The Unburdened Leader · 2026-05-22 · 1h 12m
Every system we move through runs on norms: rules and agreements that are both explicit and implicit. And nowhere are they more powerful - or more invisible - than in how we lead and how we build our businesses. In fact, sociologists have consistently found that norms don’t announce themselves. They travel through families, schools, workplaces, and entire cultures through repetition and imitation, often persisting long after the conditions that created them have changed. We absorb them before we can name them. And once they are inside us, they feel like “just the way things are.” In leadership development the norms run so deep we have mistaken them for truth. As a result, the model leader - despite decades of language to the contrary - still looks and sounds like a very particular kind of person. My guest today offers that leadership development has been trying to make better leaders for a broken system, rather than questioning whether the system itself needs to change. Nilofer Merchant has spent her career making the invisible visible - naming the norms, the systems, the daily routines that keep us collectively stuck.
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