617. Navigating Leadership Challenges: Analyzing Systems with Barbara Kellerman

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Feb 3, 2026

Barbara Kellerman, Harvard leadership scholar and co-founder of the Center for Public Leadership, challenges conventional leadership thinking. She explores how bad leaders persist, the three-part system of leaders, followers, and context, why followers comply, warning signs of harmful leadership, and how shifts like COVID and AI reshape power and removal strategies.

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INSIGHT

Why People Endure Bad Leaders

Many reasons explain why people follow bad leaders; there is no single answer.
Kellerman calls it a persistent human mystery shaped by multiple factors like fear and reward.

ADVICE

Account For Fear And Rewards

Recognize fear, rewards, and entrenchment as mechanisms that sustain bad leaders.
Use that understanding to design strategic, ally-based efforts when attempting to unseat entrenched leaders.

INSIGHT

Early Warnings And Dual Badness

Most bad leaders signal their intentions well before gaining power; warnings often exist earlier.
Kellerman distinguishes ethical badness from instrumental effectiveness when judging leaders.

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How do bad leaders persist in current-day environments, and how do they use factors like fear, rewards, and the natural difficulty of uprooting entrenched authority to their advantage? Despite the challenges inherent to speaking out, what duty and role do followers play in identifying and addressing bad leadership?

Barbara Kellerman is the founder and a fellow at the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and the author of many books, addressing many different aspects of leadership. Her latest works are Leadership from Bad to Worse: What Happens When Bad Festers, LEADERSHIP: Essential Selections on Power, and The Enablers: How Team Trump Flunked the Pandemic and Failed America.

Greg and Barbara discuss Barbara’s critiques of the leadership industry, highlighting its focus on 'good' leadership while often neglecting the study of 'bad' leadership and the crucial role of followers. She argues for a more nuanced understanding of leadership that includes the contexts and followers that shape and are shaped by leaders. Their conversation dives into the complexities of trust in leaders, the need for rigorous education and credentialing in leadership akin to doctors or lawyers, and the significance of managing both leadership development and organizational design.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

The three-part leadership system

06:25: The leadership system is slightly more complicated than just leadership, but only slightly. It’s got three parts, each of which is of equal importance. One is the leader. None of this is to say that leaders are unimportant, but equal importance. This is—think of it as an equilateral triangle—the leader is one point, if you will. One of the two other points are the followers, the constituents, the stakeholders, whatever language. If you do not like the word follower, we can do all the euphemisms. I tend to use follower because in English, it is the only natural antonym of leader. So let's say, for the purpose here now, one part of the triangle is the leader, the other part is the followers, and the third part, again of equal importance, is the context—or better put, are the contexts, ’cause it is always plural within which leaders and followers are situated.

There is no leader without followers

29:55: We tend to obey. We do not tend to disobey. So the idea that this broad thing called the field of leadership pays such inadequate attention to the obvious other side of the coin—leadership is, after all, a relationship. You cannot have a leader without at least a single follower. Why is that other, by definition, so much less consequential? The answer is they are not, but the field pays that other virtually no attention.

Does being a good leader automatically make you ethical?

15:45: The word bad is so complicated. And it is adverse good that I have found it practical in my work generally to divide bad and good into two categories. One is a continuum of ethics, so you’re a good leader if you’re ethical. You’re a bad leader if you’re unethical. And the other continuum is effectiveness. You’re a bad leader if you’re ineffective, and you’re a good leader if you’re effective.

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