Two years ago I wrote a blog post asking a question that really bothered me:
Where are the empaths in business leadership?
If you look at who tends to run the show: large companies, financial institutions, political structures tied to economic power - you see a certain profile repeated over and over. MBA graduates. Strategy people. Leaders trained to optimise growth, margins, and shareholder returns.
And then there’s another group that seems to live in a completely different universe. Community organisers. Spiritual leaders. People who talk about care, justice, sustainability, human dignity. People who actually think about the world we’re leaving behind. In my books- actual leaders we need!
Those two worlds rarely overlap.
At the time I found that gap frustrating, but also… solvable. My argument was basically this: if more people who care about others stepped into leadership roles, if they learned the language of business, built communities, invested in themselves, found role models doing it differently, things could shift.
And I still think the diagnosis was mostly right.
But the tone of that post reads differently to me now.
It sounds… hopeful in a way that feels almost naive.
Not wrong. Just incomplete.
Because the last couple of years have made something much clearer to me, and it’s not particularly comfortable to say out loud, but here we are:
The system doesn’t just overlook empathetic leaders.
It fights them.
The moment that looked like change
There was a time, not that long ago, when it really felt like the leadership conversation was shifting.
Servant leadership wasn’t fringe anymore. Simon Sinek was everywhere talking about leaders who serve their teams. Brené Brown was telling executives that vulnerability wasn’t weakness. Robert Greenleaf’s ideas were back on reading lists.
You saw it in conference talks, in corporate leadership programmes, on LinkedIn posts from very senior people. The language of empathy and purpose started creeping into boardrooms.
For a moment it genuinely felt like something was opening up.
And then… something else happened.
That window didn’t slowly close again.
It got boarded up.
What we’re seeing now
What’s happening right now doesn’t feel like a pendulum swing back to “tough leadership.”
It feels more deliberate than that.
The dominance signalling. The flexing. The deliberate cruelty performed as competence.
It’s hard not to notice how often harshness is now framed as strength. How quickly care is dismissed as weakness. How easily empathy gets caricatured as something naive, soft, unserious.
And it doesn’t stop at competing with ethical leadership.
It tries to redefine leadership entirely.
Authoritarian-adjacent leaders don’t just win the argument.
They move the goalposts.
Care becomes weakness.
Ethics becomes impractical, performative.
Working for the common good becomes something vaguely embarrassing, something idealistic people say when they haven’t “made it” in the real world.
The thing I didn’t account for
When I wrote that earlier post, I talked about structural barriers.
Business schools that reward financial thinking over ethical thinking. Corporate ladders that quietly reward aggression. The lack of role models who combine compassion with power.
All of that still holds.
But there’s something else.
Power structures don’t just sit there neutrally waiting for better people to arrive.
They defend themselves.
Michel Foucault wrote a lot about this: the idea that power doesn’t simply repress people, it shapes the very definitions of legitimacy. In other words, whoever holds power also gets to decide what “real leadership” looks like.
And right now that definition is being aggressively rewritten.
The problem with the “just step up” narrative
The original version of my argument was basically: we need more ethical leaders, so ethical people should step forward.
Which is true.
But also incomplete.
Because stepping forward alone is fragile.
One person standing for integrity inside a hostile system can be isolated, discredited, or quietly removed. History, both political and corporate, has plenty of examples of that.
Alain Badiou makes a related point when he talks about change not coming from isolated acts of goodness but from collective fidelity to something larger: people holding a line together long enough to make a new reality possible.
Integrity without infrastructure is very easy to dismantle.
So the strategy has to change
If the last years taught us anything, it’s that individual ethical leadership is not enough on its own.
The answer isn’t to abandon empathy. It’s to stop treating it like a personal virtue and start treating it like something that needs protection.
Which means a few uncomfortable shifts:
- Empathy can’t stay apologetic.
- Ethical leadership can’t stay isolated.
- People who care about these things need to stop acting like lone wolves.
Because the other side isn’t playing that way.
The part about community matters more than I realised
In that earlier post I mentioned things like B-Corps, conscious capitalism networks (although I’m not sure I believe capitalism works at all, but that’s a different post), communities built around ethical business practices.
At the time it sounded like a nice optional extra. “Oh… look, other people think like you too.”
Now it feels essential.
One empathetic leader is easy to target.
A network of them is harder.
Infrastructure matters. Shared norms matter. Solidarity matters. Even if that word has fallen a little out of fashion in business contexts.
If ethical leadership is going to survive the current climate, it won’t be because a few good individuals step up. It will be because enough people decide to stand together that dismantling them becomes difficult.
The uncomfortable part
Here’s the part I wish I didn’t have to say. I feel like some sort of a rebel inciting a rebellion, but maybe that’s what you need to hear when the world feels like it’s on fire:
If you choose to lead this way now… with empathy, integrity, care for people and planet… it may cost you something.
Opportunities.
Status.
Speed of advancement.
You might be underestimated.
You might get labelled naive.
You might watch people who play the game differently move faster.
I wish that weren’t true.
But pretending otherwise doesn’t help anyone.
And yet
Despite all of that, the core argument still stands.
Maybe even more strongly than it did in 2024.
The world isn’t short of people who care deeply. It isn’t short of people who can imagine a more humane way of organising work, power, and resources.
What it’s short of are people willing to hold those values inside systems that don’t always reward them.
Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl (I know.. I had to tho…) wrote that the only thing more powerful than hate is love. 💕
I’m not sure what’s more powerful than greed, ego, and the relentless performance of strength that dominates leadership culture right now.
Maybe it’s hope.
Maybe it’s stubbornness.
Maybe it’s simply enough people refusing to accept that cruelty is the price of recognition.
One last thing
Servant leadership might be out of fashion right now.
If your goal is popularity, there are easier ways to get it. You can always write a LinkedIn carousel about 10 AI prompts to get rich faster. I guess that means you got here by accident. Sorry for the time you’ve wasted.
But if something in you still feels called to build organisations that are actually worth being part of…
If you think power should be used to lift people, not intimidate them…
Then I implore you:
Step up.
Just don’t step up thinking it will be easy.
Step up knowing it might cost you something.
And step up anyway
Ika’s Inklings 