The leadership industrial complex is setting up academic leaders to fail

Something about the tragic fall of academic presidents feels like the logical conclusion to a certain approach to leadership that, against everything we know about psychology, has managed to businessify it into a profitable enterprise with an academic imprimatur.

We are in the midst of a crisis of academic leadership. While recent high-profile departures, including by the heads of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, should be attributed to real failures of leadership, these leaders may have been set up to fail by a certain idea of leadership being promoted by their very own esteemed business schools.

Business schools that know a thing or two about turning a buck have transformed leadership into a veritable industrial complex by selling an idea of leadership that is as irresistible as it is misleading: that everyone is reasonable raw material for leadership, provided they sign up for the right course or hire the right executive coach. 

This business model ignores inherent differences in personality, character, charisma and even pure luck — essential ingredients in how leaders happen — as it inundates our inboxes with training opportunities, drains our employee development accounts of funds that might be better used elsewhere, leaves us feeling like losers when we don’t rise as our “professor of leadership” all but promised we would. It whips up a culture-wide frenzy about all things leadership, with symptoms that include “chief pastry officers,” “chief spiritual officers,” and daycare centers with names like Tiny Leaders Children’s Center, Little Leaders Institute and Lil’ Leaders Childcare. This model of leadership-for-all comes at a high cost. 

A Harvard training program that might help you get there will set you back $52,000 for the “basic” offering and an additional $27,000 for an accessory module that can grant you Harvard alumni status and a lifelong Harvard email address. Who would not want that on their CV? A “program advising team” manning a dedicated 1-800 phone number awaits your executive education questions — a level of access that Harvard’s “regular” undergraduate and graduate applicants can only dream of. 

Another program from Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania makes near miraculous claims for a nine month experience of largely self-paced learning that doesn’t exceed five hours a week. (Oh, and if I hurried and applied within nine days of downloading their brochure, I could get $1,000 off the $20,000 tuition.) 

The marketing is strong-armed and the promises fantastical as leadership firmly entrenches itself in the global bazaar like any commodity these schools are also expert at. Crude oil, natural gas, corn, soybeans, leadership!

The industry would be worth the cost if one could point to an uptick in the number of inspiring leaders we can be proud of or to heightened confidence in those shepherding us through political, economic, technological, climatic or public health turmoil. But none of this is true, and, in fact, the opposite feels true. 

At their congressional testimony on campus antisemitism, the presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT came across as, if anything, coached to death. It may be that, by seeing leadership as perfectly teachable, we are encouraging ill-suited candidates to visualize a path to the top — and are giving them more chances than they deserve once they get there. 

Look up “leadership training” on Google Maps around where FTX, Alameda Research or Theranos were headquartered, or indeed within a short radius from the U.S. Capitol where leadership tragedies are on near constant display, and you will get entries that are too numerous to count. It is not a lack of coaching that made FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes or former Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) possible.

Indeed, it is the consistent rise of misfits or downright frauds as leaders that concerns me most about the leadership-industrial complex. 

With the rise of life coaching and leadership coaching, psychology and character have been sidelined as coaches with no requirements for mental health training or licensing, and no proven ability to diagnose troubling conditions that research suggests are overrepresented in leadership, such as antisocial personality disorder, carry the leadership industry, performing therapy-lite of sorts on leaders who would rather see a coach than deal with the stigma of psychotherapy. 

While a new helping profession is very welcome, will a typical executive coach recognize a budding psychopath clothed in abundant charms when he comes knocking on their HR door? It is doubtful.

Psychology is subordinated in other ways, too, such as when leadership TED talkers insist that emotional intelligence, which has been shown to be an essential leadership asset, can be reliably taught. Or when it is suggested to students that requisite personality traits can be acquired through weekend role play workshops. 

These traits are either there, or they’re not, and if they’re not, the process of personality change is tectonic, if at all possible. Freud himself had this to say about its frustrating pace: “To shorten . . . treatment is a justifiable wish. . . . Unfortunately, it is opposed by a very important factor, namely, the slowness with which deep-going changes in the mind are accomplished.” Like personality, there is nothing “express” about leadership, but this has not stopped offerings such as “Leadership Express Series” from confidently marketing themselves.

If I were a business school dean in the business of recruiting students to my MBA leadership track, I might argue that the industry is not big enough — invest heavier and earlier in our trainings and redemption interventions and watch your leadership pipeline burst with mini Steve Jobss. But I am a psychiatrist, and the only path I see out of this is to resurrect psychology as the main driver of leader emergence and success.

Something about the tragic fall of academic presidents feels like the logical conclusion to a certain approach to leadership that, against everything we know about psychology, has managed to businessify it into a profitable enterprise with an academic imprimatur. In response, and to make better leaders possible, we may want to start ignoring the logical fallacy that says that all are destined to lead, ease up on the prepping and the “development,” and go back to recognizing personality and character as necessary constituents that money can’t buy. 

And, perhaps more than anything, we need to show followers more respect. The frenzy around leadership training and the imperative to rise at all costs is leaving them with an inferiority complex. We need to listen to them, invest in them and reward them. And we need to do it for who they are, not their “leadership potential.”

Elias Aboujaoude, MD, MA, is clinical professor of psychiatry at Stanford University's Department of Psychiatry, where he is chief of the Anxiety Disorders Section and director of the OCD Clinic and the Impulse Control Disorders Clinic.