Something subtle, but deeply consequential, has happened to the word leadership. In our collective push for emotionally intelligent organizations, we’ve quietly traded the directional power of leadership for its affective shadows. Leadership today is often measured not by where it takes us, but by how it feels to be in the room. Tone has replaced trajectory.
This shift isn’t baseless. It’s rooted in valid critiques of legacy leadership models that were authoritarian, exclusive, and often psychologically blunt. Emotional intelligence, inclusion, and psychological safety are necessary correctives. But somewhere in the reframe, the core function of leadership - choosing a direction in uncertainty and carrying its weight - got displaced.
You can build an emotionally fluent team and still lead them nowhere. You can foster inclusion, belonging, and even engagement, and still fail to make a single meaningful decision. Today, we have leaders who are deeply attuned but strategically agnostic, celebrated for emotional calibration while paralyzed in the face of consequence.
The etymology of lead - from the Proto-Indo-European root leith- meaning “to go,” “to travel,” or “to cross a threshold” - reminds us that leadership is, at its core, about forward motion. Not just how you lead, but that you lead. That you move. That you go first, eyes open, and accept what follows.
The confusion, if it can be traced to a single idea, lies in the conflation of the how and the what.
The how is tone - emotional literacy, empathy, attunement. The what is decision - moving forward when the outcome is unclear, absorbing the cost of uncertainty. Both matter. But one defines leadership. The other supports it.
When leadership becomes a performance of inclusion rather than an act of responsibility, we all lose. Coaching frameworks, HR manuals, and leadership programs now increasingly teach leaders to “hold space,” “mirror emotion,” and “center belonging.” What they often don’t teach is how to act under ambiguity. How to decide when consensus hasn’t been reached. How to absorb consequence publicly.
Consider Satya Nadella at Microsoft. In 2014, he inherited a sluggish, bureaucratic organization and made an uncomfortable, high-stakes pivot toward cloud and open-source development. It was not popular at the time. But it worked. He didn’t just listen, he led. Or Angela Merkel, who in 2015 accepted over a million Syrian refugees into Germany at the height of the migrant crisis, knowing it could fracture her coalition. It wasn’t the safest move. But it was a decision: clear, accountable, consequential.
Contrast this with examples like Elizabeth Holmes or Adam Neumann. Both had charisma, mission statements, cultural cachet. Both excelled at performing leadership. But neither made viable strategic choices. Holmes had no working product. Neumann had no financial model. When tested, their stories collapsed, because they weren’t leading anything at all.
So how did we get here?
Much of it stems from the evolution of leadership theory itself. The 20th-century “Great Man” model, leadership as innate charisma and force, gave way to transformational leadership in the 1980s, emphasizing meaning, alignment, and performance. Then came emotional intelligence, servant leadership, and finally, psychological safety. Important shifts, yes. But each layer added more focus on interpersonal atmosphere and less on directional courage.
By the 2010s, especially in coaching circles and startup cultures, leadership became synonymous with emotional fluency. Influence was divorced from motion. Decision-making became group facilitation. Strategy became comfort management. The result? Risk was neutralized, and responsibility was diffused.
This isn’t a critique of empathy. In fact, research confirms that the most effective teams combine trust and candor. But her work has often been misinterpreted. Safety enables risk, it doesn’t replace it. Somewhere along the line, the followers of these models became more dogmatic than the thinkers themselves. Tone began to eclipse trajectory. Style substituted for substance.
But leadership without consequence is just choreography.
To lead is to collapse ambiguity into action. It means choosing even when the data is incomplete, the room is silent, and the backlash is likely. It means making decisions that don’t please everyone and carrying the weight when it doesn’t work out. That’s not recklessness. It’s responsibility.
Leadership is not a vibe. It’s not about being the most liked, or the most attuned. It’s not only “presence.” It’s about being the one who moves, and owns the outcome. It’s about going first.
In the end, strategy decks, stakeholder sessions, and alignment meetings must culminate in a single, visible act: “This is where we’re going. And I will own what comes next.”
That’s what makes it leadership.
Read the full essay "Leadership: The Act of Moving Forward"
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