Originally published on Board Agenda.
The leadership crisis we’re in has an origin story. Understand it and you understand how to fix it.
For most of the 20th century, up until the early 1990’s, leaders in business were typically known for their command-and-control style. It wasn’t uncommon for bosses to be brutally direct, even overly harsh with their subordinates. The personification of that leadership behavior was Blake, an unforgettable character in the iconic 1992 film, Glengarry Glen Ross. Played brilliantly by Alec Baldwin, Blake’s histrionics were intentionally hyperbolic, offensive even to the most hardened among us. And yet, they weren’t that far off from reality. Yes, coffee was indeed for closers.
But how did that leadership style come into existence? The model traces back to Alfred Sloan, who took over a fractured General Motors in 1923 and built it into the largest corporation on earth. An MIT-trained engineer, he had no patience for chaos and even less for sentimentality. His hierarchical skeleton (clear chain of command, divisional structure) was operated by leaders who believed that output was the singular measure of success, that the leader’s job was to direct and enforce rules, and the employee’s wellbeing didn’t factor into the equation at all. That mindset went unchallenged, particularly at the level that mattered most: how bosses actually treated their people. Those leaders simply mimicked the behaviors of those that came before them; generations deep, with no other archetype to model themselves against. But it was scorched earth. It burned everyone in its path.
In no uncertain terms, at its core, it was a failure model.
Daniel Goleman, a clinical psychologist, spent roughly twenty years as a science journalist, covering brain and behavioral research. In 1995, he published Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ. The book spent a year and a half on the bestseller list and made “EQ” a household term.
Goleman’s book became the faultline for a seismic event, changing how American business looked at leadership. It replaced Blake’s expletive-laden version of leadership, confrontational and output-obsessed, with one built on empathy, self-awareness, and emotional harmony. His 1998 Harvard Business Review article, “What Makes a Leader?,” carried the idea directly into the boardroom, arguing EQ actually outweighed technical skill as a predictor of leadership success, and Fortune 500 names like Jack Welch soon began citing it.
Goleman never worked in business, was never responsible for a P&L, nor did he lead people under intense pressure to perform against measurable objectives. He studied leadership as a psychologist and journalist, observing it from the outside, not as an experienced practitioner who’d spent time in the trenches. Nonetheless, the world of leadership thinkers, thirsty for something…anything that presented a departure from that graceless age of leadership, drank it up. Every single drop.
Once EQ got sold as leadership’s new official currency, a whole industry built itself on measuring and monetizing how well leaders felt things rather than how well they did things. The coaching certifications, the keynote circuit, the “authentic leadership” retreats. All rooted in Goleman’s premise that emotional transformation is the differentiator, later sanitized for mass consumption, until authenticity and vulnerability were all that was left of the job description. Somewhere between the 1998 HBR article and today’s LinkedIn feed, we stopped asking “can this leader help their people succeed?” We started asking “does this leader lead with empathy and create belonging?”
Nobody voted on it. Nobody even noticed it happen. So how’d that work out? A 2025 TalentLMS survey found just 8% of managers believe their company’s leadership development actually works. Eight…percent. That’s not an indictment. It’s a verdict.
In no uncertain terms, at its core, this too, is a failure model.
Even in its most defensible form, EQ was never built to measure whether leaders have the requisite skills to lead effectively. Perceive emotion. Use emotion. Understand emotion. Manage emotion. Emotion, emotion, emotion. Four branches, and every single one of them revolves around the same thing: feelings. The model never taught leaders to hire well, decide fast, or lead when the ground shifts beneath them. It taught them to feel good about doing all three badly.
Goleman’s acolytes didn’t just overweight emotion. They built an entire taxonomy of “intelligence” with zero mindshare devoted to the practical skills it takes to lead people through hard times. Things like career planning, delegation, and performance management are conspicuously absent from today’s leadership development programs. Yet, the Feelings Faculty have succeeded in making their taxonomy the new scaffolding for how leaders get hired, trained, and promoted.
In nearly four decades leading people (in different companies, roles, and crises), I never once had to choose between running my group like Joseph Stalin or a Teletubby. That’s a false dichotomy manufactured by a leadership industrial complex that profits from it.
There’s nothing sexy about teaching someone to lead a difficult performance conversation. But a ballroom goes wild after ninety minutes of “How to lead with a warm heart.” Give a
CEO a program that teaches leaders how to set and communicate clear expectations, or one that promises joy and belonging, and style wins over substance nearly every time. To the tune of $27 billion a year. The Keynote Cartel knows a cured patient doesn’t refill their prescription.
That $27 billion only serves to hide the most painful part of the story. Somewhere right now, someone is closing out a long career, never having reached their full potential. Not because their leaders didn’t care, but because those leaders were never allowed to develop the skills and competencies their people desperately needed them to have. They never had a chance to become the leader their people deserved.
But none of this is permanent. It’s a choice that was made for us, which means it’s a choice we can reject. Not by swinging back to Blake, and not by staying with the Feelings Faculty, but by building something neither of them could offer.
It’s time for new voices, new faces, and new programs led by practitioners, not professors, grounded in leadership skills, operational effectiveness and real experience. That’s the path to higher employee loyalty, engagement, and productivity.
The last seismic shift traded competency for feelings. It’s time to trade back. Feelings can keep a seat at the table. But competency must sit at the head.
