Some of the Most Dangerous Leaders Are Very Good at Their Jobs

Strong short-term results can conceal the damage a leader leaves behind.

I once encountered a senior executive who consistently delivered impressive business results. Their numbers were very strong, and most targets were achieved. From a distance, this looked like a highly successful leadership story...but something was wrong: this executive's leadership style was toxic, and the pressure to deliver short-term results was gradually changing the organization in ways that were difficult to see from headquarters. And the real damage became apparent only after this person left for another company.

Without that executive in place, we could finally assess what had happened to the working environment. Trust had deteriorated, the atmosphere had become unhealthy, and, perhaps most disturbingly, employees' understanding of what the organization valued had changed, for the worse. The behaviors that had been encouraged or rewarded were not necessarily those we wanted to sustain. And it took years to repair that damage. Yet, the executive had left with an impressive record of business performance.

This experience made me question something organizations rarely examine carefully enough: How do we know whether a successful business has actually been well led?

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The rooster and the sunrise

There is an old analogy about the rooster who believes the sun rises because of its crowing. I have often thought that executives, myself included, can behave a little like that rooster: when business results are excellent, we naturally attribute them to our decisions, strategies, and leadership capabilities. And sometimes we indeed deserve considerable credit. But business success is rarely the consequence of one person's actions.

It also reflects market conditions, favorable timing, decisions made by predecessors, capabilities inherited from previous teams, and sometimes plain luck. Above all, it reflects the work of the people who turn strategies into reality every day. Still, organizations frequently simplify this complexity into a convenient narrative: a successful business must have a successful leader.

The opposite assumption can be equally misleading. A struggling business does not necessarily have a poor leader. Sometimes excellent leadership is exercised under exceptionally difficult circumstances.

Results tell us what happened. They do not necessarily tell us how much the leader contributed—or what it cost to achieve them.

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The results we don't measure

The problem becomes particularly serious when organizations reward short-term performance without examining how it was achieved. Pressure can accelerate results, fear can produce compliance, and centralized decision-making can create the appearance of speed and control.

For a while, these approaches may even work. But they can also change what employees learn to value. People begin to understand that delivering the number matters more than collaboration, that challenging decisions carries risks, or that pleasing the boss is more important than doing what is right for the business.

These lessons do not disappear when the leader leaves. They become embedded in everyday behavior, informal expectations, and the organization's culture. And repairing them can take considerably longer than producing the impressive results that helped create the problem.

This raises an uncomfortable question:

Are we rewarding executives for creating sustainable value, or simply for delivering results during the period in which we happen to measure them?

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What does a successful leader leave behind?

I have spent enough years in multinational organizations to know that leadership matters enormously. But I have also learned to be skeptical of success stories that attribute exceptional performance almost entirely to one individual. Sometimes an executive inherits an excellent team, enters a favorable market at the right moment, or benefits from investments made years earlier; and sometimes impressive results are achieved by consuming organizational capabilities that someone else will eventually have to rebuild.

This does not mean we should stop holding executives accountable for performance. It means we should become more demanding about what we consider good performance. A truly effective leader should not only deliver results today but also leave the organization capable of delivering them tomorrow.

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Perhaps the most revealing question when evaluating an executive is not simply how much the business improved during their tenure.

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It is whether the business is stronger because they were there—or merely performed well while they were there.

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