What Lurks in the Shadows?

Hubris Conviction That Leaves No Room For Correction

Every hiker who signed in at the ranger station got the same warning: stay on the marked trail, and be off the mountain by dark. The ranger never explained why. She just made you repeat it back to her.

The first time he left the trail, he made it back before sunset, breathless, but a little bolder for it. The second time, he came out of the trees long after dark, laughing about a shortcut. He didn’t mention the footsteps he’d heard keeping pace with him, just off to the left. Each time, he came back a little later. Each time, the ranger’s warnings got easier to ignore. Eventually, she stopped giving them.

One evening in late October, he signed in, and she didn’t look up. He stepped off the trail at the usual spot. Somewhere behind him, something else stepped off too. His car was still in the lot the next morning, frost on the windshield. His name was on the sign-in sheet. The line beside it was blank.

Confidence is a precondition for leadership. Few people are willing to follow someone who seems uncertain of the way forward. But confidence can harden into something darker: hubris.

The more a leader succeeds, the more impervious to feedback they become. They don’t stop receiving feedback. They just stop absorbing it. They will explain it away, perhaps attributing it to the critic’s agenda or limitations. They conclude, quietly, that they have seen more and thought harder than the people offering it.

While hubris is obvious from the outside, from the inside it feels like clarity. Every time you step off the marked trail and find your way back, it seems to prove the warnings were wrong, so you go a little farther and stay out a little later. Eventually, the people around you do the most unsettling thing of all: they stop warning you. Not because the danger has passed, but because they’ve learned it won’t change anything. By the time a hubristic leader notices how quiet it has gotten, they are usually a long way from the trail.

What to Watch Out For

• You can’t remember the last time you changed your mind.
• When someone gives you feedback, you’re explaining why they’re wrong before they’ve finished talking.
• You’ve stopped asking your team for input on decisions you used to talk through together.

Isolation When Success Reduces Candor

The higher you rise, the fewer voices you hear. Until one day, the only voice in the room is yours…

Every leader wants to rise. Seniority and success bring scope, influence, and the chance to shape more of the organization. But they also change what people are willing to say to you. Each promotion is a little like moving your bedroom one floor higher in a big old house: the view improves, and the honest voices downstairs get harder to hear. That is how success quietly turns into isolation.

Isolation isn’t really about loneliness. It’s about the shrinking circle of people willing to tell you the truth. Manfred Kets de Vries calls it the “loneliness of command“: senior leaders end up surrounded by people whose incentives favor managing upward rather than speaking candidly. Junior colleagues learn not to risk it. Peers have their own agendas. Boards focus on results. And the more power a leader holds, the starker the calculation becomes. The person deciding whether to tell you the truth isn’t weighing your track record. They’re weighing what you could do to them. The result is a leader making bigger decisions based on a smaller, cleaner picture of reality, with problems arriving late, fully grown and expensive. And because every other shadow in this article depends on someone being willing to name it, isolation is the shadow that keeps all the others hidden.

From the inside, it rarely feels like isolation at all. It is never quiet: there are meetings, updates, and people saying all the right things. But the honest voices are the first to fade, and the polite ones that remain are easy to mistake for the real thing. Many leaders sense a loneliness they can’t quite name, and respond in ways that deepen it: working harder, controlling more, communicating less, mistaking flattery for friendship. By the time they go looking for someone to tell them the truth, the house may already have gone quiet.

What to Watch Out For

• When you ask your team how things are going, the answer is almost always “great.”
• You’re often the last to find out when something has gone wrong.
• The only people you go to for advice are people who work for you.

Avoidance Care that Outruns Candor

The noise started in the spring, issuing from behind the door of the spare room, soft at first, then louder.

He was a kind man, and well liked, and he didn’t care for unpleasant surprises. So he turned up the TV. He started working from the kitchen. When guests asked about the sound, he replied that it was nothing.

Each week, the tapping grew louder. Each week, he found another reason to leave the door closed. By fall, everyone who came to the house could hear it. What unsettled them wasn’t the sound. It was the way he smiled and kept talking over it.

People want to work for someone who genuinely cares about them. But care can cast a shadow: avoidance.

The psychoanalyst Karen Horney observed that people cope with anxiety in one of three ways: by moving toward others, against them, or away from them. Avoidant leaders move toward. These leaders tend to see themselves as collaborative and consensus-building, and many score high on emotional intelligence.

But, what looks like warmth is often a defense against the fear of being disliked. Decisions that might upset the team get delayed. Hard conversations get postponed. And the team learns to work around the individuals dragging its performance down.

To the leader, it feels like kindness: every week a hard conversation waits is a week spent protecting someone. But like the tapping behind that door, the problem doesn’t go quiet because you don’t answer it. It only gets louder, until everyone else in the house can hear it, and starts to wonder why you can’t.

What to Watch Out For

• A performance conversation has been on your to-do list for more than a quarter.
• You’re quietly doing work yourself instead of handing it back.
• Your team hears about problems from each other before they hear it from you.

Perfectionism Personal Discipline that Becomes An Impossible Standard for Success

High standards are part of what makes great leaders great. They raise the quality of everything a team touches. But standards, overplayed, cast a shadow: perfectionism. Each day, the weight of the leader’s expectations grows, until the entire team is crushed beneath it.

Karen Horney called it the “tyranny of the should“: the internal demand to be exceptional at all times, with no room for ordinary mistakes. The perfectionist leader believes they are simply holding the bar where it belongs. In reality, they’ve stopped noticing what it costs everyone to meet that bar. Work takes longer than it should. Small errors draw outsized reactions. The team narrows what they share. Eventually, the leader’s standards become the ceiling on the team’s creativity, and eventually on its willingness to stay.

Ask a perfectionist leader and they’ll call it excellence, and the flawless work on their desk seems to back them up. What they can’t see is everything that never reaches their desk: the rough ideas, the early drafts, the questions people were afraid to ask. The best thinking on their team now happens in the dark, and the leader only ever sees what survives.

What to Watch Out For

• You rarely see early drafts anymore
• Work sits for days before anyone shows it to you
• You’ve rewritten someone’s work yourself instead of sending it back

Overpromising Inspiration that Outruns Delivery

Inspiration is one of leadership’s great engines. A leader who can make an idea land can move an entire organization. But when inspiration starts racing ahead of delivery, it becomes overpromising.

This shadow is less common than the others but more consequential, because it often stays invisible to the organization until quite late. Charismatic leaders tend to be promoted quickly on the strength of their charisma. But charisma without follow-through creates a particular pattern: teams that are repeatedly inspired and repeatedly disappointed. Commitments are made and missed. Strategies are announced and abandoned.

In the leader’s own mind, it’s vision: each new announcement feels like progress. Out in the organization, every missed promise thins the audience a little more, and the leader’s word carries a little less weight. The voice still fills the room, but the people listening have started to hear an echo. Over time, a leader who keeps promising more than they deliver can become as hollow as their own promises: to the team, a source of unreliable hope.

What to Watch Out For

• Your team starts new projects faster than it finishes them.
• You’ve pushed back the same deadline more than once.
• People leave your meetings excited, but the follow-through never shows up.

Control When Leaders Hold On Too Tightly

Conscientiousness is what makes a leader reliable. People trust leaders who care about getting things right. But held too tightly, the need to get things right turns into control.

Control breaks more talented teams than any other shadow. It is perfectionism’s near relative, but the root is different. The perfectionist fears being judged, so they polish. The controller fears depending on others, so they grip.

The controlling leader believes they are driving quality. In reality, they are micromanaging decisions their team is fully capable of making, and signaling through a thousand small interventions that they don’t trust their people. It becomes a self-reinforcing loop.

The strongest performers, the ones with options, leave first. Those who stay learn to wait for direction, like marionettes waiting for someone to pull the strings. Breaking the loop means tolerating the discomfort of watching good work done differently than you would have done it, and judging your team on outcomes rather than method.

What to Watch Out For

• Work routinely comes back to you for one more look before it goes out.
• Your calendar is full of decisions someone else could make.
• Your team asks how you want something done before they start.

Volatility Urgency that Lands Harder than Intended

“At the sight that met my eyes, my blood was changed into something exquisitely thin and icy. Yes, I had gone to bed Henry Jekyll, I had awakened Edward Hyde. How was this to be explained?”
Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)

Passion fuels some of a leader’s best qualities: drive, candor, and competitive fire. But when that fire isn’t contained, it spills over into volatility.

The volatile leader almost never experiences themselves as volatile. They experience themselves as passionate, demanding, and committed to the work, surrounded by people who are a little too sensitive.

Their team has a different experience. It can feel like working for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and never knowing which one walked in this morning. Team members go into meetings scanning for the leader’s mood. They stop bringing them bad news. They spend energy managing the leader that should go into the work. In the McCall and Lombardo’s research, an abrasive, intimidating style was the single most common flaw among executives who derailed.

Like Stevenson’s doctor, the leader is often the last to notice the change. The damage doesn’t happen in front of them. It happens after they leave the room, when people quietly decide to bring them less.

Catching your inner Hyde before it speaks is the start. But volatility breaks trust, and trust needs repair: naming the behavior, apologizing without qualification, and showing, over enough time for people to believe it, that an eruption is no longer how disagreement ends.

What to Watch Out For

• People check what mood you’re in before bringing you something difficult.
• You’ve replayed a reaction afterward and realized it came out harder than you meant.
• The room goes quiet when you push back.