Do we really want "strong leadership"?
By Andrew Wills, Head of Operations and Principal Consultant
"Strong leadership" is one of the most common compliments in public life – but it is also one that's rarely examined. We use it for politicians under pressure, for stewards of industry who project certainty, for advocates who never back down. But what if the phrase is doing more work than we realise? What if it's narrowing our expectations rather than raising them?
That is why the term deserves more scrutiny. As an ideal it tells us less about the quality of leadership than about the kind of authority we are primed to admire. That’s the claim in this article and in exploring it I’ll draw on public leadership examples and emerging research into the “dark side of leadership” to help dig deeper.
What do we mean by strong?
Across a wide variety of settings, we reward strong leadership when we believe we see behaviours such as:
certainty under pressure
visible command
message discipline
firmness in public
a refusal to look rattled.
Consider Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's rare national address on the fuel crisis last week. It was a clear attempt to project reassurance and national steadiness, strength as visibility. The Prime Minister has been criticised (see example from the Financial Review) for saying something without saying anything at all. But I can easily imagine the logic of his advisers (and I'm sure you can too): you need to be seen, you need to show strength. Meanwhile, the gas industry pushed back against calls for a windfall tax, warning that intervention would damage investment and Australia's reputation – strength as immovability. And in Queensland, Premier David Crisafulli called for nationally consistent reporting and pricing transparency – strength as control. These are very different leaders with different interests, dealing with the same significant national issue, however we frame them all through the same narrow lens: firmness, clarity, a steadfast refusal to look uncertain.
The dark side of leadership
For me, the more interesting and important question is not whether today’s leaders are strong enough, but why are we so narrow in our expectations of them?
There is an emerging area in the leadership research on the “dark side of leadership” (and it’s increasingly interesting). A paper published in the latest edition of the British Journal of Management by Peter Stephenson, Richard Bolden and Morgen Witzel argues that harmful leadership should not be understood simply as the product of a flawed individual. They suggest that it manifests through internal dynamics, external interests, regulatory settings and the way success or failure gets interpreted after events. In other words, darker forms of leadership are rarely just personal, but that they are socially enabled, reinforced by our institutions and narrated retrospectively in ways that often simplify what really happened.
The idea is that the dark side of leadership rarely begins with an outlier – a uniquely unethical leader. When certainty starts attracting status, permission is given. When control is confused with clarity, or decisiveness becomes a performance that nobody is rewarded for questioning. When a leader’s public authority grows in direct proportion to how little doubt they show.
What are we rewarding?
Let’s stop and think about this in the context of "strong" leadership. This is not an argument against strength, or to judge specific public leaders without richer consideration for context. But it does question the thin and overly theatrical idea of “strength” that we as followers appear to accept, time and again.
My question is whether the pervasive idea of strength in leadership as something inherently good and desirable, should continue to go unquestioned? Is it something to be rewarded and celebrated without any form of critical reflection?
When this idea of strength in leadership permeates widely across several areas of public life (e.g., politics, sport, industry and public administration), things start to flatten. If every arena starts to reward the same visible posture of certainty, firmness, and command – our shared idea of leadership will continue to narrow. We stop distinguishing between courage and dominance, between conviction and closed-mindedness, steadiness and performance, evidence and rhetoric, entitlement and humanity.
Specific international or local examples of public and institutional leaders will no doubt jump out. In fact, there are plenty of current and historical leaders to whom we could apply these. But that in itself is a big part of the problem. When the same narrow posture of strength as certainty gets rewarded across the spectrum of politics and social values, and across sectors and industries, we stop noticing how much it's shaping our expectations. Ultimately, we stop thinking critically about how leaders present themselves.
A harder judgement
So how can we make sense of this?
What if “strong leadership” is not just a compliment, but a social preference that distorts what we are able to see? What if the phrase does too much work, allowing us to avoid a harder judgement about the quality of thought on display: whether a genuine contest of ideas is permitted, whether complexity is being confronted rather than flattened, whether a climate for discussion is being opened up or closed down, and what kinds of truth a leader makes easier, or harder, to speak.
This is the dark side of “strong leadership”, in my view. It’s not a critique of leaders, nor a political argument, but a critique of a culture that we’re all part of. One that admires a style of authority that narrows thought, compresses dissent and over-rewards certainty. The danger isn't strength. It's when we stop asking what the strength is for, the purpose it serves, and who gets silenced in its name.
This article was originally published here as part of a series of short articles on emerging research, including Andrew’s PhD work, and current events to explore leadership, reform, governance and emerging ideas shaping public institutions.
