The Kindest Leader in the Room Can Still Build a Cult

The most popular lightning in a bottle isn't always something you can pour out

I want to be careful here, because the person I’m describing does not exist as a villain in this story. That is exactly what makes this worth writing about.

Picture a leader who is, by any reasonable measure, the real thing. Not the LinkedIn version of empathic (which is to say: someone who posts about vulnerability and gives TED-style talks about psychological safety while running a culture where people are afraid to have a bad quarter). I mean the actual version: someone who listens without performing listening, who can tell the difference between someone being difficult and someone being in pain, who builds teams where people feel safe enough to say true things. Someone who has done the internal work and whose care for the people around them is not a strategy. It is just who they are.

This person is real. I have met them. I have worked for some version of them. And I am here to tell you that around this person, if you are not careful, something very strange can happen.

The team starts routing everything through them. Not because the leader demands it (they don’t, and would be uncomfortable if you pointed it out). But because the leader is so reliably good at holding the complexity of a situation, so genuinely trustworthy in a way that most professional relationships are not, that people stop trusting their own read as much as they trust the leader’s. Disagreement starts to feel disloyal, not because anyone said it was, but because the culture has started treating alignment with this person as a proxy for good judgment. The team’s collective ability to reason about hard things begins to run through a single node.

This is a cult of personality. It does not require a charismatic egomaniac at the center of it. It does not require anyone to have bad intentions. It can form entirely around someone who is trying to do the right thing, and who would be mortified to know what had been built in their name.

I think about this a lot in the context of what I’m writing about in this book, because the thing I keep coming back to is that empathy is a capacity, not a personality trait. The goal of empathic leadership is not to be someone your team can always turn to. It is to build a team that does not need you in that way. Those are very different projects, and they require different things from you.

The version that builds dependency is not always obvious from the inside, because it feels like trust. When your team looks to you for guidance on hard judgment calls, it can feel like evidence that you have created something safe. And you have. But safety that is contingent on a specific person’s presence is not the same as safety that is woven into how a team operates. One of those is a gift. The other is a dependency. They can look identical from the outside, and sometimes from the inside, for a long time.

What tends to reveal the difference is a transition. The beloved empathic leader takes a new role, or leaves, or is on leave for a month, and the team either holds its shape or it doesn’t. The teams that hold their shape are the ones where the leader spent years doing something that felt, in the moment, a lot less rewarding than being turned to: they pushed decisions back. They said “what do you think?” when they had a perfectly good answer of their own. They deliberately made themselves less necessary, because they understood that the point was not to be a good leader forever but to grow people who could do things they couldn’t have done before.

The teams that don’t hold their shape, the ones where everything quietly stalls or fractures or just gets visibly worse the moment the leader is not in the room, reveal something harder to sit with: the leader had become the team’s capacity, rather than building it.

I want to pause here and acknowledge the obvious irony in what I’m about to say.

There is a clip that circulates online of Steve Jobs answering a question about the most important thing he learned at Apple. Jobs is, by most accounts, the canonical example of a tech cult of personality. His name is on a religion. People still argue about whether he was a genius or a monster, as if those were mutually exclusive, and that argument is itself a kind of devotion. He is not the person you expect to quote on this subject.

And yet what he says is this: when he sees something not being done correctly, his immediate instinct is to fix it himself. But over time, he learned to fight that instinct. Because his job, he realized, was not to fix the thing. His job was to build a team that could do great things over the next decade, not just the next year. Which meant that when someone struggled, his question had to shift from “how do I solve this?” to “how do I help this person learn from it?” He admits it is painful. He says he still fights the instinct every time.

I find this genuinely interesting, and not because it makes Jobs a hero of humble leadership (it doesn’t, and there is substantial evidence to the contrary). I find it interesting because even someone who spent decades being the center of gravity in a room full of exceptionally capable people eventually understood, at least intellectually, that the center of gravity was the problem. That the instinct to fix, to step in, to be the one who makes the call, is exactly the instinct that prevents a team from becoming something that can survive you.

There is also something worth naming about what happens to the leader in this dynamic, because I don’t think we talk about it honestly enough. Even someone who genuinely does not want to build a cult can start to find comfort in being depended on. The team’s trust feels good. Being the person everyone turns to feels good. Being the person without whom the hard things can’t get resolved is a particular kind of significance, and significance is not nothing. The risk is not that the good leader becomes corrupt exactly. It is that they stop noticing when their presence has become structural, when the thing they have built requires them specifically to function, and when quietly withdrawing from that center might be the most empathic thing they could do.

I do not think this is a simple problem, and I am not going to hand you a simple solution.

What I will say is that the question “does this team work without me?” is one of the most important questions an empathic leader can sit with, and that the answer you arrive at through wishful thinking is not the same as the answer you would get from a real test. The cult does not announce itself. It accumulates, quietly, in the gap between how much people trust you and how much they have learned to trust themselves.

The kindest thing a good leader can do, sometimes, is be less available. Not absent. Not cold. Not performatively hands-off as a management philosophy. But genuinely willing to let the team carry more than is comfortable, to let them make calls you could have made faster, to let them sit with uncertainty you could have resolved, because the point was never to resolve the uncertainty. The point was to help them get better at living inside it.

That is not a cult. That is a team.