The Ends Don't Justify the Character

Bob Sutton posted something on LinkedIn this week that stopped me mid-scroll. He was flagging a Brené Brown interview in the Financial Times, in which she described a troubling shift: leaders feeling a sense of relief and permission from the current political climate to be, as she put it, the assholes they've always been. Sutton, who literally wrote the book on this (The No Asshole Rule, 2007), has been tracking the organizational costs of toxic leadership for decades. The fact that he was amplifying Brown's warning suggests they're both seeing the same thing.

So am I, and it's been bothering me.

Brown's framing is more precise than it might first appear. She isn't saying the political climate is creating bad leaders. She's saying it's licensing them. Leaders who previously kept their worst instincts in check because social and institutional norms demanded it now feel liberated. The restraints have loosened. That's a fundamentally different, and more dangerous, problem.

The Documented Costs

Sutton's research makes the case against this directly. His concept of the "Total Cost of Assholes" is real and measurable: talented people leave, honest input dries up as psychological safety collapses, decision quality erodes. As he put it, "It takes numerous encounters with positive people to offset the energy and happiness sapped by a single episode with one asshole." The "but he gets results" rationalization doesn't survive contact with the longitudinal data.

Stan McChrystal, in Team of Teams and his more recent On Character, gets at the deeper mechanism. Trust is infrastructure. Leaders with genuine character are predictable under pressure, which allows organizations to extend discretion without waiting for permission at every step. Character-deficient leadership centralizes everything because nobody trusts the system. McChrystal put it plainly: "People will forgive you for not being the leader you should be. But they won't forgive you for not being the leader you claim to be."

His own resignation following the 2010 Rolling Stone affair is worth noting. He didn't fight it, didn't spin it. He accepted accountability and stepped down. That kind of behavior reads almost as exotic today.

The Part That Actually Makes Me Angry

I can almost understand, not excuse but understand, a purely transactional leader who drops the character mask when the costs of wearing it exceed the benefits. Cynical, but at least internally consistent. What I cannot get my head around is the behavior of people who have spent careers, sometimes entire lifetimes, building identities around moral and ethical frameworks, often explicitly religious ones, and then abandon those frameworks the moment a convenient "end" appears on the horizon.

Easter Sunday is a celebration of forgiveness and sacrifice rooted in a love so boundless it's nearly incomprehensible. The contrast between that symbolism and the conduct of certain political leaders this past weekend was difficult to miss. You don't need me to name names.

The theological term is "situational ethics," and it has a long, embarrassing history. The secular version is "ends justify the means." Both reduce to the same thing: my objective matters enough that I'll mortgage the principles I claimed were non-negotiable. Power, policy, or proximity to both. The rationalization writes itself.

The Harder Path

Here's what troubles me most about this trade. Many of the people making it are genuine. They care deeply about issues that matter, issues with real moral weight. The logic feels almost reasonable: accept an imperfect leader to achieve an important end. A shortcut to something that might otherwise take years, or never happen at all.

But character works like a relationship, not a transaction. Anyone who has watched someone enter a marriage or a partnership convinced they can change the other person already knows how this ends. You don't change people by accepting their worst behavior; you ratify it. And you signal to everyone watching that the behavior is acceptable, which is how norms collapse.

The harder path, the one that actually maintains what you claim to believe, is staying true to the principle when the shortcut looks most appealing. Especially then. And the irony is that the shortcut rarely delivers what was promised anyway. The downstream effects of tolerating poor character accumulate quietly at first, then loudly: institutional trust erodes, the culture coarsens, the people who care most either leave or go silent. What looked like a faster route to the goal has created an environment in which the goal is now harder to achieve, not easier, because the foundation it required has been eaten away.

We are reaping some of those results now. Pointing at the leaders is the easier move, and they deserve the criticism. But the more honest question is what we enabled, what we rationalized, and what we're still rationalizing.

So the next time you find yourself excusing a leader's behavior you would never accept from your own kids, your employees, or your friends, ask what that rationalization is actually costing. Not them. You.