We Need to Save Leadership from the Leadership People

What good bosses really are

Megan Hustad
Journal of Beautiful Business
8 min readOct 11, 2021

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Last week Forbes published another one of their more typical quotes of the day: “Being a good leader starts with a firm commitment to your purpose.” The person who said this was Paul Polman, former CEO of Unilever, which ticks off three of the boxes that put you in a good position to say things about leadership and be taken seriously: you’re a CEO; of a company that people, at least those interested in business, have heard of; and you’re male.

Statements like this are standard fare in leadership literature, but what’s striking about it is how little it actually tells us. Firm commitment to a purpose is fine, but I don’t see how much of a head start on good leadership it actually gives us. I live in New York’s Lower East Side — a bustling, diverse, noisy neighborhood — and daily see people devoted to a task but not leading, not by CEO standards. One of my neighbors has legs amputated above his knees and sits in his wheelchair every day at the traffic-choked intersection of Delancey and Chrystie, gesturing at cars, greeting passersby, yelling at passersby, his mood swings palpable, in every kind of weather. This man is firmly committed to supervising this intersection, year-round. But he doesn’t appear to have followers, which to me seems like a better place to begin defining what makes a leader: having people who like what you’re doing and want to see more of it.

I don’t tell this story to make light of probable mental illness. (Indeed this man strikes me as saner than I would be in his circumstances.) But it’s important to dwell on the fact that being purpose-driven is far too squishy an indicator of good leadership, and that the sooner we stop thinking of leadership in lofty but ultimately vacuous terms, the better off we’ll be.

We need to save leadership from the leadership people, because if we’re objective about it, it’s obvious that the billions spent on “leadership development” has not brought us far enough away from thinking of the good leader as purposeful and decisive, in a very narrow and traditionally masculine way, and it has not led to happier outcomes, either on an individual or planetary level. Three-quarters of respondents to a recent global survey of 10,000 people ages 16 to 25 in 10 countries…

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Editor, author, businessperson, New Yorker, mom. Editorial Director at the House of Beautiful Business. Working on EDITH.