We live in a world obsessed with metrics. Revenue growth. Profit margins. Market share. Customer acquisition costs. Conversion rates. Every quarter, we slice and dice the numbers, looking for insights that’ll give us an edge. And that’s fine. Numbers matter. They’re how we keep score, how we know if we’re winning or losing in the marketplace. But here’s what nobody’s measuring: gross leadership. You know what I’m talking about. The kind of leadership that makes talented people quietly update their résumés. The kind that turns “culture” into whatever passive-aggressive dynamics play out in Slack channels management isn’t invited to. The kind that looks brilliant on paper but feels suffocating in practice. We’ve all encountered it. Many of us have worked under it. Some of us—if we’re being brutally honest—have been it at some point in our careers. And it’s costing companies far more than any line item on a P&L statement.
The Four Horsemen of Gross Leadership
Let me paint you a picture. You’ve probably worked for at least one of these people:
The Credit Thief
This leader has a remarkable talent: every success is theirs, every failure belongs to the team. When the project crushes it, they’re front and center at the all-hands meeting, basking in glory. When it tanks, suddenly it’s about “execution issues” and “the team not quite getting there.” They’ll say “we” in the boardroom and “I” in their performance reviews. Their team knows the score—your wins are their portfolio pieces, your losses are your performance problems.
The Interrupter
Ask them about collaboration and they’ll wax poetic about “open dialogue” and “diverse perspectives.” Watch them in a meeting and you’ll see something different: they’re not listening, they’re waiting to talk. Or more accurately, they’re not even waiting—they’re just talking. They’ve perfected the art of asking for input while making it clear that disagreement is career-limiting. They champion “psychological safety” right up until someone actually feels safe enough to challenge their pet idea.
The Upward Manager
These leaders have their boss’s calendar memorized and their team’s concerns… well, they’ll get to those eventually. Maybe. They’re brilliant at managing up—every report is polished, every presentation is perfect, every metric is massaged to tell the right story. Meanwhile, their direct reports are struggling with unclear priorities, conflicting directives, and the growing suspicion that leadership has no idea what’s actually happening on the ground. They’re invested in how things look, not how things are.
The Authority Confused
This one’s subtle but devastating. They genuinely believe that their title came with inherent respect, automatic deference, and the right to make unilateral decisions without explanation. They confuse “in charge” with “in control.” They think “final say” means “only say.” They believe that questioning their judgment is questioning their authority, so they surround themselves with yes-people and mistake agreement for alignment. When people stop speaking up in meetings, they think it’s because they’ve finally “established leadership.” They don’t realize it’s because people have given up.
The Real Cost of Gross Leadership
Here’s where this gets expensive—and I mean really expensive.
It murders your margins through turnover
When good people leave, they don’t just take their skills—they take institutional knowledge, client relationships, and the momentum of projects in motion. The cost of replacing them is just the beginning. There’s the productivity loss during the search, the ramp-up time for the replacement, the mistakes made during that learning curve, and the hit to team morale when yet another talented person “decides to pursue other opportunities.” Your CFO can show you what turnover costs in hard dollars. What they can’t easily quantify is the compounding effect: when your best people leave, your remaining team has to pick up the slack, which increases their burnout, which increases the likelihood that they’ll leave next. It’s a death spiral disguised as an HR metric. And here’s the kicker: exit interviews rarely tell the truth. Nobody wants to burn bridges, so they’ll cite “career growth” or “new challenges” when the reality is “my boss made me dread Monday mornings.”
It makes revenue irrelevant
You can hit your revenue targets and still be a failing business if that revenue is built on a foundation of miserable people delivering subpar work to clients who are one bad experience away from churning. I’ve watched this play out: a company growing fast on paper while the team quietly deteriorates. They’re hitting numbers through sheer force and hustle, but it’s not sustainable. The product quality starts slipping. The customer service gets snippy. The innovation pipeline dries up because nobody has the energy or psychological safety to take risks. Revenue growth driven by gross leadership is like running a marathon while bleeding internally. You might finish the race, but you’re going to collapse at the finish line.
It transforms profit into pain
Profit is supposed to be the reward for creating value. But when that profit comes at the cost of grinding people down, it’s not a success story—it’s a warning sign. I’m not talking about the normal stress of building something hard. I’m talking about the specific pain that comes from working under leadership that doesn’t trust you, doesn’t respect you, doesn’t listen to you, and doesn’t appreciate you. That’s a different kind of exhaustion. And here’s what gross leaders never seem to grasp: you can’t manufacture passion. You can’t mandate creativity. You can’t policy your way to innovation. These things emerge from environments where people feel valued, trusted, and empowered. When your people are just trying to survive until Friday, you’ve lost something way more valuable than what shows up in your profit margin.
The Companies That Get It Right
Now let’s talk about the flip side, because it’s not all doom and gloom. I’ve seen companies with mediocre financials—at least initially—build something remarkable because they prioritized leadership quality over leadership pedigree. These organizations understand something fundamental: culture isn’t what you say in your values statement, it’s what you tolerate from your leaders. They know that one toxic high performer does more damage than ten mediocre team players. They understand that “culture fit” isn’t about hiring people who think alike—it’s about hiring people who treat each other well while thinking differently. They measure leadership effectiveness not just by outcomes, but by how those outcomes were achieved. They ask: “Did we hit our goals and maintain team health?” Not “Did we hit our goals despite burning people out?” These companies become talent magnets. People don’t just want to work there—they tell their talented friends to work there. Recruiting becomes easier. Retention becomes natural. Innovation becomes normal because people feel safe enough to experiment. And here’s the beautiful irony: these companies often end up with better financials in the long run because they’re not constantly hemorrhaging talent, institutional knowledge, and momentum.
The Leadership Mirror
So here’s the uncomfortable question: where do you fall on this spectrum? Because here’s the thing about gross leadership—nobody thinks they’re the problem. The credit thief genuinely believes they’re “providing strategic direction.” The interrupter thinks they’re “adding value to the conversation.” The upward manager sees themselves as “managing stakeholder expectations.” The authority-confused leader believes they’re “making tough decisions.” Self-awareness isn’t just a nice-to-have leadership trait—it’s the prerequisite for everything else. You can’t fix what you won’t see.
Here are some questions worth asking yourself:
When was the last time someone on your team genuinely disagreed with you in a meeting? If it’s been a while, that’s not because you’re always right—it’s because people have stopped feeling safe enough to challenge you.
When you get an email or Slack from a team member, what’s their likely emotional reaction? Relief? Stress? Dread? Excitement? Their visceral response to seeing your name pop up tells you more about your leadership than any 360 review.
When someone on your team succeeds, who gets the credit? When they fail, who gets the blame? If there’s a pattern where success flows up and failure flows down, you’ve got a problem.
When was the last time you changed your mind because of something a team member said? If you can’t remember, you’re either hiring poorly or listening poorly. Probably the latter.
How many of your former team members would enthusiastically work for you again? This is the ultimate litmus test. If people who’ve worked closely with you wouldn’t sign up for a repeat performance, that tells you everything you need to know.
The Bottom Line
Your P&L matters. Your balance sheet matters. Your growth metrics matter. But none of it matters if you’re leading in a way that destroys the very people you need to create those outcomes. You can hire consultants to fix your numbers. You can bring in strategists to refine your positioning. You can invest in technology to improve your operations. But you can’t outsource character. You can’t automate empathy. You can’t policy your way to trust. The most important metric you’re not measuring is how you make people feel. Not in a fluffy, “everyone gets a participation trophy” way—but in a fundamental “do people do their best work under your leadership or despite it” way. Because here’s the brutal truth: gross financials can build a business, but gross leadership will sink one. Every time.
So measure your metrics. Track your KPIs. Obsess over your numbers. Just don’t forget to measure yourself. The ROI on self-awareness might be hard to quantify, but it’s the difference between building something that lasts and building something that looks good until it collapses.
What’s your take? Have you encountered gross leadership in your career? More importantly—have you ever realized you were being gross leadership? Drop a comment. Let’s talk about the leadership behaviors that nobody wants to acknowledge but everyone’s experienced.
P.S. If you found yourself getting defensive while reading this, that’s probably worth examining. The best leaders I know are the ones who constantly question whether they’re showing up the way they think they are. The worst ones are certain they already have it figured out.
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