‘People’ may not be sociopaths. But some people are sociopaths.
And some people have enough power that they don’t often consider long term consequences, or need to, for things like this.
And some people have enough power that they don’t often consider long term consequences, or need to, for things like this.
By default, one should assume the most successful people have every superlative quality, from those that are most admirable to least.
That being said, low empathy/low affect for others emotional and mental state is a clear advantage past a certain (low) organizational level, if combined with decision making that does weight it at least a little. A lot of people call that sociopathic, but that is because they haven’t met an actual sociopath.
Caring about people has advantages in our day to day lives (especially for others), but being able to make clear headed pragmatic decisions about people for your benefit (with sometimes severe negative consequences for others) isn’t one of them.
And if someone is in a leadership position and can’t do that, they won’t be effective. The larger the scope of the leadership position, the more true it is.
Ineffective leadership dooms everyone, sooner or later.
People just love this fantasy! Think about it: Do you have any basis for it? Some research?
See my response here:
What I said is helpful, isn't sociopathy. What is helpful is not having a bleeding heart. Being able to make the right call, even if it hurts someone, or many someones. The higher up you go, the more necessary it is.
I started out in industry at a low level, and worked myself up to senior leadership at a Fortune 50 company. I've founded several companies. I've had to fire friends who were really, really trying hard. I've had to hire folks I didn't like. I've had to lay off teams, and shut down one of my own companies (and lay off everyone I'd hired, which I did face to face) not because what they were doing was bad, but because it didn't fit the market anymore. I do care about people, and it has cost me quite a bit of emotional trauma that I see others not have. It has given me a positive reputation and general like well after the fact, but that doesn't scale or work in other situations.
1) The larger the organization, the more likely you'll run across someone who is bad and is skillful at using emotion to manipulate others (playing the victim, pushing buttons, you name it) and those people need to be removed. If you can't handle making the call and seeing it through despite the tugging at the heart strings, it poisons the organization. The problem being, most people will do it to some extent when their jobs or livelihoods are on the line. There is no 'clean' way to do this generally, though money can help (severance). It can also be very expensive.
2) The larger the organization, the bigger the impact of a layoff, change in strategy, etc. and the larger the emotional toll of doing what needs to be done. The more you are friends with everyone, the more the toll generally. But it doesn't change the necessity of it. In fact, it magnifies the cost in real terms if it isn't done. Sometimes to 100's or more of median 'life work value' (aka total economic output for a lifetime for a median person).
Being overly empathetic or sensitive to this just makes it harder, and if it is harder, eventually that person will hit a point they can't do it. Which makes someone ineffective and prolongs and magnifies the actual damage.
While the positive/great side is awesome - making things work, getting organizations working together, making everyone productive and value creators instead of destroying value - the negative/downside that can happen sometimes is much harder than most people are willing to face.
A common way of coping for this is to draw emotional distance between oneself and ones reports, which also has downsides. Another way is 'othering' them, which has even more major downsides. Another way is disempowering oneself (oh, I had to do this because I was told to), but that has even MORE major downsides. Either way, the more someone feels it, the harder it is to do. Being inauthentic or out of touch with people however, makes it nearly impossible to avoid being toxic and damaging more than is required. It also destroys the ability to do the POSITIVE side of leadership, and is ultimately destructive to the leader.
Rarely, someone will be empathetic AND be able to do this at a large scale. Seeing what they do up close however, they often shut off the degree of emotional exposure they get, and make sure that many of the hardest decisions are done in a clinical way out of view, so they can be effective in those situations.
So think of it as a filtering mechanism. Folks who make it to a certain place, they have reasons they survived and others didn't. Sometimes it's sheer luck, but more often than not, it's certain survival traits and ways of looking at the world that happened to click in the right way.
That's a loaded pejorative, not a meaningful, defined term. It expresses your emotion about it, but doesn't inform us.
> Being overly empathetic or sensitive to this just makes it harder
'Overly' is a circular argument - if someone is 'overly' X, then they are by definition 'too much X'. The question is, what is too much?
I think avoiding empathy is just weakness and intentional ignorance - ignoring essential consequences of your actions, which results in bad decisions If someone is a good leader, they have the strength to face all the conseqences of their actions and to plan and execute actions that take them into account. If you are engineering a car, and the seatbelt isn't fitting into the seat design, you don't discard the seatbelts and say - 'people who ignore safety make more functional decisions'.
Have courage; empathy is a strength.
The #1 requirement for any leader is effectiveness in their decision making.
Empathy which prevents it is too much. A lack of empathy which prevents it is too little.
Either way, there are very very few situations a sociopath (by the generally accepted definition) will last.
Sword of Damocles and all.
But reality is that there are all sorts of conflicting interests, and no principle can tell you how to resolve them in all cases.
You can do all sorts of things that hurt individuals in pursuit of the organizational goals because you think it serves a higher purpose, but the organization can be corrupted.
As a non-manager, I try to always remember that my manager's job is to mediate conflicts of interest, and if they are defending the organization's interest, I won't take it personally. But, since I am not a manager, I pursue my own interest, or try to help individuals that I like.
There are few organizations with a hold over their managers/executives so strong that human emotion cannot ever sway them. If that is the case, then how do things get back on track if the whole organization goes astray?
Faith in whatever the mission is supposed to be, cannot be taken as a given.
As I wrote above, people seem drawn to the fantasy of sociopathic behavior. They fear it and thus try to master it, following its feared power. We fear it, and the sociopaths (of course) try to amplify that - because they are weak. Look at Vladimir Putin or Saddam Hussein. All it takes is one person to stand up to them.
Have no fear. The world isn't perfectly just, evil happens, but humans are much more powerful as social, not sociopathic, creatures. Good is more powerful, really; we vastly outnumber the sociopaths. No dictator's dominion has ever even approached the heights of democracies based on human rights. George Washington, Ghandi, Churchill - they weren't sociopaths. Putin is; Zelenskyy is not.
But good people do need to believe in themselves, to act, and to act courageously. That's almost all Gandalf did (in the books), is to remind good people of their power and courage. Right now, we are only missing a leader.
Oh dear...we can all agree about Gandhi and Churchill? They go together like Le Duc Tho and Kissinger.
Churchill is associated with a famine in India during WWII that killed 2-4 million people.
See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943
Many people, of course, think Stalin was one of the greatest monsters in history, among other reasons, for the Holodomor, Soviet man-made famine.
I don't know what a sociopath is, ultimately, but it's not nearly as obvious as you think that Churchill goes in a different bucket than Stalin.
Oh and Gandhi...Gandhi famously said in response to the Holocaust that the Jews should've committed mass suicide since they were going to die anyway, and then maybe the world would've given a shit.
George Orwell (who was an apologist and ineffective propagandist for British colonialism during WWII) praised Gandhi for honesty and adhering to his principles, but claimed he didn't understand totalitarianism, that his movement could not have succeeded in Nazi Germany because it wouldn't have gotten any publicity.
> it's not nearly as obvious as you think that Churchill goes in a different bucket than Stalin
You might be surprised that I might know more about it than you imagine, maybe more than you. It is pretty obvious that they belong in different buckets.
I responded to you, and you seemed to have two categories:
1) sociopath (Putin, Hussein)
2) not-a-sociopath (Washington, Gandhi, Churchill, Zelenskyy)
My point is and was, that you didn't list Stalin, and putting him in either list is...problematic, as they say, when you consider Churchill and the Bengal famine.
Now I am not making any straw man or putting words in your mouth. I am interested in how you fit Stalin into your framework, not in telling you how to.
I'm not pushing the moral equivalence of Stalin and Churchill. Not at all. I'm just saying that there are well known facts that could support the opinion they are similar, and I'm fairly confident there are a lot of people (maybe millions) with that opinion.
That doesn't mean you or I need to accept it, but it does suggest to me that, from a global perspective, it should be considered respectable or at least not shocking.
There is a Wikipedia page on Washington-and-slavery, and while this is a tangent I don't want to discuss here and now, being aware of it makes the question of how to define a sociopath very complex in my mind.