I have appreciated Kevin Meyer’s thinking on Lean, manufacturing, leadership, and life for many years. He recently wrote on his blog:
Bob Sutton posted something on LinkedIn this week that stopped me mid-scroll. He was flagging a Brené Brown interview in the Financial Times, in which she described a troubling shift: leaders feeling a sense of relief and permission from the current political climate to be, as she put it, the assholes they’ve always been. Sutton, who literally wrote the book on this (The No Asshole Rule, 2007), has been tracking the organizational costs of toxic leadership for decades. The fact that he was amplifying Brown’s warning suggests they’re both seeing the same thing.
So am I, and it’s been bothering me.
And also, me. As an aside, Brown’s new podcast conversation with Adam Grant called The Curiosity Shop is my new favorite listen
Meyer points to Brown’s deeper meaning:
Brown’s framing is more precise than it might first appear. She isn’t saying the political climate is creating bad leaders. She’s saying it’s licensing them. Leaders who previously kept their worst instincts in check because social and institutional norms demanded it now feel liberated. The restraints have loosened. That’s a fundamentally different, and more dangerous, problem.
Ah, research from the PhD:
Sutton’s research makes the case against this directly. His concept of the “Total Cost of Assholes” is real and measurable: talented people leave, honest input dries up as psychological safety collapses, decision quality erodes. As he put it, “It takes numerous encounters with positive people to offset the energy and happiness sapped by a single episode with one asshole.” The “but he gets results” rationalization doesn’t survive contact with the longitudinal data.
How many of us have followed leaders from many walks of life who have seemingly build careers on character and morals only to be shown to have been deceived?
I can almost understand, not excuse but understand, a purely transactional leader who drops the character mask when the costs of wearing it exceed the benefits. Cynical, but at least internally consistent. What I cannot get my head around is the behavior of people who have spent careers, sometimes entire lifetimes, building identities around moral and ethical frameworks, often explicitly religious ones, and then abandon those frameworks the moment a convenient “end” appears on the horizon.
Character as relationship, not transaction.
But character works like a relationship, not a transaction. Anyone who has watched someone enter a marriage or a partnership convinced they can change the other person already knows how this ends. You don’t change people by accepting their worst behavior; you ratify it. And you signal to everyone watching that the behavior is acceptable, which is how norms collapse.
The harder path, the one that actually maintains what you claim to believe, is staying true to the principle when the shortcut looks most appealing. Especially then. And the irony is that the shortcut rarely delivers what was promised anyway. The downstream effects of tolerating poor character accumulate quietly at first, then loudly: institutional trust erodes, the culture coarsens, the people who care most either leave or go silent. What looked like a faster route to the goal has created an environment in which the goal is now harder to achieve, not easier, because the foundation it required has been eaten away.
He ends his essay much like I often do on my other blog—making it personal.
So the next time you find yourself excusing a leader’s behavior you would never accept from your own kids, your employees, or your friends, ask what that rationalization is actually costing. Not them. You.
