The Problem with Leadership Culture Today | Vaney Hariri | TEDxSioux Falls
- Aisha Washington
- 1 day ago
- 7 min read
Do you want someone else to lead—and would you willingly become the person who goes first? Vaney Hariri opens his TEDxSioux Falls talk with these deceptively simple questions. Together, they expose a tension at the heart of modern leadership culture: people want capable leaders, but the conditions surrounding leadership increasingly make the role punishing, isolating, and unattractive.
Drawing on years of conversations with leaders, Hariri argues that leadership problems cannot be explained only by the character of executives, politicians, or managers. The surrounding community matters too. How people communicate disappointment, respond to vulnerability, reward technical performance, and share responsibility all influence which leaders emerge—and whether thoughtful people are willing to lead at all.
Leadership Is a Tool, Not a Moral Identity
Hariri uses a childhood story about Cain, Abel, and a rock to make an important distinction. A rock can be used to build something or to injure someone. Its effect depends on the intentions and actions of the person holding it.
Leadership works in a similar way. Authority, institutions, and organizational structures are tools. They do not automatically produce humane or harmful results. Their consequences depend on who uses them, how prepared that person is, and what the surrounding culture encourages or permits.
Hariri speaks from his experience as the co-founder of a leadership and culture company. Over roughly a decade, he says, he has held thousands of one-to-one conversations with hundreds of leaders—listening to their concerns, challenging their assumptions, offering encouragement, and observing what responsibility does to people. That experience has convinced him that the instruments of leadership are heavy. They require judgment, training, and support, not merely ambition.
Why Competent Leadership Often Becomes Invisible
Leadership is not confined to formal titles. Hariri asks listeners to consider the “stable” person in a family: the one who arranges gatherings, offers advice, lends money, resolves disagreements, or remains calm during a crisis.
This person is already leading, even without a managerial role. Yet the better they perform this work, the easier it is for everyone else to overlook it. Reliability creates an illusion of effortlessness. Because the gathering happens, the problem gets solved, or the family remains connected, others may assume there was little burden to carry.
The same paradox appears inside organizations. A leader who prevents emergencies, keeps a team aligned, or absorbs uncertainty may receive less recognition precisely because the disruption never becomes visible. Success conceals the labor that produced it.
Over time, that invisibility can turn responsibility into resentment. People continue expecting stability while failing to notice the planning, emotional regulation, and difficult decisions required to sustain it.
The Dinner Story and the Failure of Useful Feedback
To explain another weakness in leadership culture, Hariri turns to an ordinary dinner experience. In his account, his wife does not enjoy her meal, but when a restaurant manager asks how everything was, she offers a positive response.
The exchange seems harmless. Social politeness makes the moment easier for everyone. Yet the restaurant leaves with inaccurate information. Its staff cannot improve because they were never told what was wrong.
There are two failures here. First, dissatisfaction remains vague: the diner may know that she dislikes the meal without identifying whether it is too salty, insufficiently sweet, poorly cooked, or simply not suited to her preferences. Second, even the limited information she does possess never reaches someone able to act on it.
Hariri connects this mismatch to a broader consumer mindset. Customers are taught to expect immediate satisfaction and to regard their preferences as authoritative. When disappointed, they may complain to friends or post a harsh public review while avoiding a direct, specific conversation with the people who could make a change.
Organizations reproduce this pattern when employees discuss a manager’s shortcomings with everyone except the manager. Criticism circulates, but learning does not. The speaker argues that people frequently withhold constructive feedback from its proper recipient and deliver it instead to audiences that have no power to improve the situation.
When Leaders Become Products and Shields
Hariri offers a concise definition of leadership: a leader goes first. That means taking initiative, accepting uncertainty, and becoming exposed to risks that others have not yet assumed.
Consumer culture can distort this relationship. Rather than seeing leadership as a shared human process, people begin treating the leader as a product. If the product disappoints, criticism feels consequence-free. The leader is presumed to have accepted unlimited hostility simply by taking the role.
Under this model, the leader becomes a shield. Others expect that person to absorb frustration, blame, and public judgment while continuing to project calm confidence. The community retains the role of customer: it evaluates outcomes, expresses dissatisfaction, and distances itself from the difficult process that produced the decision.
Accountability remains essential, of course. Hariri’s argument is not that leaders should escape scrutiny. It is that dehumanization does not create better accountability. Criticism becomes valuable only when it is specific, honest, proportionate, and directed toward improvement.
The Rise of the Accidental Manager
Many leaders enter their roles without having deliberately prepared for them. Hariri cites a Chartered Management Institute survey of 4,500 workers in which 82 percent of respondents said they had become managers accidentally.
The familiar promotion pattern helps explain why. An employee excels at a technical task, so the organization rewards that performance by putting the employee in charge of other people doing the same task. But technical expertise and people leadership are different capabilities. Coaching, conflict resolution, delegation, communication, and decision-making under uncertainty require their own development.
A strong engineer does not automatically become an effective engineering manager. A successful salesperson may not know how to build psychological safety or deliver difficult feedback. Promoting someone without preparation can therefore punish both the new manager and the team.
The job description may promise strategy, vision, and communication. The lived role can carry additional, unspoken demands:
Appear certain even when the situation is frightening.
Accept criticism without revealing its emotional cost.
Avoid admitting fatigue, doubt, or loneliness.
Remain reassuring while being blamed for unpopular outcomes.
Support everyone else without expecting comparable support.
Such expectations do not merely ask leaders to work hard. They ask them to conceal parts of their humanity.
How Isolation Damages Judgment
The phrase “lonely at the top” is often delivered as though isolation were an unavoidable privilege tax. Hariri instead describes it as a self-reinforcing organizational hazard.
A leader becomes isolated and increasingly anxious. Because everyone expects answers, the leader hides uncertainty. With fewer candid conversations and less emotional support, decision quality deteriorates. Poor decisions attract more criticism, which encourages further withdrawal. Each stage strengthens the next.
Hariri reinforces the seriousness of this cycle with several figures presented in the talk. He says that 55 percent of CEOs reported experiencing a mental-health crisis in 2024, representing a sharp year-over-year increase. He also points to more than 2,200 leaders leaving their positions, while citing loneliness as a significant factor in both departure and diminished performance.
The talk further compares the health consequences of persistent loneliness to smoking 15 cigarettes per day. Whatever a person’s rank, chronic isolation is not simply an unpleasant feeling. It can affect physical health, emotional stability, relationships, and the ability to make consequential decisions.
Those decisions rarely affect the leader alone. They reach employees, customers, families, and communities. A system that isolates decision-makers and then punishes the predictable consequences of that isolation is undermining the outcomes it claims to demand.
Why Capable People May Refuse to Lead
Given these conditions, reluctance is rational. Hariri cites findings that 42 percent of workers would reject a promotion and that 72 percent of Gen Z would prefer to remain individual contributors rather than enter leadership.
This creates a dangerous vacancy. When thoughtful, collaborative, or self-aware people decide that leadership is not worth its personal cost, positions do not disappear. They may instead be filled by candidates who are unprepared—or by those attracted primarily to status, control, and visibility.
A culture hostile to leaders can therefore select for the very leadership traits it later condemns. If a role requires someone to tolerate isolation, hide vulnerability, and endure indiscriminate attacks, people who value openness and mutual support may choose another path.
The result is not merely a talent-pipeline problem. It is a cultural feedback loop: unhealthy expectations deter healthy candidates, weaker leadership deepens public distrust, and growing distrust makes the environment even harsher.
Leadership Culture Is Built in Everyday Relationships
It is tempting to locate leadership failure exclusively in corporate headquarters or national government. Hariri redirects attention toward ordinary life. He notes that small enterprises account for the overwhelming majority of businesses and that leadership is exercised daily by owners, supervisors, organizers, parents, volunteers, and community members.
Most people encounter leadership more often through a workplace, service provider, school, local organization, or family than through a famous CEO or head of state. These routine interactions shape what leadership feels like and what behavior receives reinforcement.
That means everyone participates in leadership culture. We participate when we give—or avoid—feedback. We participate when we treat a manager as a collaborator, a partner, a team member, or merely a product expected to satisfy us. We participate when we reward leaders for admitting uncertainty or punish them for failing to perform invulnerability.
Leaders are not a separate species. Communities train, select, encourage, and constrain them. The environment influences whether people learn to make sound decisions with adequate support or learn merely to defend themselves.
Better Outcomes Require Attention to the Process
Hariri cautions against focusing only on getting the “right” result. That language can hide the complicated process behind an outcome, much as someone may enjoy a prepared meal without wanting to know how it was produced.
He characterizes effective leadership as placing the right person, at the right moment, in the right action, to produce the right outcome. Every part of that formulation demands judgment, and the meaning of “right” will vary among stakeholders.
A healthier leadership culture therefore needs more than better individuals. It needs communities willing to participate in the process. In practice, that means offering direct and actionable feedback, developing managers before and after promotion, creating relationships in which leaders can express uncertainty, and distinguishing rigorous accountability from personal degradation.
The final challenge returns to Hariri’s opening questions. Do we want to lead? Do we want to be led? And, perhaps most importantly, are we willing to create an environment in which good leadership remains possible?
Leaders must go first, but going first does not mean going alone.
