How should AI and human leadership evolve together in this moment of rapid transformation?
The more qualified you are today, the harder it is to get hired. This is not a guess. It’s a documented, scientific reality.
A recent study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that when job candidates were perc…
They lie. Repeatedly. Shamelessly. They lie even when the truth would be easier. They lie when the lie can easily be debunked. They lie to dominate, confuse, and assert control. They treat contradiction as an attack and disagreement as betrayal. These are defining traits of narcissistic leadership.
Strangely enough, in politics and in organizations alike, we keep rewarding narcissistic leaders by giving them more power. We promote them, fund them, vote for them, excuse them, and normalize their behavior, even when there are unmistakable warning signs that should stop us from doing so.
It is obvious that narcissists seek power. The big (and more burning) question is: Why do we keep giving it to them?
We choose narcissists when we’re anxious
Narcissism is often confused with confidence, ambition, or charisma. In reality, pathological narcissism is defined by grandiosity, a constant need for admiration, low empathy, intolerance of criticism, and a tendency to instrumentalize others.
At high doses, narcissism is deeply corrosive. Highly narcissistic leaders take greater risks, manipulate more freely, break rules more readily, and do not learn from failure. They externalize blame, rewrite history, and prefer loyal sycophants over competent professionals.
As organizational psychologist Adam Grant has argued, we are rarely naive about narcissistic leaders. Most of the time, we recognize them quickly. They boast. They monopolize attention. They perform outrage. They lie openly and repeatedly. We see it—and we still choose them.
One of the main reasons is that chaos makes us crave certainty. In moments of crisis—economic instability, war, technological disruption, climate anxiety—we mistake loud confidence for competence. Nuance feels weak. Complexity feels unbearable. Fear narrows our tolerance for ambiguity. It makes us vulnerable to leaders who promise control, simplicity, and absolute answers—no matter how fictional those answers may be.
Seen through this lens, Donald Trump is not really an anomaly. He is a symptom. His constant lying, grandiosity, and contempt for institutions are extreme, but the underlying dynamic is familiar. The same behaviors—on a smaller scale—are rewarded every day in companies, startups, media organizations, and public institutions around the world.
7 Things We Must Change If We Want Fewer Narcissistic Leaders
If narcissistic leaders keep rising, it is because our systems keep selecting and protecting them. Changing outcomes requires changing the rules of the game. Here are seven shifts that matter.
1. Stop confusing visibility with value
Narcissistic leaders thrive on attention. They dominate meetings, interrupt others, and flood the space with what appears to be certainty. In too many environments, visibility is mistaken for contribution. To counter this, organizations must actively redesign how influence is expressed—by limiting airtime and prioritizing written input, for example. Value should be measured by clarity created, not noise produced. Treating visibility as value creates a moral hazard: Those least constrained by doubt gain disproportionate influence.
2. Make lying costly
Narcissists lie because it works. Lies are tolerated, minimized, or reframed as “communication style.” This tolerance is fatal. False statements must be corrected publicly and promptly. Repeated dishonesty should carry clear reputational and career consequences. Treating truth as optional corrodes institutions fast. The longer a lie goes unchallenged, the more it signals that reality is negotiable—and that power, not truth, sets the terms.
3. Evaluate leaders on collective outcomes
Narcissistic leaders often look impressive on individual metrics while quietly hollowing out their teams. Measuring leadership without accounting for turnover, burnout, disengagement, and loss of trust is profoundly wrong. Collective intelligence, psychological safety, and learning capacity must be treated as core performance indicators—not soft, secondary concerns. If results are achieved at the expense of trust, retention, and learning, they represent short-term extraction rather than sustainable performance.
4. Stop rewarding the will to power
Aggressively wanting power is not proof of leadership potential. In fact, narcissistic personalities are statistically more likely to self-nominate, campaign for authority, and pursue promotion relentlessly. Systems that equate ambition with suitability all but guarantee poor outcomes. Leadership selection should deliberately include capable individuals who do not seek power for its own sake—and should treat excessive self-promotion as a risk signal.
5. Institutionalize dissent
Narcissistic leaders fear contradiction and punish it, directly or indirectly. That is why dissent cannot rely on individual bravery alone. Organizations must structurally protect disagreement through formal devil’s advocate roles, strong whistleblower protections, and explicit rewards for surfacing bad news early. A leader who cannot tolerate dissent is fundamentally dangerous. Disagreement should be seen as a contribution to intelligence.
6. Redefine charisma
Charisma is too often equated with dominance, theatrical confidence, and verbal force. But sustainable leadership can look different: calm authority, restraint, curiosity, and the ability to change one’s mind in light of new evidence. As long as we glamorize the worst kind of “strong personalities,” narcissistic leaders will continue to thrive. Our dominant definition of charisma is also deeply gendered. Traits coded as charismatic—assertiveness, verbal dominance, emotional detachment, physical presence—map closely onto traditionally masculine norms, while behaviors more often associated with women (like listening) are systematically undervalued.
7. Address the root cause: Fear
Narcissistic leaders rise fastest in anxious systems. When people feel unsafe—economically, socially, psychologically—they outsource certainty to those who project it most loudly. Reducing precarity, increasing fairness, and building real psychological safety are not just moral imperatives. They are structural defenses against narcissistic leadership.
Narcissistic leaders do not seize power alone. They are enabled—by our fears, our metrics, our myths about leadership, and our reluctance to confront uncomfortable truths. If we want different leaders, we must become different selectors. The problem is not that narcissists exist. It’s that we keep mistaking them for leaders.
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Let me set a scene for you: A manager at a tech company pings his team at 6:01 p.m., asking for a “quick favor before morning?”
The millennial responds instantly with “Sure, give me a sec” while texting their partner to warn they will be late for their kids’ game.
The Gen X employee gives a thumbs-up emoji and plans to do the work after the kids are asleep.
The Gen Z parent has a different vibe altogether, responding, “I’m offline for day care pickup and will handle in the morning,” then logging off.
It’s a move that likely stuns most millennial and Gen X colleagues, but this is what happens when boundary-setting appears in a workplace built around people sacrificing their personal lives for the bottom line.
As Gen Zers become parents, they are shifting workplace expectations.
Why the Old Playbook Isn’t Working
For generations, we have struggled in a culture that requires both intensive parenting and the always-available ideal worker. Is it any wonder that burnout has become a status symbol? Millennials and Gen X have tried to “lean in,” then had kids, and then hit a wall—hard. The pandemic provided some relief by normalizing flexibility and paying more attention to the mental health crisis in this country. All of this had given rise to the first generation of truly anti-burnout parents.
They were raised on mantras like “Do what you love” and “Find your passion,” but student loan debt and massive layoffs killed that dream for most. So the pressure to find a dream job was replaced with landing a job with boundaries that enables them to have friends, hobbies, and relationships. Work is just part of a full life, as opposed to a defining characteristic. What they do has nothing to do with who they are. It’s a stark contrast to Gen X, whose careers symbolized how hard they worked or how important they were in the cultural ecosystem.
While hustle culture turned exhaustion into a statement of how dedicated you are, Gen Z saw it as outright exploitation. Being busy is no longer a bragging right, and all-nighters aren’t a badge of honor. They don’t buy into the notion that being overloaded signifies ambition.
This doesn’t mean that Gen Z lacks ambition. They just reject the idea that ambition requires the erasure of self-care. They want promotions, not burnout. They want leadership, not a cutthroat or desperate ladder-climbing personality. They want financial stability, not status for appearances. The bottom line is Gen Z wants power; they just don’t want to bleed for it.
What Gen Z Is Teaching the Rest of Us
It’s a hard pill to swallow for boomers and Gen X, who have that “we paid our dues” energy. These boundaries can come off like entitlement, demanding, and unrealistic. But those older generations came of age when housing was cheaper, childcare was cheaper, college cost less, and a family could survive on a single income. That world doesn’t exist anymore.
A shift could be good for everyone. Gen Z parents I have spoken with demand infrastructure changes, like paid leave, mental health coverage, flexibility, and pay transparency. They are proving that you don’t have to white-knuckle your way to a promotion for it to count, and mental well-being is just as important as the bottom line.
They are also rejecting the idea that parenting should not interfere with work. When childcare falls through, it impacts work, and they are not hiding it. Family life is a priority rather than a source of guilt. Instead of asking, “How do I survive this?” they’re asking, “Why is the system built this way?” That shift in mindset could potentially change everything.
The Future of Work
It’s a profound rebellion: closing laptops at 6, taking time away without apology, refusing to live perpetually exhausted. So what happens when these workers start running departments, companies, or entire industries? Leadership styles soften and reviews focus less on face time and more on output. The ideal worker stops being the person who never logs off. And these changes won’t just benefit new parents. Everyone wins when the culture stops worshipping burnout.
Perhaps the most ambitious thing we can do going forward isn’t to work ourselves into the ground but rather to build a life worth protecting.
It was mid-morning when Nadine Jones got the daycare call every working mother dreads—her son spiked a fever and needed to be picked up.
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For a generation, the smartest people I knew dreamed of moving to America.
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AI mega data centers are being announced at a record pace, but many projects may stall or collapse due to power, permitting, financing, and backlash.
The post Why Half of All Planned Mega Data Centers May Never Be Built appeared first on TechRepublic.
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