioritization of political discord over dialogue and communication of grievances rather than seeking common ground, many citizens have felt “affectively polarized” and see a deeper crisis of confidence in political institutions and leaders.
This lack of confidence in political institutions and leadership (and, again, the media institutions that provide information about them) is an understandable reason for many in the public to look for entrepreneurial and innovative leaders as alternatives. The contrast between the social status of entrepreneurs and the leaders of established businesses is also striking. A 2023 analysis by Spanish researchers about the social status of entrepreneurs globally showed that in the U.S., China, and many countries in the Middle East and Africa, entrepreneurs are seen as cultural heroes, with positive social status perceived by nearly 70% or more of the population. Positive social status was mostly in the 60%-range in European countries.
In both business and politics, entrepreneurship and innovation have increasingly emerged as core leadership positive values – and as symbols of purposeful change and substantive impact that resonate across sectors. Entrepreneurial leaders are celebrated for their capacity to transform existing organizations or institutions or, better, to launch new ones unencumbered by bureaucracies or divisiveness. Yet, these entrepreneurial values are often embedded in highly personalized narratives shaped around the individual leader’s vision, story, hopes, and aspirations, which become a proxy for the organization or community they represent. Whether in the context of a company, city, state, or country, the leader’s persona often stands in for the collective, blurring the lines between personal ambition and shared purpose.
Beyond the Containers of the Past
These varied and often conflicting views raise a fundamental question: What kind of leaders do we truly want, especially in times of uncertainty and turbulence? Some argue for the need for entrepreneurs or “strong” leaders willing and able to effect far-reaching changes—a call often embraced by traditionalists in politics and the media. However, what constitutes strength or change is subjective, and at times, those seen as “strong” by some are labeled as “extremists” by others. The Overton window – which frames the range of ideas considered acceptable in public discourse – plays a crucial role here, and whose standards of acceptability and extremism define this window should be a matter of more explicit and ongoing debate.
When demanding better leadership, media commentators, researchers, and citizens alike should acknowledge their collective role in shaping the views of leaders and the contexts in which they operate. Council on Foreign Relations Chair Richard Haass, in The Bill of Obligations (2023), argues that Americans must look beyond an exclusive focus on individual rights and embrace their shared obligations to others. To have genuinely open, trusting, empathetic, engaged, and connected leaders, in politics and business, we must be open, trusting, empathetic, engaged, and connected ourselves. Leadership is an active relationship that requires ongoing, reciprocal commitment. This imperative applies far beyond the United States; it speaks to the necessity of recognizing and acting upon our responsibilities to one another as members of broader communities, crossing geographical and ideological borders. Only by embracing both our rights and our obligations can we create the conditions for effective, empathetic, and resilient leadership that meets the challenges of our times.
If we are to take actions beyond ourselves, or expect others – including leaders – to do so, what are the aims or goals? There is a jarring contrast between the current thinking about the future of work and organizations (and business or organizational leadership) and the future of citizenry, communities, and countries (and their leadership). As business visionary Rishad Tobaccowala writes, “the future does not fit in the containers of the past” (Restoring the Soul of Business, 2020). This mantra resonates with business thinkers, leaders, and entrepreneurs who are eager to innovate, reshape, and even disrupt industries. However, it seems anathema to many political and government officials, who insist on maintaining national and international institutions built on longstanding sovereignties, elective isolations, and antagonistic blocs that are vestiges of the past.
To put this in more dramatic terms, we might ask: Is the nation-state still fit for purpose in the twenty-first century? These containers, while seemingly immutable, are sometimes challenged around the edges. Or consider “The Atlas of Impunity.” Initiated by former British politician and head of the International Rescue Committee David Miliband and political scientist and Eurasia Group founder Ian Bremmer, the quantitative study of societies seeks to move beyond facile oppositions between democracies and autocracies to assess their impunity and accountability. Could such a framework also work in the private sector to drive the kind of leadership and organizational change that is often discussed but difficult to realize?
The challenge is not merely to critique outdated structures but to imagine—and act toward—new forms of collective organization and belonging that align with our shared aspirations for equity, accountability, and progress. In both business and political leadership, an array of forces make such changes difficult. These include the reassuring familiarity of past or existing institutions, the practical challenges of mounting substantive reforms, and the simpler reality of institutional inertia rooted in vested interests, entrenched routines, fear of uncertainty, and lack of resources. Only by taking steps toward far-reaching change can we begin to create a future that truly transcends the containers of the past and the conflicts of the present.
Leadership Discourse as Magical Thinking
Many of us prefer to dwell in the containers of the past—be they institutions or organizational structures and processes, or norms of perception and interaction with others—rather than addressing the uncertainty of the future. This nostalgia, or longing for an imaginary past that never truly existed, is also present in business, in which today’s complexity and volatility can prompt calls to return to a previous time of supposed simplicity and prosperity, often to be accomplished by embracing the “fundamentals” – strategies or other approaches that may no longer be clearly applicable to current conditions or adaptable to future challenges. Many contemporary leaders can be seen as unwilling and unable to move beyond their longstanding habits and biases for the familiar and reassuring, both in business and even more so in politics.
To an extent, such resistance to change—whether individual or institutional—is understandable. In the face of dynamic and transformative conditions, clinging to what is known or familiar, and therefore presumably safer than the unknown, is a natural human response. However, this resistance often leads to a denial of the full scale of the changes underway, particularly in societies where people want to preserve a way of life that is both familiar and comfortable—materially and ideologically. This phenomenon has grown increasingly evident in the divisive politics of contemporary United States and Western Europe.
Political theorist Leo Strauss famously argued that nations need first and foremost to identify their enemies, particularly foreign nations or peoples, as a means of instilling fear, promoting allegiance, and justifying certain actions or policies that might otherwise be considered controversial or excessive (Thoughts on Machiavelli, 1958). Importantly, the concept can help clarify how nations use external threats to shape both foreign and domestic policies, such as by using the threat of terrorism to justify military action abroad and increasing surveillance or restrictions on civil liberties at home. By fostering fear and division, this emphasis on defining external enemies can create an illusion of fixed identity, political stability, and shared purpose at home.
In business, too, the identification of enemies can be deployed by leaders and organizations to mobilize others and justify their actions. Foreign competitors or workers, domestic rivals and stakeholders, investors, and regulators are some of the typical threats raised. Yet government regulators, speculative investors or financial markets, and trade unions are other threats, located within the country but external to corporations, that can serve as organizational ‘enemies.’ For executives, such threats can be mobilized to raise company morale, create shared goals, and perhaps drive performance around specific targets.
Typically, however, even when leaders address major macro-environmental changes like the climate crisis, technological revolutions, or talent transitions, they do so in ways that reinforce existing organizational and institutional forms. Leadership discourse, perpetuated by business schools and consultancies in particular, continues to promote the development of specific skills, reduction of internal inefficiencies, building trusting and productive collaboration, making value-creating strategies, and advancing incremental changes in the structure, culture, and processes in the workplace. While the rhetoric of transformation is sometimes present, corporate leaders often lack the courage—and their investors the risk appetite—to truly disrupt the status quo. That leaves, again, the containers of the corporate past reinforced by a popular leadership discourse that serves up a steady drip of imaginative ideas that promise to fulfill the wish of meaningful change but are reluctant to explore radically different perspectives and, especially, pursue them through substantive action.
Resetting the Reality and Perception of Leadership
Public leadership researcher Barbara Kellerman has critiqued the “leadership industry” that she observes encompassing both business and political leaders (The End of Leadership, 2012). This complex perpetuates a self-sustaining industry of leadership research and development that, while profitable, frequently fails to deliver real change in the quality of leaders. Kellerman recommends, alternatively, a leadership for the future that is about substance over style—emphasizing the need for genuine accountability and shared responsibility, and less about “leader-centrism.” In a call relevant to both business and political arenas, she envisions a way forward that involves not only learning to lead effectively but also following responsibly, thereby recognizing the interconnectedness of leader–follower dynamics and the need to look beyond situational specifics to longer-term and more contextual leadership priorities.
Such an approach offers hope of breaking free of the rhetorical doom loops in which many leaders—and citizens, commentators, leadership researchers, and development experts—are easily caught. Recall the cycle of political polarization in which politicians make increasingly divisive statements to appeal to their bases, leading to further polarization and distrust between opposing sides, which in turn makes compromise more and more difficult. Or, in business, the Short-Term Thinking Trap: a focus on short-term gains can lead to neglecting longer-term investments, including human development, organizational re-design, continuous innovation, and customer relationship management, all resulting in damage to the work environment and a decline in the company’s overall performance.
Potential ways forward require a break from these cycles of short-term priorities, strained and superficial personae, and a lack of accountability. Becoming a better everyday leader—engaging with others, acting with empathy and humility, fostering open dialogue, modeling feedback and collaboration—offers an opportunity for everyone, regardless of position, to exercise better, more contextualized and social leadership. As noted earlier, leaders can also learn more about the dynamics of twenty-first-century media, not only to add followers or create ephemeral events, but to understand the sway of mediated leadership personas and the distinction between talk and action. Perhaps most obviously, leaders need to move beyond individual, partisan, ideological, or even national viewpoints to understand their relationships with others as part of a broader, complex, and interconnected world system.
These steps indeed derive from systems thinking, which emphasizes similarities and interdependencies rather than imagined, projected, or actual differences (especially among nations, cultures, religions, and races). At a time of profound global climate challenges and transformational technological developments, the imperative for leaders is to prioritize our shared humanity. Leadership across sectors should be a key driver of meaningful interaction and cooperation, moving us away from division and conflict and toward collective progress. Only by breaking free from the rhetorical constraints of the past—and the leadership industry that continues to feed those constraints and the dissonant perceptions of leadership today—can leaders in business and politics, and all of us who rely on them, create a future in which organizations and institutions, communities and societies, become more genuinely inclusive, hopeful, and transformative.