Professional Narcissism: The high cost of hiring your own echo - part2/3

0:01 Roger, Charlie, we're. Ready to rock?

0:06 All right, quick question and I want you to sit with this one before you answer. When was the last time someone in your team told you something you genuinely didn't want to hear and then they kept their job? Take your time. Like comments and subscribe.

0:29 If that took you longer than 3 seconds, we need to talk. His research out of Exec Business School in Penn State, published in the Academy of Management Review, found that narcissistic leaders don't just attract yes men. They actively construct professional worlds designed to produce admiration on demand, not loyalty, not challenge. Just applies on a loose look. Like you too.

1:02 But the most terrifying part, most of them have no idea they're doing it. I'm sorry, welcome back to Unusual Practice, the corner office where we take the things quietly destroying your business and make them slightly more bearable by pointing and laughing at them together. I am your host, Charlie, and the question is, what happens when the most dangerous person in your company is you? What the fuck? Not your competitor or the economy, or some disruptive startup run by a 24 year old with a figma count and a good complex.

1:47 You, specifically who you've been hiring, who you've been keeping, and who you've been unconsciously building a team of. And why, If you're really honest with yourself, your inner circle sounds suspiciously like you. Don't forget to like and subscribe.

2:13 I want to start with a word that sounds clinical but is really just a fancy term for something embarrassingly human. Homophily from the Greek homo same and filia love, love of the same. Let the games begin. Rock'n'roll sociologists coined it in the 1950s to describe why human beings, given a choice, will almost always gravitate toward people who look, think, and talk like them. It's not malicious. It's not even really conscious. It's just, well, obviously easier. Familiar feels like safe, and similar feels like trustworthy, and in a hiring room it feels like cultural fit, which is where it starts to get really expensive.

3:08 The psychological mechanism behind this is called similar to me bias, A tendency to prefer people who look and think like us, rooted in a form of trust building when we believe we share characteristics with someone new. Here's how it plays out in practice. You're a decisive, fast moving, slightly impatient founder. You've built something real. You interview 2 candidates, 1 challenges your framing in the second question and the other nods at everything you say, mirrors your energy, and finishes your sentences.

3:44 You hire the second one and call it chemistry. You have just officially installed a mirror in your org chart. Do it enough times and you don't have a team. You have a hall of mirrors, every reflection slightly different, but all of them fundamentally showing you you. And here's the paradox we don't discuss in leadership retreats. A narcissistic CEO showered with praise and adulation would most probably guarantee a place on their board for the person doing the praising, satisfying the crucial need for a mirror of reassurance in their own capacities.

4:26 The board becomes a standing ovation, the leadership team becomes an applause track, and the CEO, surrounded by approval, insulated from friction, becomes the loneliest person in the building. But I want to take this part from psychology lecture to actual crisis. It's not just that your team agrees with you, it's that they've learned what to agree with. And that's a completely different problem. There's a behavior that emerges in teams built around a dominant personality, and it doesn't announce itself.

5:01 It is subtle. It looks like competence, and it sounds like alignment. It's what I call subscription management, the artist staying employed without actually driving anything. These are people who have done a very precise calibration of your preferences, your triggers, your ego, and your blind spots. They know which ideas to bring to you, which problems to filter before they reach you, which news to soften and which winds to amplify. They have become functionally your PR team, except they work inside your building, attend your strategy sessions, and occasionally run your departments.

5:43 They are not bad people. They are rational people. They've simply solved the wrong optimization problem. Instead of optimizing for the company's outcomes, they've optimized for their own continuation. And in a culture built around approval, those two things become very difficult to tell apart. Discover insights on business growth, leadership challenges, and human impact with unusual practices. Insightful 3 part corner Office series unlock transformation at the very top. Listen now. Reshape your perspective on true success.

6:18 The Stoic philosopher Epictetus, who was, for the record, literally enslaved before he became a philosopher, so he understood power dynamics in a way most leadership consultants do not, wrote. It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows. Your subscription managers know this instinctively. They don't challenge what you think you know. That's it's not their function. Their function is to protect it. And what does that do to ACEO over time? Well, research shows narcissistic leadership provokes specific negative attitudes and behaviors and subordinates cynicism, low job satisfaction, silent behavior, and turnover intentions.

7:03 Notice what's first on that list? Not turnover cynicism followed by silence. The people who care enough to have an opinion go quiet first because they've learned that opinions are not what's being rewarded. Then they leave, and what remains is a curated collection of survivors who have mastered the art of looking busy while moving nothing forward. That is not a team. That is a very expensive waiting room. Do you mind me asking where you got? That no. Let me be honest with you about why this is hard to fix, because I've realized this is not just structural, it is actually chemical.

7:50 Let me explain. French sociologist Michel Mefisoli wrote about what he called the erotics of power, the idea that authority, when unchallenged, becomes a kind of intoxicant. Not in an obviously corrupt way, but in a warm, ambient, deeply pleasant way. Rooms get quieter when you enter them, ideas get accepted faster, and people laugh at your jokes even when they're only slightly funny, if at all. And this feels neurologically like competence, like clarity. Like things are working, but they are not working.

8:25 What's happening is that your social environment has been redesigned to minimize friction. And friction, annoying as it is, is exactly how you find out where the real problems are. Friction is information. Smooth is a lie the environment is telling you. There's a remarkable pattern, documented across multiple leadership studies, where narcissistic leaders advanced executive roles faster than their peers, partly because traits such as confidence, bold vision, and self promotion are rewarded during early leadership selection.

9:02 Yeah, the selection environment rewards the exact behaviors that, once unchecked, create the problem so the system is selecting for the thing it will later be destroyed by. This is not unique to business. The Roman Senate rewarded Julius Caesar's audacity right up until the moment the audacity became their problem, and we're going to see this again around the world today. The Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, who ruled one of the largest empires on Earth in the 17th century, spent his first decade as a masterful political operator who surrounded himself with strategically loyal generals.

9:42 By his final decades, he had spent so long at the center of his own constructed universe that he'd lost track of ground truth entirely. His empire didn't collapse during his reign, it collapsed immediately after because he'd systematically removed every person capable of independent thought from any position of influence. He didn't just hire his echo, he promoted it. And that is exactly how legacies fall. You don't know the power of a dark side, so if you're sitting with some recognition right now, good.

10:20 That means the show is working. But here's where it gets quite useful. Because the solution is not be humble or hire different people. It's more specific than that and kind of uncomfortable. You see, Let me introduce you to a distinction that doesn't get enough airtime. There's a difference between someone who is loyal and someone who is dependent. Loyal people will tell you when you're wrong. They'll actually sit in a difficult meeting and say the thing nobody wants to say. They will push back on a bad strategy because they care more about the outcome than about how you feel in the next 30 minutes.

11:01 Dependent people will not. Dependent people need the job, need the status, need the proximity to your reflected glow. And they have learnt with impressive precision exactly how much friction they can generate before it threatens their position. The answer in most approval based cultures is none. The problem is, from the outside, they look identical. Both arrive on time, both hit their deliverables, both send the right messages and the right Slack channels, and both say good things about you in meetings you're not in.

11:39 The ghost and the real person are wearing the same suit. Narcissistic leaders tend to discourage relationships across their team and expect to be the hub everyone revolves around. As a result, the teams they lead score low on social support and psychological safety. Low psychological safety is the technical term. The lived experience is basically nobody tells you the truth anymore and you've accidentally made that happen. So thanks to decades and advising in that matter, I'm going to share with you what I think is the trick of the trade first Test.

12:17 Let's call it the disagreement record. Go back through your last 10 significant decisions. How many of them had documented pushback from someone inside your team before you made the call? Not after. Before. If the answer is zero, you don't have advisors, you have narrators. Second test. Let's call that the news they bring. What kind of information arrives at your desk? Unfiltered bad news, messy problems, structural failures, or just progress updates and wins? If your team has become a highlight reel someone is editing before it reaches you, the question is who and why?

13:00 And the third test, and this is the one that actually hurts. Who in your immediate circle has directly contradicted you in the last 90 days and suffered 0 consequences, Not just survived, but been actually rewarded for it? If nobody comes to mind. You have not built A-Team. You've built an audience.

13:29 Here's the thing about identifying ghosts in your own organization. You cannot actually do it yourself. Not because you're not intelligent enough, you almost certainly are, but because the ghosts entire strategy is calibrated to you, to your preferences, your read of the room, your version of a good meeting. They are optimized for your perception, which means your perception is the last instrument you should trust to evaluate them. It's just how systems work. You can't audit the environment you're standing in with instruments made of that same environment.

14:09 There's a concept in Igbo culture in Nigeria, Onya Withara OG withara Ndu, which translates roughly as the person who brings cola brings life the cola nut and Igbo tradition is used to open truth telling. It creates the formal social container in which real things can be said. The point isn't the nut. The point is that truth telling requires a structure that isn't already compromised by the existing power dynamic. Your subscription managers respect the power dynamic. They were selected by it. The structure for truth needs to come from outside it, which is exactly what a proper team reassessment does.

14:55 Not a survey or a town hall, not an anonymous feedback form that everyone fills in while imagining you're reading it. It's a real diagnostic, someone who can walk into your organization's dynamic without owing anything to anyone in it and tell you who's actually there, who's driving, who's managing their subscription, and who left months ago but is still physically attending the meetings. Narcissism score paradox is that narcissists live with the assumption that they cannot reliably depend on anyone's love or loyalty, but at the same time need others to confirm their sense of adequacy, power, and superiority.

15:36 That tension, needing the mirror while not trusting it, is the loneliness underneath the competence. It's the thing Marcus never mentions at the off site. It's the 4:47 AM thing, but a different flavor. Less existential dread, more quiet suspicion. Do any of these people actually have my back, or are they just managing their proximity to mine? That's a real question, and it deserves a real answer. The Greek myth of narcissists, and yes, I know, bear with me, is usually told as a vanity story. Beautiful boy falls in love with his own reflection.

16:19 Can't look away, Eventually wastes away staring at a pool. What gets left out is the other character, the character we call Echo. Smash the like. Button.

16:35 Echo was a nymph, condemned by the goddess Hera to only ever repeat what others said, never her own words, only yours back at you. And Narcissus loved her for it. Not because she was interesting, not because she challenged him, but because she confirmed him constantly, perfectly, without variation. If you've built a team of echoes, and if you've been honest with yourself for even a moment during this episode, you might suspect you have. The problem isn't that they're bad people. The problem is that you selected for them, rewarded them, and promoted them accordingly.

17:18 And somewhere along the way, you started mistaking the echo for the truth. The question we're sitting with today is not who on my team as a ghost, it's what did I do that made being a ghost the safest thing to be. That answer is not comfortable, but it's the only one that actually changes anything. So if this episode made you slightly want to call your COO and stare at them suspiciously, congratulations, that is growth. If you want help actually figuring out who's real and who's a very well dressed ghost in your organization, that's literally a thing we help with.

18:01 We call it an employee reassessment, which is a very professional name for let's find out who's actually there. No surveys, no anonymous forms to someone who didn't go to your last off site telling you the truth. Also, if this resonated, share it with your most honest friend. Not your most supportive one, your honest 1. You know the difference. Five stars on wherever you listen would be genuinely appreciated and entirely unrelated to my own narcissistic tendencies. Allegedly. Until next time, stay curious, stay smart, and watch who your Echo is.

18:38 Mom, somebody just followed me. Hasta La Vista, baby.