The Algorithmic Tyranny of the Aspirational Average Leader
Popular discourse surrounding leadership has become thoroughly mediated by digital platforms, social media, and AI. More than a decade ago, Harvard Kennedy School researcher Barbara Kellerman criticized the “leadership industry” – a nexus of management consultancies, business schools, publishers, and thought leaders – for manufacturing consensus, if not conformity, around circumscribed leadership ideas that are engaging but often superficial (2012). Today, that consensus is reinforced through the continuous circulation of certain ideas through social media algorithms, streaming platforms, and podcasts that saturate popular consciousness. Personal branding, marketability, and commodifiable tools are prioritized in these media over rigorous analysis, substantive exchanges, and nuanced perspectives.
As a result, consolidating the structures, incentives, and dynamics of predominant institutions and media platforms, popular discourse shaped by the contemporary mediascape constrain leadership thinking into narrow, shallow, and repetitive forms. The hard work of leading and developing leaders in the real world is displaced by generic frameworks, pithy slogans, and folk theories of leadership. Aspiring leaders are inundated with content but deprived of depth and context, left unable to find specific, evidence-based solutions to their own challenges and the messy realities of leadership. Progress is assumed as inevitable in today’s technology-driven media landscape, yet that landscape may actually be regressing leadership discourse.
More specifically, the regression is to the idea of an “average leader” constructed both by an ongoing celebration of exceptional, high-performing leaders and entrepreneurs and by a largely consensual vision of what good and effective leadership development “should” look like. The average leader thus emerges through triangulation: she is neither a larger-than-life senior executive nor young but precociously accomplished leader, nor does she practice the gamut of personal and professional improvement activities constantly being promoted; she therefore consequently occupies, with the majority of readers or viewers occupy, an aspirational middle ground. The continual consumption of others’ success stories and of self-improvement models, recommendations, and hacks drives a quest for continuous self-improvement, fed by concerns of personal and professional inadequacy and averageness.
By applying a critical lens at the intersection of the leadership industry, management research, and media ecology, we can illuminate how the contemporary media environment produces this more homogenous and potentially restrictive view of leadership while too often excluding alternative perspectives. We can also draw upon critiques of media structures and cultures, connecting historical arguments to present-day algorithms, virality, and always-on content. Ultimately, we can call for more systemic, creative, adaptive, heterogeneous, and deep-thinking approaches to leadership practice and development.
Leadership Entertainment
My premise here is that the field of leadership development should be continually shaped and driven by multiple viewpoints, critical discourse, and emergent thinking. The field of leadership discourse, that is, should be more adaptive, interactive, and rough-edged. Yet the institutional arrangements and incentives of the contemporary leadership industry, as currently structured, dictate a much narrower purpose than supporting the open exchange of ideas and advancement of practices that are fit for purpose. Many of the major players – whether business schools, consultancies, or individual gurus – are driven to deliver the excitement, emotional uplift, and good feelings expected in training programs by their clientele.
As Stanford’s Jeffrey Pfeffer observes bluntly, “the leadership industry has clearly been better at providing heroes, myths, stories, and inspiration than it has been at making workplaces better or leaders last longer in their jobs” (2015: 48) This means sustaining a market for generic yet enticing leadership lessons, frameworks, and credentials that can be bought and sold at scale.
While the industry has long been restrictive of voices and ideas, an underlying assumption here is that the purpose of the media that circulate that leadership content cannot be separated from the content itself. The current media landscape, in other words, deepens the challenges Kellerman and Pfeffer identified around leadership discourse in the past. Such dynamics of media were likewise cogently elucidated decades ago, by media theorist Neil Postman. Writing about television in Amusing Ourselves to Death, he observed that, “the problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining” (1985: 87).
Today, social media algorithms, virality metrics, and engagement-driven business models all conspire to flatten leadership into soundbytes, slogans, and simplified stories. While this content may be readily accessible, emotionally resonant, and useful for personal brand building, it often fails to wrestle with the real complexities and challenges of leadership.
A more open culture of leadership development would resist these homogenizing forces. It would foster debate, nuance, and a diversity of perspectives and experiences. But when major institutions control the production and distribution of leadership thinking in service of their own agendas, we get manufactured consensus instead. Social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter/X, YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram have revolutionized how leadership ideas are disseminated and consumed. These platforms enable thought leaders, influencers, and institutions to reach vast audiences, but, in doing so, they also constrain the conversation in significant ways, both abbreviating ideas into soundbites and often reducing their content into formulas.
The repetition of certain leadership ideas and frameworks across the platforms enable what psychologists call “illusory truth effects” (Fazio et al., 2015). These effects are dangerous in that they can breed a false sense of their universal validity, largely excluding alternative viewpoints and shaping a homogenous vision of leadership and, with it, the deficits of the many leaders who consume that vision and, as a result, are left by popular leadership discourse feeling average.
This mediated consensus inevitably excludes many more challenging, systemically-oriented, and potentially contradictory approaches to understanding leadership. For example, the consensus leaves little room for exploring how leadership is shaped by cultural and structural inequalities, and how developing truly inclusive leadership cultures requires developing contextual intelligence – the ability to understand and adapt our knowledge across the social, cultural and situational dynamics of different specific contexts – and reckoning consistently with these deeper dynamics.
The mediated consensus also largely sidelines frameworks that emphasize how leadership is embedded in complex systems rather than resting in heroic individuals (or, occasionally, teams and organizations). It lacks incentives for sustaining long-term leadership development programs that go beyond short-term skills training or intensive learning experiences. And it often avoids grappling with the darker and contradictory sides of leadership and the less flattering aspects of human nature that can drive leader and follower behaviors toward less productive, even destructive outcomes.
Leadership as Performance in Simplified Struggles
The flattening and homogenization of popular leadership discourse can be directly traced to the incentive structures and technical features of today’s media platforms. Whether it’s short-form content on Twitter/X, TED-style talks on YouTube, or sound-byte driven cable news interviews, the media environment relentlessly abstracts and simplifies. Complex ideas typically need to be compressed into immediately comprehensible and share-worthy chunks, while whole schools of thought are reduced to hashtags. Worse, the most persistent and energetic voices, be they likable or unlikable, tend to win readers’ and viewers’ attention over those offering depth and specificity.
Again, similar dynamics were presciently critiqued in the era of broadcast television. Postman warned of the intellectual expectations instilled by television as a medium: “The commercial asks us to believe that all problems are solvable,” Postman wrote, “that they are solvable fast, and that they are solvable fast through the interventions of technology, technique, and chemistry.” He then crucially added that, “the commercial disdains exposition, for that takes time and invites argument” (1985: 130-131).
Today, amid influencer culture and algorithm-driven media, we can make a similar claim about leadership content. Simplified slogans, self-affirming models, and personal branding tropes create a caricature of successful leadership while avoiding or glossing over many contested questions of organizational and interpersonal dynamics. The result for many leaders engaging this content quickly is something of an aspirational hamster wheel: besides ongoing consumption of leadership content, many commit to ever greater efforts to act on the continual stream of tips and recommendations in pursuit of personal and professional improvement.
In the television age, Postman went on, “It is in the nature of the medium that it must suppress the content of ideas in order to accommodate the requirements of visual interest; that is to say, to accommodate the values of show business” (1985: 92). With today’s social media, the media have shifted but the effects have only intensified. Complex notions of politics and power in organizations are reduced to matters of individual charisma and resilience. The rich contextual challenges of culture change and systems design are flattened into linear, step-by-step playbooks, listicles, and canvases. The “visual interest” of television has been supercharged by the brain-stimulating appeal of likes, shares, and comments, creating feedback loops that reward simplicity, speed, and emotional resonance.
Influencers like Gary Vaynerchuk have cultivated large followings by blending leadership advice with personal branding. This turns leadership into a form of aspirational performance, where calls for reflexive storytelling, facile self-understanding, and generic relatability often overshadow substance, at least actionable substance. “As a whole the leadership industry is self-satisfied, self-perpetuating and poorly policed,” Harvard’s Kellerman observes (2012: 169). Without agreed-upon standards or safeguards, longtime and well-resourced institutional players and imaginative individual operators have grown to exploit social media’s emphasis on memorable personalities and well-turned aperçus over critical thought or evidence-based discussions.
These media effects don’t just shape content: they shape people’s expectations, thinking, and mental models. Over time, shallow discourses of leadership come to be taken for granted precisely because they are so pervasively promoted. Like the pseudo-contexts of commercial advertising described by Postman, leadership content today often presents plausible images of success, effectiveness, and happiness without accounting for real-world consequences and constraints. Leaders can bask in the affirming glow of a pioneering entrepreneur’s success story or a well-crafted LinkedIn post that succinctly explains overcoming a problematic personal tendency, all while avoiding themselves the hard work of habit change or culture transformation or the acknowledgment of human complexities and contradictions.
In many ways, the leadership development industry’s response to the incentives of new media mirrors concerns about the internet’s wider impact on human cognition. Just as Nicholas Carr argued a decade ago that online interfaces prioritizing efficiency and limitless access can diminish our capacity for deep contemplation and synthesis, the “shiny object syndrome” of bite-sized leadership content optimized for virality and performative self-improvement can crowd out substantive skill-building and sustainable reflective learning. Constantly toggling between notifications, snippets, and simplifications, we risk losing sight of the integrative perspectives and adaptive behaviors required for leading people and complex systems effectively and meaningfully over time.
The repetition of soundbites and slogans across media platforms has long been understood by communication scholars as a means to entrench this shallowness (Dowling & Kabanoff, 1996). By presenting the same reductive framings again and again, the leadership development industry leverages a cognitive bias that equates familiarity with truthfulness and importance — and contributes, in many instances, to marketing and selling products and services based in those ideas. Nuance and critique, by contrast, face an uphill battle to break through the cacophony. Leadership concepts that fit into bite-sized formats thrive, while complex or critical ideas often struggle to gain traction. Even if we pause to question the validity or relevance of the steady stream of iterations of the same ideas, that ephemeral self-consciousness tends not to progress into ongoing self-reflection amidst the never-ending slurry of posts and presentations.
Leadership Development Heroes and Personalized Bubble Brands
Paralleling the simplifications of leadership discourse across new media has been a proliferation of more targeted platforms and productions promising deeper and more sustained engagement. From long-form podcasts to premium streaming subscriptions to exclusive instructional channels, there is no shortage of “thought leaders” (often self-proclaimed) who have built personal brands around their particular takes on management and leadership. Again, the nature of the media on which they rely is important here: spoken-word audio – traditionally, on radio, and currently, in podcasts and other digital forms – can build on the persuasiveness and emotions of the human voice to foster a sense of authority and to create a sense of intimacy and trust between listener and host or narrator.
On the surface, some of these approaches seem to resist the dynamics of shallowness and fragmentation. Well-known leadership advisers and coaches offer original interviews and commentaries that make clear over time their own positions and priorities. Business school professors and management consultants hold forth in audio series and subscriber-only learning cohorts. Aspiring leaders can increasingly immerse themselves in the works and worldviews of their chosen leadership development guides in hopes of moving beyond the ranks of the average.
Such self-selection into content tends to have the result of reinforcing current or prior thinking and risks a confirmation bias of the leadership and leadership development ideas being considered. Critical engagement with outside perspectives often falls by the wayside in the pursuit of promoting a consistent vision of leadership – and the personal brand of the thought leader.
In other words, even ostensibly deeper dives like podcasts can exist within carefully constructed filter bubbles. With strong incentives to build a loyal base or community of followers, leadership influencers frequently preach to their own choirs, exclude divergent ideas and inconvenient contradictions, and repeat their analyses, commentaries, and stories about current events and past events or examples across multiple channels and outlets in an effort to scale their brands. Many leadership influencers share their ideas across a circuit of interview and podcast shows, publicizing books or otherwise consistently positioning themselves in reinforcing conversations with their guest-host peers.
Even more, the podcast format and business model allows many leadership voices to form collaborations with brands, picking up on an increasing general marketing and cultural phenomenon. Consider the Wicked-inspired clothing lines with the Gap, H&M, Bloomingdale’s and Forever 21, Louis Vuitton and Takashi Murakami’s two-decade long partnership, and the larger trend it represents, of artists collaborating with fashion brands (Degen, 2024). In podcasting, sponsored segments, product integrations, co-created content, and cross-promotions are among the many comparable opportunities for leaders, influencers, and other wannabe gurus to monetize productions centered around thought leadership.
Power, both interpersonal and institutional, is an illustrative if particularly fraught topic within these brand-driven leadership bubbles. Difficult questions around how formal authority is allocated and exercised, how decisions get made and implemented, and how dissent and debate are handled within organizations are often unexplored (or, at least, under-explored). Still more difficult (and less explored) are potential connections between the power of leadership in the business sector and that of the geopolitical realm.
After all, reckoning honestly with the irrational and self-interested aspects of human behavior is not always great for building an inspirational narrative or a devoted following. As Pfeffer, the Stanford professor and longtime researcher of power, concludes, “the leadership industry rolls along, profiting from the disconnect between its prescriptions and what gets done, a disconnection that means not only problems remain but also the business opportunities from speaking, blogging, and so forth about those problems” (2015: 219).
Ultimately, even seemingly in-depth leadership content can land audiences of leaders aspiring to improve themselves in the same simplistic place when it is driven by the imperatives of brand-building, niche formation, and audience building and maintenance. Inconvenient discussions around power, hierarchies, incentives, and politics within organizations are sidelined, as are critical comparisons to the corresponding impacts of other leadership schools of thought and experiences.
What remains are ecosystems of ideas curated to reinforce the positions and propositions of their particular influencers and institutions. While reassuring for believers, or acceptable to those without the time or inclination to examine ideas further, these leadership development heroes and their content bubbles leave little room for the critical discourse and synthesis of competing perspectives that are necessary for real progress and learning to be achieved, alternative ideas to be advanced, and, often, substantive leadership to be exercised in actual conditions.
Mediating Consensus on Leadership Development
Across these many media and the institutions that supply them with content, certain messages and priorities inevitably circulate recurrently. Through the dynamics of virality and algorithmic amplification, these patterns congeal into an implicit consensus about what leaders today should focus on and how leadership development should be approached. Like any pattern or consensus, the boundaries both focus on some ideas, individuals, and institutions and exclude others. The torrent of content across social media platforms rewards volume, engagement, and visibility, regardless of the substance or specifics.
So what does this constructed consensus look like? At the broadest level, it tends to center around a fairly generic set of priorities: fuller self-understanding, vision-setting, motivating people, driving innovation, embracing uncertainty, managing change. Sometimes these are repackaged with new buzzwords or trademarked frameworks, but the underlying concepts and recurrent hashtags are often quite similar. What’s more, they are frequently presented as timeless truths and universal best practices, illustrated by micro-cases and anecdotes, and untethered from the messy realities of competing contexts and different cultures.
Within this general narrative, certain messages about organizational design and culture are also elevated. The notion of “empathy” – understanding and sharing the feelings of others – is one example that has achieved prominence across leadership development platforms in recent years. It’s not hard to see why: empathy is an admirable human quality that speaks to both the relational and emotional dimensions of leadership. Influential voices like Brené Brown have built enormous followings by preaching the power of empathy and compassion on social media, and in books, TED Talks, and corporate speaking circuits. Yet many such discussions, both of empathy for oneself and others, can easily lose their fuller meaning in the over- or broad-stroke application to leadership.
However, as with many leadership buzzwords that gain widespread popularity, the buzz around empathy in management often overshadows deeper discussions about its real-world applications and limitations. The buzz also often ignores the science and evidence from research on empathy in other fields, such as neuroscience (Reiss 2017). Is empathy equally important at all levels and in all functions of an organization? And across different professional and cultural contexts? How can it be reliably developed and sustained in high-pressure, high-stakes environments? When might the emotional labor of empathy lead to burnout and compassion fatigue?
While deeper dives into empathy, by Brown and others, can necessarily and helpfully extend the purview and relevance of the topic to wider contexts of leadership, the ceaseless memes and postings in everyday social media circulation remain largely superficial. They invite complex questions often left unanswered by thought leaders in their personalized explanations, moving narratives, and well-packaged frameworks that travel farthest and fastest through media spaces.
Similarly, concepts like Emotional Intelligence, growth (and other) mindsets, and remote and hybrid work, and principles like authenticity, customer focus, and continuous improvement have become mainstays of leadership development discourse. They, too, are valuable ideas that can all too easily devolve into generic content when stripped of context and nuance.
Do these ideas mean the same thing to diverse individual leaders? Or to leaders at every level of an organization? Or at every stage in an organization’s life cycle? Are they equally applicable across national and industry contexts? What is the actual evidence of their impact over time? Again, these thorny questions are often sidelined by the pithy inspirational stories that get the most likes and shares by leaders aspiring to become more than average.
Repeating Romanticized Stories and Scripts
Management researcher James Meindl’s seminal writings on the “romance of leadership” characterized leadership as a social construction where followers attribute organizational outcomes disproportionately to leaders’ unique personal attributes and actions rather than contextual or systemic factors (1985, 1995). This romanticization has been amplified exponentially by social media platforms, where algorithmic amplification and engagement metrics privilege dramatic narratives of visionary tech founders, charismatic CEOs, and entrepreneurial heroes.
Meindl was astute in arguing that it is easier and more romantically appealing to believe that visionary individuals, from Steve Jobs to Jeff Bezos to Elon Musk, can single-handedly drive organizational success than to fully appreciate the complex contexts in which they operate. This is a dynamic that social media’s preference for simplified, personality-driven content has only intensified.
The dominance of meme-friendly leadership content and viral soundbites on platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter/X, and Instagram marginalizes more nuanced portrayals of organizational leadership. Lost in the endless stream of inspirational quotes and day-in-the-life posts from self-branded founders, funders, and would-be leadership guides are the critical but less sensational aspects of leadership that Meindl identified: the patient building of team and other stakeholder relationships, the navigation of competing organizational priorities, and the often unglamorous work of maintaining organizational stability, competitiveness, and employee wellbeing.
To his list we might well add the development of patience, tolerance, endurance, and adaptability. This algorithmic privileging of romanticized leadership narratives risks perpetuating a kind of “individual leader attribution error” in which we exaggerate the impact of individual leadership and at the same time neglect or minimize other equally important determinants of organizational outcomes.
This latter dynamic might help to explain the enduring popularity of “great man” (or, still much less often, “great woman”) archetypes, charismatic quotations, heroic anecdotes, and inspiring mini-cases in social media leadership discourse. Largely absent from this discourse are depictions of leadership that emphasize the unglamorous, day-to-day work of leadership in navigating complex systems and stakeholder relationships in what management researcher Jean-Louis Denis and his colleagues called “the messy world of organizations” characterized by “ambiguous authority relationships” (2010).
All told, stories and scripts of leadership on social media thus provide a kind of currency for the quick and frictionless exchange of clearcut leadership ideas and impressions well-suited to an attention economy. Leadership narratives that align with these romanticized individualized ideas both accord with and reinforce popular norms and expectations, and are thereby more likely to be shared, liked, and elevated in algorithm-driven online spaces – even as they risk perpetuating an overly simplistic view of the complex realities of actual situated leadership practice.
Given that certain leadership development messages are consistently amplified, it’s unavoidable that the current media ecosystem manufactures a kind of consensus (or at least a de facto prioritization of a bounded set of ideas and individuals). It is a consensus built through content promotion incentives, information overload, and the energy and originality of those delivering the messages and appealing to people’s desire for clarity and self-actualization amid so much noise and busyness. It is also a consensus built on the lack of deep and substantive conversations or debates about specific leadership values, behaviors, or “solutions.” These are often crowded out by a surfeit of continuous posting, sharing, and promotion of epigrams, wise sayings, and simple models. In the process, these social media dynamics breed a certain conformity of thinking, a narrowing of the boundaries of what leadership could be and become.
For example, and to reiterate, many prevailing narratives and singular figures downplay dynamics of power and the complexities of organizational systems. The current media environment’s emphasis on individual charisma, decisiveness, strength, purpose, and the ability to motivate others with a vision and purpose performance feeds a cycle of repetitive, ephemeral, and easily digestible content. Yet that limiting of both the voices and the ideas they express serves the leadership development industry’s emphasis on promoting at scale a small set of marketable, modularized, readily deliverable ideas that, again, are appealing to individual leaders aspiring to improve themselves. More systemic perspectives, long-term developmental opportunities, and situated, contextual solutions may appear but, if so, typically secondarily.
What’s more, the circumscription of leadership thinking to a relatively narrow range of human virtues and aspirational individual traits may reflect a willful blindness to the actual desires and incentives that shape human behavior in organizations. As the late anthropologist and activist David Graeber provocatively argued in The Utopia of Rules (2015), perhaps the real utopia imagined by many people is not the absence of structures and rules but rather a world where everyone knows exactly what the rules are, and knows that the rules are fair, because they actually appear to make sense. Extended to the leadership development industry, the focus on heroic figures (leaders themselves, as well as the leadership gurus), clear codes of behavior, and universalist principles may therefore be not only a function of media dynamics but also an act of projection of what we wish were true of human nature.
The repetition of idealized leadership archetypes and frameworks across various media can further reinforce this collective and wishful attribution of truth. As psychologists have studied, the leveraging of a “repetition effect” or a “truth effect” can powerfully shape perceptions and perspectives (Unkelbach, 2007). By presenting aspirational leadership behaviors and traits again and again, the leadership development industry taps into the cognitive bias that familiar information is more likely to be accepted as true. Deviations from these well-worn scripts, no matter how grounded in reality, face a steeper climb to credibility and acceptance.
Less a Marketplace of Ideas, More the Marketing of Ideologies and Services
Embedded in the contemporary, thoroughly mediated discourses of leadership development is a pervasive assumption of the inevitability of technological progress. Digital media platforms are credited with democratizing access to information and enabling the “wisdom of crowds” to elevate the best ideas. Online course marketplaces and credential providers are celebrated for expanding opportunities for skill-building and career advancement at scale. Social media influencers in the management and leadership space are seen as scrappy upstarts disrupting the staid institutions of old.
However, my contention here is that this narrative of progress contains a major blind spot. The specific ways in which these technologies are structured and monetized – from engagement-maximizing algorithms to the incentives for personal brand building – are not neutral. They shape both the production and consumption of leadership development content in ways that tend towards simplification, individualization, and the illusion of consensus around problems to be addressed and approaches to be adopted. Moreover, these ideas then become the basis for pursuing and often contracting specific leadership development, advisement, and coaching services.
Rather than a vibrant marketplace of ideas, we have a landscape where the marketing of ideologies and services is amplified, even if they are shallow or ignore critical dynamics of context. Far from the wisdom of crowds, it threatens to crowd out a broader wisdom in favor of hype cycles and false binaries. If “entertainment” was the “supra-ideology of all discourse on television” for Postman in the 1980s (1985: 87), the corresponding supra-ideology of today’s social media landscape may be a fusion of branded performance, incessant engagement, and self-commodification. Virality, shareability, and recognizability become the main arbiters of value, privileging content that provokes and persuades and appears readily applicable over that which acknowledges nuance and uncertainty and longer-term development.
None of this is to say that the technologies and media that have reshaped leadership development in recent years are inherently or comprehensively bad or unhelpful. Nor is it to suggest that those individuals who leverage the technologies and media do not believe in the ideas and values they espouse or have intentions other than to help leaders and organizations to flourish. Indeed, employing these technologies, many of these individuals have created expansive and recurring opportunities for learning and connection that were previously inaccessible to many. The problem is more in our taking the underlying media dynamics for granted and in our assuming that they automatically surface and support the most robust ideas and relevant solutions simply because they can reach the largest audiences.
Moving forward, leadership discourse and education should develop a much more critical and reflexive stance towards the communication dynamics and incentive structures of the platforms they now rely upon to develop and disseminate ideas and promote activities. What would it look like to create media ecosystems, learning environments, and institutions that incentivize more integrative and collaborative thinking across disparate voices, traditions, and frameworks? How might we combine the reach of new technologies with a renewed emphasis on the craft of situated leadership, one grounded in the messy realities of human, relational, and political dynamics in teams, organizations, and communities?
Ultimately, by illuminating the distortions and constraints imposed by the current and inescapably mediated leadership development industry, the hope is to point the way towards realizing a more expansive vision of leadership thinking and practice. Not leadership as a set of slogans and personal brands that feed homogenized aspirations of consumers, but leadership as a mode of sensemaking and acting in complex and emerging social systems. Not leadership as a mediated consensus or conformity perpetuating the powers that be and the feelings of averageness or inadequacy of its consumers, but leadership as a profoundly context-dependent and emergent phenomenon, always assembled by actual, collaborative leaders from the ground up.
References
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