Whenever I watch the news or read an online current affairs article, I feel as though I am in an alternative reality. I am shocked to notice that a troubling pattern is resurfacing with renewed boldness: the rise of leaders who treat power as a performance, cruelty as a form of strength, and loyalty as the only virtue. From boardrooms to government offices, narcissistic, fear-based leadership is once again on full display – celebrated in some circles as “decisive” or “disruptive,” but leaving behind a wake of chaos, burnout, and institutional distrust.
We’ve seen this playbook before. Bob Sutton, in his landmark book The No Asshole Rule, warned that a single toxic leader can ruin workplace culture, regardless of their credentials or charisma. His research showed that even “brilliant jerks” come with a hidden tax of disengagement, stress, turnover, and diminished collaboration. Today, Sutton’s insights feel more urgent than ever, as prominent figures double down on an outdated belief that success is best achieved through domination, rather than dignity.
Consider Elon Musk. His now-infamous mass firings at Twitter/X were just the beginning. More recently, he has employed a kind of DOGE-coin-style volatility in his approach to people management at the US Government, axing and rehiring entire teams – not based on merit, but on mood, loyalty, or provocation. It’s leadership as meme warfare: impulsive, erratic, and proudly opaque.
Or consider Donald Trump’s infamous Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, which recently took place. It was a vivid demonstration of leadership centered not on shared purpose but on personal leverage and image control – the abuse of a war-torn president of another nation, with a final comment, “This is going to be great television.” The legacy of such behavior continues to permeate organizational life: trust is sacrificed at the altar of ego, and those who dissent are dismissed or silenced.
These are not isolated cases. They are symptoms of a deeper pathology: a leadership model rooted in control, compliance, and self-interest – often dressed up as “visionary” but hollow at its core. While such figures may grab headlines and temporarily boost stock prices or polling numbers, the long-term damage they inflict on culture, credibility, and collective performance is profound.
These high-profile examples underscore a dangerous trend: in far too many organizations, toxic ‘strongman’ leaders are allowed to run rampant, inflicting what researchers bluntly call workplace suffering. Employees bear the brunt. One striking data point: 35% of U.S. employees would willingly forgo a substantial pay raise if it meant their direct supervisor was fired. In other words, over a third of people would literally pay to remove their boss – a shocking indictment of how bad leadership breeds misery. It is little wonder that public trust in corporate leadership is faltering; a global survey found that 56% of citizens believe our current, leader-centric form of capitalism does more harm than good. We are, it seems, at a breaking point. The cult of the heroic, egocentric CEO is being revealed for what it often is: a cover for unchecked power that prioritizes control over compassion and ends up poisoning the very culture it’s supposed to nurture. The time for change is now.
Against this backdrop, a radically different vision is emerging – one that dares to ask: What if leadership wasn’t about command, but about community? What if performance wasn’t coerced, but cultivated? And what if flourishing, not fear, became the organizing principle of work?
From Control and Compliance to Freedom and Flourishing
A group of forward-thinking academics and practitioners – frustrated by ‘the most broken process of all’ in HR, performance management – recently drafted the Freedom to Flourish manifesto and launched at the HR World Summit in Porto in 2024. Their stance is boldly human-centric: ‘We are taking a stand against the growing trend of reducing human beings to mere resources in the workplace. Instead, we uphold a vision of leadership that fosters growth, respect, and collaboration.’
This manifesto offers a beacon of hope in a landscape dominated by toxic leadership, advocating for a future where people are valued and organizations exist for human thriving, not human exploitation.
- Freedom and Flourishing over Control and Compliance
- Purpose and Social Value over Quarterly Budget Games
- System Change over Individual Appraisals
- Growing Better Together over Bonuses and Forced Rankings
In other words, the manifesto calls out the toxic staples of corporate life – rigid hierarchies, micromanagement, obsessive short-term metrics, cutthroat rankings – and dares to value the opposite paradigm more. It’s a stark contrast to the toxic leadership that has become all too common, offering a vision of organizations that exist for human thriving, not human exploitation. This contrast underscores the urgent need for a shift in leadership paradigms.
What does an organization that embodies “freedom and flourishing” actually look like?
First, it trusts people. Rather than viewing employees as cogs to be controlled, it empowers individuals with the freedom to pursue meaningful, virtuous work, trusting them to manage their tasks in pursuit of a shared purpose. Decision-making is pushed outwards and downwards – a principle of subsidiarity where self-directed teams at the frontlines have the authority to act, as the best performance emerges when those doing the work are involved in the decision-making process. Teams care for individuals, and individuals care for their teams, creating a mutually supportive network.
Second, a flourishing organization anchors itself in purpose and social value. Profit matters (it keeps the lights on), but maximizing shareholder value at all costs is not the North Star. Instead, the organization defines success in broader terms – is our work improving lives, building community, and serving a greater mission? Leaders continually reconnect people to that sense of purpose, a far more powerful motivator than fear or bonus carrots. The manifesto advocates dialing back the classic extrinsic incentives, pointing out the need to stop individual bonuses and moderate pay extremes. Instead, it suggests paying fair, above-market wages and sharing profits widely to build trust. People should be rewarded for contributing to the common good, not just hitting a number .
Third, performance management itself is reinvented from the ground up. The annual review ritual – loathed by employees and managers alike – is exposed as a charade. “Performance appraisals do not produce truth; they’re completely flawed and biased, and shockingly, not even correlated with organizational performance, so why do it?” asks Prof. Antoinette Weibel, one of the manifesto’s architects. Decades of research support her claim: traditional appraisals are more theater than science, often measuring who can play the political game rather than who contributes. Likewise, forced ranking systems and high-pressure bonus schemes often backfire. They may drive employees to chase metrics and incentives at the expense of collaboration, innovation, and ethics – incurring “so many hidden costs” that overall performance suffers. As Weibel bluntly notes, the very system supposedly designed to drive performance is “just simply not working”.
The freedom-to-flourish approach throws out these failing practices and replaces them with something more dynamic and humane. Continuous, personalized support and feedback take center stage, decoupled from compensation. Feedback is no longer a top-down judgment delivered once a year, but a collaborative inquiry among equals – forward-looking and growth. Rather than stack-ranking individuals, the focus shifts to developing everyone’s potential and maximizing team outcomes. Yes, accountability remains – the manifesto isn’t about coddling poor performers. But accountability is achieved through more nuanced methods: on-demand evaluations to address real performance issues in a fair, bias-resistant way, and periodic reviews not to rank people, but to adapt roles and systems to help people excel. In simple terms, the mantra becomes: help people succeed, don’t just measure how they failed.
This represents a profound mindset shift. It means leaders must stop instrumentalizing people as means to an end and start unleashing them as ends in themselves. It means redefining success: not “Did I squeeze enough out of my workers this quarter?” but “Did we create an environment where our people can do their best work and grow?” Companies like Microsoft, for example, have famously moved away from forced rankings to focus on coaching and learning – reflecting the realization that internal competition was killing collaboration. In a flourishing-centric culture, the only competition is against yesterday’s self, not your teammate. People are encouraged to beat their own best and support others to do the same.
The Broken System Behind “Normal” Practices
If these ideas sound idealistic, it’s worth remembering how “normal” corporate practices are systematically failing us. For years, HR leaders have implemented tweaks to performance management – annual reviews have become quarterly check-ins, and pulse surveys supplement engagement data – but these often amount to superficial changes that don’t address the core problem. The core problem lies in the mental model that underpins it all: a model that views organizations as machines and humans as unreliable components that must be tightly controlled, measured, and manipulated through incentives. This mechanistic, control-first paradigm is the quiet culprit behind much of the dysfunction. It’s what Antoinette Weibel and Otti Vogt (co-authors of the manifesto) refer to when they say our current approach to performance is rooted in “control and compliance” and a mindset of profit maximization at all costs – a mindset that inadvertently creates widespread suffering.
Traditional performance management is a linchpin of that old paradigm, and its failures are increasingly evident. Employees either dread their perfunctory annual review or become cynical about its fairness. Managers, for their part, often dislike conducting reviews; they know that a single number or vague rating hardly captures a year’s worth of effort, yet the process forces them into simplistic judgments. Trust erodes on both sides. High performers disengage after witnessing mediocre colleagues play politics to advance, and struggling employees conceal problems out of fear of being penalized at year-end. Incentive pay and rankings were intended to encourage excellence, but they often discourage honesty, teamwork, and innovation – the very qualities that foster excellence. Everyone ends up gaming the system: “quarterly budget games” where hitting the target matters more than doing the right thing. And once people start gaming the system, genuine engagement and trust are the casualties.
Moreover, narcissistic leadership thrives in this broken system. When a culture is all about individual achievement, numbers, and heroic leaders, it becomes a fertile ground for self-aggrandizing personalities to take charge. They can manipulate metrics, hoard credit, and punish dissent all under the guise of “performance.” We’ve seen it with leaders like Trump – who publicly equated loyalty to himself with organizational success – and Musk, who touted extreme workload and sacrifice as the only path to greatness. These leaders often do achieve short-term results (narcissists are notoriously good at creating a blip of improved metrics or stock price through sheer force, which only reinforces the false narrative that the ends justify the tyrannical means. However, as research indicates, the damage accumulates over time: Narcissistic CEOs are associated with higher turnover, increased legal troubles, and ethical lapses, and they perpetuate a culture of toxic behavior by rewarding such behavior while driving out principled voices. By the time the quarterly numbers are revealed as fool’s gold, it’s often too late – the best talent has fled, and a culture of fear has calcified.
Tinkering around the edges of performance management or leadership development won’t cut it. We need a systemic change in how we think about leadership and performance. And this is where HR’s role becomes pivotal.
HR Leaders as Change Agents for a Flourishing Culture
For Chief HR Officers and senior HR leaders, this moment is a call to action – perhaps even a career-defining opportunity. HR is uniquely positioned at the crossroads of people and strategy, which means HR can either reinforce the old control paradigm or help dismantle it in favor of something far better. As Otti Vogt put it, HR has “a true opportunity to influence how the business will work and how to shape the future of work”. In practical terms, HR can be the architect of the freedom-to-flourish model within their organizations.
What might that entail?
It starts with courage and conviction – the courage to challenge long-standing practices and the conviction that doing so will yield better outcomes. HR leaders should feel empowered to present the data and human case against toxic leadership. For example, armed with findings that narcissistic leaders ultimately undermine organizational effectiveness and even “risk the very survival” of the enterprise by corroding integrity, HR can make a compelling argument to the C-suite and board: Our culture is a competitive asset, and we cannot allow it to be sabotaged from the top. Similarly, HR can highlight internal survey data showing declines in engagement or trust, linking them to micromanagement or fear-based management styles. Shine a light on the hidden costs – the slow brain drain of talent, the creeping cynicism, the lost innovation when employees are afraid to speak up. Nothing gets a CEO’s attention like evidence that the current approach is backfiring.
Next, HR must model a new approach in its domains, with performance management as the prime pilot. This could involve overhauling the review and reward system within a single division or team to align with the manifesto’s principles, and then scaling up the success. By experimenting with approaches such as peer feedback circles, team-based recognition, or profit-sharing in place of individual bonuses, HR can gather real-world examples and success stories. Did collaboration improve when rankings were removed? Did voluntary turnover drop when managers started coaching rather than judging? Often, the results speak for themselves. Progressive HR leaders at companies like Adobe and Deloitte have already demonstrated that scrapping annual reviews in favor of continuous feedback leads to higher engagement and better performance conversations – and the sky doesn’t fall. Such pilots give credibility to the broader human-centric approach.
Moreover, HR can influence leadership development and selection. It’s time to rethink what we expect of leaders at all levels. Rather than promoting the most aggressive individual performers, organizations should promote people who excel at enabling others. HR can push for incorporating 360-degree feedback, including measures of a leader’s empathy, integrity, and ability to foster teamwork, not just their sales numbers or project deliveries. As Antoinette Weibel has discussed, we need to weed out toxic narcissists from leadership pipelines early because “they are causing a lot of trouble” and inevitably fail in the long run . This might mean having tough conversations about star performers who hit targets but leave a trail of disengaged colleagues. HR’s mandate is to insist that how results are achieved is as important as the results themselves. By setting a tone of ethical, servant-minded leadership in hiring and promotions, HR can gradually dilute the influence of narcissistic personalities. People who cannot let go of their ego and power will find fewer places to hide.
Finally, HR leaders should embrace their role as culture stewards and facilitators of dialogue. The Freedom to Flourish manifesto suggests that HR periodically “invite the entire organization to discuss how to improve excellence and social value,” embodying a commitment to collective success. Imagine convening cross-level forums where employees talk openly about obstacles to doing their best work, or where leaders answer candid questions about the company’s direction and purpose. These practices build trust. They signal that leadership is a shared responsibility – a verb, not a title. HR can nurture this ethos by training managers to be coaches, setting up mentoring networks, and celebrating examples of humble, inclusive leadership. Every story of a leader who listened, who served their team, who admitted a mistake and learned from it – these are cultural gold. Share them widely, because they reinforce that this is “how we lead here.”
In championing these changes, CHROs must be prepared to sometimes go against the grain. There will be leaders who scoff at “soft” concepts like flourishing or who are addicted to their KPIs and control levers. However, HR can speak the language of business outcomes to win them over: Trust and psychological safety are proven drivers of innovation. Ethical, people-centric cultures outperform in customer satisfaction and brand reputation. Companies known for human flourishing (think Patagonia’s profound sense of purpose or the high-trust culture at Southwest Airlines) have remarkably loyal employees and customers – an advantage no autocrat can buy. Critically, organizations that give people freedom also unlock their discretionary effort and creativity, which leads to better financial performance in the long run. It’s truly a win-win: well-being and performance rise together when you get the culture right.
The contrast before us could not be more pronounced. Down one path, we see organizations clinging to a control-and-compliance playbook enforced by narcissistic bosses – a path that yields short-lived gains, toxic cultures, burnout, and public distrust. Down the other path, we envision organizations that cultivate freedom, trust, and purpose – a path that can lead to engaged employees, resilient cultures, and sustainable success. Choosing the latter is not easy; it requires unlearning decades of “business as usual.” But if anyone is equipped to lead that charge, it is HR. As HR professionals, we often say, “People are our greatest asset.” – now is the time to prove we mean it by designing systems that truly put people first.
CHROs and senior HR leaders, the gauntlet is thrown. Will we continue to tolerate or even enable the cult of the toxic leader, with all its devastating effects? Or will we seize this transformative opportunity to usher in a new era of human-centric leadership? The Freedom to Flourish movement provides a blueprint, but it will remain merely words on paper unless HR leaders bring it to life. This is our chance to be the change agents we always wanted to be – to help our organizations not just perform, but transform.
In the end, it comes down to a simple yet profound choice: perpetuate control, compliance, and suffering – or champion freedom, trust, and flourishing. The future of work and the well-being of countless people may hinge on our answer. Let’s make sure, when history looks back at this inflection point, that HR was the profession that had the courage to say: Enough. It’s time to let go of the old and let human beings truly flourish at work.
The health of our organizations – and our society – depends on it.
Join the conversation at the Freedom to Flourish track during the 2025 HR World Summit in Lisbon on May 20-21. For details, visit https://hrworldsummit.com
Sources:
- Freedom to Flourish Manifesto, HR World Summit 2024
- Weibel, A. & Vogt, O. – Interview on Freedom to Flourish
- Vogt, O. – “Letting Go of Leadership” (Global Leadership Society, 2023) https://leadershipsociety.world/knowledgehub/articles/LettingGoOfLeadership
- Chatman, J. – Narcissistic Leaders and Organizational Culture, Berkeley Haas research (How narcissistic leaders infect their organizations’ cultures – Haas News | Berkeley Haas)
- Medium (E. Grape) – ; Washington Monthly – “Rise of the Dictator CEO“
- Politico – “Paul Ryan calls Trump a ‘…narcissist'” (Paul Ryan calls Trump a ‘populist, authoritarian narcissist’ – POLITICO)
- Antoinette Weibel https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antoinette-weibel_narcissists-select-weed-activity-6802115393017126912-laeX?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAACjvlMBBizHrhvxXJ-OfT3L9POxe4oiG-E
Written by human with the help if AI Tools.
