Serious about leadership? Skip Sinek. Choose Chamorro.

Simon Sinek tells us that leadership is about empathy, vision, and authenticity.
Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic tells us that leadership selection is mostly a confidence contest.

Only one of them describes reality.

Photo by Charles Forerunner on Unsplash

The Gospel of Sinek

Sinek’s gospel is seductive: be yourself, trust your team, lead with empathy.
If leaders “start with why,” trust their people, and act authentically, organizations will flourish.

It’s a comforting story. It flatters both sides; the leader who wants to be inspiring and the employee who wants to believe meaning still exists in PowerPoint land.

But spend a decade inside any large organization, and you’ll see how hollow it rings.
Most leaders don’t fail because they forget their why.
They fail because they were promoted for the wrong who.

The problem isn’t that Sinek’s principles are false, it’s that they’re incomplete. They describe what good leadership looks like from the outside, but ignore the selection mechanisms that prevent it from ever forming

Chamorro’s Cold Lens

Dr. Chamorro doesn’t sell inspiration. He studies dysfunction.
No warm, fuzzy feel-good message. Just data and pattern recognition.

He reminds us that most organizations promote confidence over competence, choose charisma over integrity, and keep confusing narcissism for vision.

Sinek’s language sounds noble but operates like anesthesia.
It helps us feel hopeful while the system stays the same.
Dr. Chamorro’s work, by contrast, breaks the spell: if you want better leaders, stop rewarding the traits that look like leadership and start measuring the ones that act like it.

Take his research on dark triad traits: narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism correlate strongly with emerging as a leader but negatively with being effective as one. The exact people who seek power are often the least suited for it. Yet we keep promoting them because they look the part.

The Authenticity Trap

The corporate world loves to talk about authenticity, usually while punishing it.
Be “real,” but not difficult. Be “vulnerable,” but still hit your KPIs.
Be “yourself,” as long as your self fits the brand deck.

Where Sinek (and many others) preaches “be authentic,” Dr. Chamorro warns: “don’t be yourself. authenticity is overrated.”
Your authentic self is simply the version a few people have learned to tolerate.

Leadership isn’t about expressing that self; it’s about managing it, refining it, and sometimes denying it for something higher.
His advice is less comfortable but far closer to integrity: don’t be yourself. Be your best self, the one you’ve worked to earn.

Leadership isn’t self-expression. It’s self-regulation.
It’s growing the part of you that acts with discipline when your impulses don’t.

Where Psychology Meets Faith

Oddly enough, Christianity has always understood this.
It never told us to “be authentic.” It told us to transform.
Not “a little more like me,” but a little more like Jesus.
Not radical self-expression, but radical self-examination; humility, repentance, growth.

That’s integrity: alignment between what you believe, what you say, and what you do.

As Warren Buffett said, “Look for three things in a person: intelligence, energy, and integrity. If they don’t have the last one, the first two will kill you.”

Unfortunately integrity is the quality our organizations and culture are bleeding out the fastest.

What We Really Need

Sinek gives us comfort. Chamorro gives us correction.
Only one of them moves us forward as a species: the one willing to confront the data, not sell the dream.

Integrity requires confrontation- with our ego, our motives, our masks.
It’s not feel-good leadership. It’s grown-up leadership.

If we want workplaces (and societies) worth belonging to, we’ll need fewer vision statements and more moral backbones.

Less “be yourself.”
More “become someone worth following”
And that includes knowing when not to lead.

The question isn’t whether to read Sinek. It’s whether you’re brave enough to read Chamorro afterward and change how you see leadership completely.