Why Bother Talking About “Good Leadership” When Bad Leadership Is Running Rampant?

It’s a fair question. 

When institutions are collapsing in plain sight. When leaders lie without consequence. When cruelty is reframed as strength and incompetence is rewarded with more power. When division isn’t an unintended outcome, but an operating strategy. In moments like this, talking about good leadership can feel naïve at best—and insulting at worst. 

So why bother? 

Because what we are living through is not just a crisis of politics, policy, or governance. It is the widespread use of fear, distortion, and coercion as tools of leadership—patterns we have come to tolerate, excuse, and normalize in people with authority. 

And those patterns don’t stay “out there.” They shape how leadership shows up everywhere else—on teams trying to do meaningful work with shrinking resources and rising pressure, and in everyday decisions about who is protected, who is listened to, and who is treated as expendable. 

Bad leadership scales. But so does good leadership—or the absence of it. 

The truth is, we already know a great deal about what effective, ethical leadership looks like. We know it requires clarity under uncertainty. We know it requires restraint, not just decisiveness. We know it requires telling the truth about what is happening without inflaming fear or denying reality. And we know it requires holding care and accountability together, not choosing one at the expense of the other. 

The problem isn’t a lack of frameworks, values, or language. The problem is that good leadership is harder to practice than bad leadership is to perform. 

Bad leadership is often rewarded in the short term. It simplifies complex realities. It gives people someone to blame. It offers certainty where none exists. It concentrates power instead of distributing responsibility. 

Good leadership does none of those things. 

Good leadership asks people to stay in tension—to make tradeoffs visible, to tolerate discomfort, to slow down when speed would feel better but cause more harm. It asks leaders to take responsibility without performing dominance. 

That kind of leadership doesn’t trend well on social media. It doesn’t satisfy outrage cycles. And it rarely comes with instant validation. 

This is why I will continue to talk about leadership—what it is, and what it is for. Because when bad leadership becomes normalized, people begin to adjust their expectations downward. They stop expecting honesty. They stop expecting coherence. They stop expecting care. They stop expecting institutions to behave in ways that align with their stated purpose. 

That erosion doesn’t happen all at once. It happens quietly, through lowered standards and exhausted resignation. 

Talking about good leadership is not about nostalgia or idealism. It is about holding the line on purpose. 

Leadership is not about winning at all costs. It is not about personal brand management. It is not about being right, loud, or unchallenged. Leadership exists to help groups of people move through complexity without destroying themselves—or each other—in the process. 

When that purpose is lost, everything downstream suffers: culture, trust, performance, and ultimately legitimacy. 

This is not a call for heroes. It’s a call for practice. 

We don’t need more charismatic figures promising to save us. We need leaders—at every level—who can name reality without exaggeration or denial; make decisions with incomplete information and own the consequences; regulate their own fear before asking anything of others; hold standards consistently, even when it’s inconvenient; and choose long-term integrity over short-term approval. 

This kind of leadership rarely looks dramatic. It looks like steady language in unstable moments. It looks like fewer declarations and more follow-through. It looks like refusing to turn human beings into abstractions or enemies. It looks like not confusing certainty with competence. 

So yes—bad leadership is running rampant. 

And that is precisely why it matters to keep talking—seriously, rigorously, and practically—about good leadership. Not as a slogan. Not as a personality trait. Not as a performance. But as a set of disciplined practices that help people navigate uncertainty, preserve trust, and act with responsibility when the system around them is failing. 

Because institutions don’t collapse only from the top down. They collapse when enough people decide that how they lead no longer matters. 

And it still does. 

Many leaders are carrying this moment quietly—doing their best to hold clarity and care in systems under strain. If you are one of them, CultureRoad offers a place to slow down, think together, and strengthen the kind of leadership that lets light back in. This work is not about performing confidence or perfecting technique. It is about developing the steadiness required to lead well when conditions are hard and the stakes are real. There's no cost to join. Just a growing community of people who care about what good leadership can and should be. 

With care for the standards we are setting, 

DeEtta