When Good Leaders Do Bad Things

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” — Carl Jung

Some years ago, I was called to help with a problem that, at first glance, made no sense.

The general counsel of a company, a thoughtful and even beloved executive, had been accused of sexual assault at a company party. The chief lawyer. The watchdog. The one entrusted to uphold the rules had, it seemed, broken them.

The leadership team was stunned. Confused. Angry. Afraid. But beneath all of that was a deeper question, one that is harder to answer and more unsettling to ask.

How could this person have done this? Not just what happened. But how could he do this?

I’ve come to believe this question is less about monsters than about what it reveals about being human.

As part of my effort to help, I gave the general counsel a copy of When Good People Do Bad Things, by James Hollis. When I asked him what he thought of the book, he said, “I threw the damn thing across the room.”

I knew that he had. Not because he was being dismissive, but because the book asks something most of us spend a lifetime avoiding. It asks us to see ourselves without the comfort of our preferred story.

What startled me then, and still does, is how quickly a life can split into public virtue and private harm.

The Pattern We Prefer Not to Name

Over the years, I have seen variations of this pattern more times than I can count.

The head of HR who begins an affair with a direct report, despite fully understanding the ethical and power dynamics involved. The founder and CEO who repeatedly undermines their head of product, not once or twice but across successive hires, because designing product is the only place they feel competent, the only place they feel at ease in themselves.

These are not aberrations. They are expressions of something deeply human.

In each case, we are not dealing with cartoon villains. We are dealing with capable, often thoughtful people, people who are experienced, well-intentioned, and in many aspects of their lives, decent.

And still, they cause harm.

Often, the harm is not loud at first. It’s subtle. Rational. Dressed up in competence. It arrives as a small turning away—from feedback, from humility, from the simple sentence: I might be wrong.

When harm shows up in this way, we reach for explanations that preserve our sense of order. We call it a lapse in judgment, or the result of stress, ego, or pressure.

There may be some truth in all of those explanations. But they are partial truths, and partial truths can be misleading. They allow us to maintain a reassuring fiction that there are good people and bad people, and that what we are witnessing is a deviation from an otherwise stable identity.

It’s much more accurate, and more demanding, to admit that the capacity to harm is not an exception to who we are. It is part of who we all are.

The Shadow

When Good People Do Bad Things builds upon a central insight drawn from Jungian psychology. Each of us carries what Carl Jung called the shadow.

The shadow is composed of the parts of ourselves we have learned to disown. It includes impulses we judge unacceptable, needs we were taught to suppress, and desires that threaten the image we hold of ourselves as good, competent, or in control.

A leader who cannot bear uncertainty may call it “high standards,” then turn that unnamed fear into pressure—tightening timelines, punishing dissent, mistaking control for clarity.

The shadow is not the opposite of who we are. It is a part of who we are, one that operates outside of conscious awareness until something brings it into the light.

What remains unseen isn’t harmless. It shapes perceptions, distorts judgments, and, under the right conditions, expresses itself in action.

What Power Removes

Leadership intensifies this dynamic.

Power amplifies whatever is present in a leader, including what remains unexamined. But it also reduces friction and guardrails. It quiets dissent and, too often, eliminates the very mirrors that might have reflected back what is difficult to see.  Power exacerbates blind spots.

Without those mirrors, the shadow does not stay contained. It finds its way into behavior—often escorted by a story persuasive enough to sound like truth.

This is not who I am. This is just this once. They misunderstood.

And because it sounds like the truth, we relax our vigilance.

The stronger the attachment to being seen as good, the more energy it takes to keep denying evidence. And for a while, the effort works. Until it doesn’t. The disowned parts do not disappear; they gather pressure.

And eventually, they emerge.

Not Good. Not Bad.

Recently, I was sitting with a group of leaders in an interfaith dialogue about ethics in an AI-driven world. One participant, who is Sikh, offered a perspective that has stayed with me.

“My faith teaches me that I am not ‘good.’ And so, I do not need to see you as ‘bad.’”

There is a liberation in that stance. It loosens the grip of an identity that cannot survive honest examination. It also softens the reflex to locate our disowned qualities in someone else.

If I am not required to be good, I am more able to be truthful. And if I am more truthful, I am less likely to act unconsciously in ways that cause harm.

This is not self-loathing. It is sobriety. A refusal to outsource darkness onto other people so I can keep my hands clean.

It is important to be precise here.

I am not speaking about people who are intentionally malicious.

I am speaking about ordinary human beings in positions of authority. People who care, who strive, who want to do well, and who nonetheless act in ways that harm others because they are disconnected from parts of themselves.

Good leaders often do bad things not because they are bad, but because they are human.

Redemption Without Absolution

So the question becomes not how to eliminate the shadow—which is impossible—but how to meet it before it meets others through us.

This is where the idea of redemption becomes useful—if we can bear to understand it without sentimentality.

Redemption is not absolution. Nothing here undoes what was done. It is not the erasing of harm or the restoration of an image. It is the act of reclaiming what has been disowned and bringing it into a conscious relationship.

It is the willingness to say, without flinching, this too is me.

The envy. The need for recognition. The impulse to control. The capacity to dominate. The longing to feel secure, or important, or safe. They live in each of us.

To acknowledge these qualities is not to act on them. It is to reduce the likelihood that they will act through us without our awareness. Hollis teaches that the task is not to become perfect, but to become conscious.

Radical Self-Inquiry

Leadership, then, is not the performance of goodness. It is the discipline of radical self-inquiry—my term for a form of rigorous self-confrontation that is not punitive, not performative, and not guilt-seeking and, equally, not optional.

It is the ongoing practice of asking: what am I not seeing; what does my power allow me to avoid; and who is paying the cost of that avoidance? It is a willingness to turn toward what I would rather explain away.

These questions aren’t rhetorical. They are the foundations of great and redemptive leadership.  More importantly, they shape what we notice, what we ignore, what we reward, what we are willing to repair, and, ultimately, who we are as leaders, as adults.

When leaders engage in this work sincerely, the effects are real. You can feel them in the room. Meetings get quieter in a good way—less theater, more contact. People risk telling the truth sooner, while it can still be used.

Harm is interrupted earlier. Responsibility is taken faster. Apologies become less performative and more consequential, more real—paired with changed behavior, altered incentives, and a willingness to make amends where possible.

This is what I would call redemptive leadership. Not leadership that is spotless, but leadership that does not require spotless in order to be trustworthy. Leadership that can hold accountability and humanity in the same hand without dropping either.

The Turning

I think back to that general counsel, to the book thrown across the room, to the moment the story he carried about himself began to crack. That moment is unbearable precisely because it is clarifying. It places us at the edge of two paths.

One path is defense: minimize, justify, blame others, bury the problem.

The other path is contact.

To enter the rupture without theatrics. To tell the truth to at least one other person. To accept consequences without trying to purchase innocence. To stay close enough to the damage that repair becomes more than an idea but a redemptive restoration.

The invitation isn’t to become good. It’s to become whole.

Wholeness doesn’t guarantee we will never do harm, but it increases the chance we will see ourselves sooner. It increases the chance we will stop. It increases the chance we will repair.

Questions to Ask Before We Act From Our Shadows

Where, right now, am I most certain—and what might that certainty be protecting?

What feedback am I calling “noise” because it threatens my self-image?

When I feel resistance, do I become curious—or do I become punitive?

Who becomes smaller around me—and what does that say about the atmosphere I create?

What do I most need from other people—admiration, agreement, gratitude, obedience—and what do I do when I don’t get it?

Where am I using my role to avoid shame, grief, loneliness, or fear?

If I were the person with less power in this relationship, how would my choices feel from the other side?

What rule do I expect others to follow that I quietly exempt myself from?

Who can tell me the truth about me—and have I made it safe for them to do it?

What am I not saying that I need to say?

What am I saying that’s not being heard?

What’s being said that I’m refusing to hear?