Why Companies Should Give Leaders a Psychological Checkup, Not Just a Performance Review
It's Time Companies Started Giving Leaders a Checkup — Not Just a Performance Review
If AI Ends Up Closing the Skills Gap
Young people are having a genuinely hard time at work these days. But here's what's strange: technology keeps getting better, so why does daily life keep getting harder?
This is my own prediction, not a proven fact — but I believe that as AI advances, the gap in technical skill will keep narrowing. Good credentials, a good school, strong research output, clean code — these things won't stay as scarce as they are now. I think we're heading toward a world where an AI tool can close most of the practical skill gap on its own.
If that happens, there's exactly one thing AI will never be able to replace: the feeling of wanting to work for someone. That comes from a person, not a piece of technology.
Which is why I think it's time companies changed how they evaluate leaders. Not by how smart, credentialed, or accomplished someone is — but by the kind of influence they leave behind.
I've spent my life cutting people like this out — anyone who reads as narcissistic or psychopathic, I walk away and don't come back. It's cost me. I've taken losses, changed direction more than once. But I learned the hard way that the cost of staying, once you know, is always higher than the cost of leaving early. That's why I can say this isn't theory to me — it's something I've lived.
Good Leadership Is Contagious — and This Part Is Actually Backed by Research
From here, I'm not speaking from my own opinion — this is actual research. Leadership researchers Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman collected three-tier data: 265 senior leaders, the managers beneath them, and the employees beneath those managers. They studied 51 distinct leadership behaviors, and found meaningful correlation across the hierarchy in more than 30 of them.
Their conclusion:
Both excellent and poor leadership tend to cascade downward through an organization, almost like a virus.
An employee who worked under a bad leader is statistically more likely to become a mediocre or bad leader themselves. An employee who worked under a good one tends to become one too. This isn't a one-time event — the research shows it gets passed down, generation after generation, inside an organization.
From here, I'm speculating again. If you extend this principle, what happens? One leader with good influence produces several people carrying that same influence. Each of them eventually builds their own team, and the influence spreads again. If this starts at the mid-level manager positions — the ones closest to the most people, day to day — wouldn't the number of people with good influence compound over time across the whole company? The research doesn't prove this exact multiplier, but I believe the underlying mechanism points this way.
I'd expect the reverse to work exactly the same way.
Why Bad Leaders Still Look Like Stars
Here's an uncomfortable fact companies need to sit with. There's research suggesting that people with Dark Triad traits — narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy — sometimes boost specific short-term metrics, like sales numbers. From above, that person looks like a star performer.
The cost shows up elsewhere. Organizational researcher Clive Boddy interviewed senior leaders directly about psychopathic managers in their companies, and found a consistent pattern: conflict and bullying increase, employee wellbeing drops, and capable people eventually leave quietly or emotionally check out. Companies track this as a "turnover rate" and move on. The manager stays a star.
To be transparent: I'm weaving together three separate threads of research here — leadership cascading downward (Zenger and Folkman), psychopathic managers eroding organizations (Boddy), and Dark Triad traits boosting short-term performance. These come from different researchers and different samples. No single study proves all of this at once, but my interpretation is that several independent studies are pointing in the same direction.
In other words: companies are measuring the numbers they can see — revenue, project completion — while ignoring the numbers they can't: how many people quietly left, how many quietly checked out, and what quality of leader is being produced for the next generation.
What If the People Who Left Quietly Were the Good Ones?
This next part isn't data — it's conviction. I think there's a question every company needs to ask itself: What if the employees who left quietly were the ones with good influence?
Skilled, credentialed people are easy to find. Post a job, and résumés pile up. But a person with genuinely good influence is different — it doesn't show up on a résumé, and it's hard to spot in a few rounds of interviews. Whether people like that stay in an organization or not may determine whether that company is still healthy in ten years.
Which is why I think what companies actually need going forward isn't someone who's good at reading resumes and performance numbers — it's someone who can sense a person's good influence. That's not a skill you hire for with credentials. It only comes from an eye trained on people.
Birds of a Feather — My Own Read on This
I don't know if there's an academic term for this, but there's a Korean saying: birds of a feather flock together. People with good influence tend to attract others like them. And something interesting happens as a result, as I see it: even when someone with a different disposition enters that circle, if the group's norm is dominated by good influence, that person will often start acting the part — even if it's not who they really are.
And I believe that when the "acting" repeats enough, it becomes a habit. And a habit, eventually, becomes part of who that person is.
I think this is the real mechanism by which good influence changes an organization — not by reforming people one at a time, but by making good people the majority, until the environment itself becomes the norm and pulls even different-natured people toward it. The reverse works the same way: in an organization where bad influence is the majority, even good people start performing the role just to survive. Either way, I believe people eventually come to resemble the rules of whatever environment they're in.
So instead of just counting the people who quietly left, companies should be asking which direction the "flock" tipped when they left.
The problem is, most companies have almost no way to find that out.
Let AI Compare the Numbers. Let People Listen to People.
Why do companies pour so much effort into comparing numbers, while paying so little attention to actually listening to the people doing the work?
AI is already better than we are at comparing revenue, output, and performance metrics. There's no need to spend more human time on that. But the place companies actually need to spend time — managing people, hearing people out — gets less attention, not more.
Most companies have some version of a suggestion box or anonymous reporting system. So why are they mostly useless? There's a difference between a company saying "we'll keep this confidential" and a company that's structurally incapable of tracing who reported what. Employees can tell the difference. So they don't report. They've seen people get punished for it. They've seen nothing change even when they did.
There's no royal inspector inside most companies. In the Joseon dynasty, the amhaengeosa — secret royal inspectors — had real power precisely because they operated outside the local officials' chain of command, answerable only to the king. Today's compliance and HR teams sit inside the same org chart, get evaluated and promoted by the same people they'd need to investigate. When the investigator and the investigated share the same power structure, real independence is structurally difficult.
Let AI handle the number-crunching. Spend that freed-up time and budget building a structure where employees' voices are actually heard — real anonymity, real independent investigation, and visible change after a report is made. Without those three things, the suggestion box is just decoration on a wall — which is exactly why the checkup I'm about to propose needs that kind of independent structure behind it to mean anything.
So Here's My Proposal — Give Leaders a Regular Checkup, Not Just a One-Time Screen
This isn't as far-fetched as it sounds. It's already starting. There are academic calls for including behavioral testing, psychological assessment, and ethics screening in executive hiring, and several companies already use Dark Triad screening tools for hiring and leadership development.
But so far, this kind of screening has only ever happened once — at hiring. People change as their role changes, as their power grows, as time passes. I think this needs to happen annually, like a company physical, not once at the door. And I think it should start with the mid-level, hands-on leadership roles — the ones closest to the most people day to day — because, as Zenger and Folkman's research suggests, that's exactly where the contagion begins.
Concretely, this could look like a regular, genuinely anonymous 360-degree feedback process — not of the individual as a diagnosis, but of the position as a health indicator. Not hunting for a specific person to blame, but reading which way the air in that team is currently leaning.
Designing this safely and legally is, admittedly, a hard problem — labor law and privacy standards vary by company and by country. I don't have a complete answer to that. But I don't think that difficulty is a reason not to try at all.
A Question for the CEOs and Executives
Every major company, A to Z.
Is your company actually safe?
I believe the era of "profit is the only thing that matters" is over. As AI and automation become part of daily life, I think the people who thrive will be, paradoxically, the most human ones. The technical gap will be filled by AI. What companies should be looking for now isn't a great résumé — it's someone who leaves a good influence behind.
What is your company actually evaluating its leaders on? This quarter's numbers, or how many people quietly left underneath them?
If your company has a leader with good influence, there are probably several people growing underneath them right now. If it has a leader with bad influence, there are people growing underneath that too. Either way, the people who will run your company in ten years are being shaped this very moment.
Does your company know that?
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