Safe but Stagnant: Leadership in the Age of Fragility

In recent years, a troubling trend has emerged: many leaders no longer feel free to lead. They speak of hesitation, second-guessing, and fear of crossing invisible lines no one will name. While caution has its place, something else is happening, something that risks leaving whole organisations directionless and anxious.

We are living through a necessary institutional reckoning across sectors. Stories of leaders who bullied, manipulated, created toxic cultures or even abused have rightly been exposed. Power has been used in ways that are morally wrong and personally devastating. Calling this out matters, accountability matters. None of us long for a return to authority without challenge or transparency.

But in our urgency to address the pain caused by destructive leadership, a new danger has surfaced: leaders so afraid of accusation that they retreat, avoid decisions, and shrink their vision to avoid offence.

Unhealthy dynamics do not only flow from the top down, they rise from the bottom up. Unchecked power in leaders is dangerous. But we forget that unchecked behaviour and unaccountable critique among the wider community can be damaging too. When every difficult conversation is branded aggression; when challenge is named coercion; when expectations are experienced as oppression — paralysis follows. Opinions soften, clarity blurs, and the loudest discomfort sets the direction.

That is not leadership — it is survival.

More troubling still, simply raising these issues is, for some, proof of complicity. Honest enquiry is treated as pouring fuel on the fire. The pursuit of truth collapses into the performance of agreement with the zeitgeist of the age.

I do not write this as a theorist. Two seasons in my professional life I dreaded work because of leadership so damaging I still struggle to speak of it, once to the point of vomiting on the way to the office. But I have been trying to recognise the distinction that was needed. I had to learn public courage to call toxicity what it was. But I also needed to learn private courage not to baptise every discomfort, stress, or uncertainty as abuse, and to recognise when challenge was evidence of healthy leadership, not harmful control.

The Courage to Name Things Properly

To move forward, we must name things truthfully in both directions. When leaders misuse power, we must confront it. When behaviours are harmful, manipulative, or self-protective at others’ expense, they must be called out — courageously and consistently. But we also need the courage to recognise when what we are seeing is not bullying, not toxicity, not abuse but leadership doing what leadership must do: holding a line, naming a problem, calling for change, challenging a pattern, encouraging growth, asking for accountability.

Discomfort is not the measure of wrongness. Growth stretches, accountability stings and facing our immaturity has never felt pleasant. None of this means a leader is acting unjustly.

A Toolkit Without Tools

One Christmas, my son asked for a toolkit. Wanting to be responsible, I filled it with plasters, overalls, bandages, cloths and instructions, everything except tools. Upon opening it his excitement evaporated. I had given him safety, but not the means to build. The very thing he needed to make it work. Creative potential rendered useless.  

We do the same with leadership.

Policies, procedures, safeguarding are all necessary, but without permission to decide, freedom to challenge, courage to speak hard truths, responsibility to say “no,” and trust to act without presumption of guilt, we hand leaders plasters while demanding they build cathedrals.

A toolkit without tools prevents harm, but it also prevents the work.

We can be safe and still have poor leadership. But we cannot have good leadership if safety is the only virtue.

What Makes Leadership Impossible

Leadership sets direction, makes decisions, speaks difficult truths. It moves a community from familiar to unfamiliar — and movement always creates resistance.

But today, in many environments:

• Disagreement is rebranded as abuse

• Expectation is interpreted as coercion

• Consequences are framed as oppression

• Accountability is experienced as attack

In such climates, articulate immaturity masquerades as victimhood, and the feeling of offence becomes evidence of wrongdoing.

Two truths must coexist:

• We must take genuine abuse seriously and respond to it

• We must not dismantle leadership under the weight of emotional fragility

Lose either, and we end with cultures where either no one challenges wrongdoing, or no one leads at all.

Edwin Friedman saw this before we had language for it: anxious systems prioritise safety over maturity; comfort over growth; the loudest pain over the wisest voice; and leaders become managers of emotions rather than carriers of vision. When “If I am uncomfortable, you must stop” becomes the rule, leadership is only acceptable if it never challenges, confronts, or asks anyone to change.

Which means it is not leadership at all.

So How Do We Allow Leaders to Lead?

We cultivate cultures that:

• Distinguish pain from harm: Growth hurts; harm wounds — they are not the same.

• Reward resilience rather than reactivity: Emotional maturity becomes a shared expectation.

• Hold leaders and followers accountable: Responsibility is mutual.

• Establish fair, trusted complaints processes: Protecting the wounded without weaponising accusation.

• Form people for adulthood - spiritually, psychologically, communally: Immaturity will always sabotage responsible leadership.

The Way Forward

The solution to bad leadership is not leaderlessness. The answer to abuse is not paralysis. The future cannot be led by people terrified of being misunderstood. We need leaders humble enough to be challenged and courageous enough to challenge; accountable and empowered; safe and strong.

Because without leaders who are free to lead, we cannot grow, cannot reform, and cannot become who we are called to be.