Narcissism and Leadership: The Executive’s Field Guide
By Arvid Buit. Based on two decades of C-suite coaching practice and the research conducted with clinical psychologist Martin Appelo for Red de Alfawolf (Boom, ISBN 9789024422753) and the business novel Wahlberg (ISBN 9789462720473).
What is narcissistic leadership? Narcissistic leadership is leadership driven by an inflated self-image that compensates for early deficits in unconditional recognition. It combines genuine strengths, such as vision, decisiveness and crisis composure, with a structural deficit in reciprocity: the capacity to treat others as equals rather than as instruments. It is a risk profile, not a diagnosis.
If you have read anything about narcissism and leadership lately, you have probably read some version of the same story. Narcissists charm their way to the top, exploit everyone within reach, poison the culture, and must be identified and removed before the damage becomes irreversible. The story is satisfying, morally clean, and wrong in every place where being wrong has consequences.
I have spent twenty years in rooms with the people this story claims to describe: CEOs, founders, board members, the leaders everyone else has an opinion about and nobody tells the truth to. Together with clinical psychologist Martin Appelo, I spent years researching the pattern properly, which became the book Red de Alfawolf. Before that I wrote Wahlberg, a novel about a CEO so blunt that readers regularly ask me which of my clients he is based on. (All of them. None of them. That is what fiction is for.)
This guide is the summary of what I actually know about narcissism at the top of organisations: where it comes from, why organisations keep selecting for it, what it costs, what it contributes, whether it can change, and what you should do if you work for it, sit on a board above it, or suspect, in a quiet moment, that you might be it.
One promise before we begin. I will not hand you a checklist for unmasking the monster in the corner office. The field has enough of those, and they mostly teach people to pathologise every colleague with more energy than they have. What I will give you is the practitioner’s view: less comfortable, considerably more useful.
What narcissism at the top actually is, and what it is not
Start with the inconvenient part: the qualities we label narcissistic are, in moderate doses, the qualities we demand from leaders. Self-confidence. Risk tolerance. The willingness to stand up in a frightened room and say: follow me, I know the way. An unshakable belief in one’s own direction when every adviser is hedging. Strip those from a leader and you get a facilitator with a title, someone who convenes committees while the building burns.
Martin Appelo puts the clinical boundary precisely, and I repeat it in every conversation on this subject: there are many successful leaders with narcissistic traits, there are many successful leaders without them, and there are many people with the same childhood wounds who never become leaders at all. We are talking about risk profiles, not diagnoses. Narcissism is a spectrum on which every human being holds a position, not a species you can identify and quarantine. The interesting question is never whether a leader has narcissistic traits. Every leader I have ever coached does, and so, for the record, do both authors of Red de Alfawolf. The interesting question is what the leader does with them, and what the traits do with the leader.
In our work, Martin and I use a term for the productive end of this spectrum: talented narcissism. The drive, charisma, intelligence and creativity that so often travel together with an inflated self-image are real capacities. They give their owner a head start. The same pattern that produces the head start also produces the limitation, and the limitation is always the same one: a deficit in wederkerigheid, reciprocity. The capacity to let influence flow both ways. To be affected by others, not merely obeyed by them. I define the concept properly in Talented Narcissism: A Definition, but hold on to the short version: the talent is real, the bill is real, and both arrive from the same supplier.
What narcissism at the top is not: it is not a synonym for unpleasant. It is not a diagnosis you may apply to your CEO because he rejected your proposal. And it is not, despite what the airport books insist, the exclusive property of men in expensive suits. The pattern is human before it is executive. Organisations simply concentrate it at the top, for reasons that deserve their own section.
Why organisations keep choosing narcissistic leaders
Here is a thought experiment Martin and I use in Red de Alfawolf. You have just moved to a new town and must choose between two dentists. The first receives you warmly: a smiling assistant, art on the walls, genuine interest in your children. In the chair you notice his hands tremble slightly. The second practices in a clinical unit on an industrial estate, keeps you waiting half an hour, shakes your hand too hard, and displays exactly one form of decoration: a wall of framed diplomas, Harvard among them. Now add one variable. This week you developed acute periodontitis and the pain is considerable.
The research on this is consistent: the more stress, the more we choose competence over warmth. Under threat, a collective does not want a facilitator. It wants the surgeon with the diplomas and the personality of a filing cabinet. Scale that up and you have the selection mechanism of the modern corporation. Boards hire in crisis, under pressure, against uncertainty. The candidate who radiates certainty, who answers before the question is finished, who visibly does not doubt himself, wins the room precisely because the room is anxious. Confidence, assertiveness, self-belief and a certain ruthlessness correlate meaningfully with narcissistic traits, and the mechanism selects for the correlation.
Then the crisis passes, and the same board that hired the alpha wolf discovers it has hired the whole wolf, not just the useful Tuesday-afternoon version. The research Martin and I reviewed adds an uncomfortable detail: the longer a dominant leader operates inside a stabilised organisation, the more his effectiveness declines, to the point where he begins to destroy his own earlier work. Strong, directive leadership has a shelf life, which is precisely why the word interim-manager exists. Almost nobody plans for the expiry date at the moment of purchase, because at the moment of purchase the pain is acute and the diplomas are gleaming.
This is not an argument against hiring decisive leaders. It is an argument for hiring them consciously: knowing which phase your organisation is in, what the profile costs in peacetime, and how the exit or evolution will be governed. I cover the selection and succession mechanics, including what screening can and cannot honestly detect, in Hiring, Promotion and the Narcissism Filter.
Where the pattern begins: the narcissistic circle
Every child is born looking for one thing: unconditional recognition. To be claimed, delighted in, allowed to belong, regardless of performance. Martin calls this early emotional nourishment the oersoep, the primordial soup, and the metaphor has the advantage of being unforgettable. When the soup is served properly, a child builds a stable base: I am acceptable as I am. When it is not, the child improvises. The improvisations are impressive, and some of them run companies today.
Two failures of supply produce two recognisable patterns, and I meet both weekly.
Too little soup: the child receives insufficient emotional validation, is frustrated in its need for symbiosis, and is often forced into autonomy far too early. The improvisation is heroic self-sufficiency. If nobody will be there for me, I will do it alone, and better than everyone, and later, when they finally come, I will no longer need them. Martin calls this the depressive narcissistic dynamic, and he describes it, with a candour rare in his profession, from the inside, because it is his own. These leaders become solitary top performers: brilliant, driven, calm in crisis, allergic to authority, and fundamentally alone.
Too much soup: the child receives validation without conditions or limits, is never allowed autonomy, and learns that the world exists to serve it. The improvisation here is entitlement. These leaders expect service, experience disagreement as betrayal, and surround themselves with mirrors. Different childhood, same structural result.
And the structural result is the point. Both variants produce what Martin named the narcissistic circle: an early deficit in unconditional recognition, compensated by narcissistic inflation, which produces a deficit in reciprocity, which drives others away, which confirms the original belief that others cannot be relied upon, which fuels further inflation. Around and around. The circle explains something that otherwise looks like a paradox: why the most outwardly self-assured people in the building are so often, on honest inspection, the least secure.
It also explains the endless hunger. The adult chases conditional recognition (applause for performance, status, the Audi, the watch) as a substitute for the unconditional kind, and the substitution can never saturate, because it is the wrong nutrient. You can watch the wealthiest people on earth pivot from accumulation to philanthropy and back, still visibly hungry, and understand exactly what is being sought and why it cannot be bought with what they are spending. Some leaders eventually sense this, and the sensing is dangerous territory: it is where careers end abruptly, where vineyards in France get purchased, and where, in darker cases, depression begins. It is also, handled well, where real development starts.
The full etiological story, including what attachment research does and does not support, is in Where Narcissistic Leaders Come From, and the broader link between early attachment and leadership style has its own essay.
The polished and the unpolished alpha wolf
The central distinction in Red de Alfawolf is not between narcissistic and healthy leaders. That border, as we have established, runs through every leader alive. The distinction that matters in practice is between the polished and the unpolished alpha wolf.
The unpolished version you know from the public record. Steve Jobs, who did not believe in market research because he, not the customer, would decide what the customer loves. Zlatan Ibrahimović, who as a young player hated passing the ball, on the impeccable logic that he would do something better with it himself. Extreme performers, genuine alpha wolves, unquestionably effective. And, on the same public record, men whose biographies read as an unbroken chain of conflicts, escalations and scorched relationships. The pattern is always identical: under the banner of serving the product, the team, the club or the nation, the unpolished alpha wolf serves primarily himself, and whoever fails to applaud is removed. It works, until it doesn’t. Depending on the stage on which the pattern performs, the final act is called divorce, dismissal, deposition or, in the more historically ambitious cases, something worse. Unpolished narcissism collects its short-term gains and then, with remarkable reliability, sends the invoice.
In Wahlberg I gave the pattern a face. Dirk Wahlberg, CEO, is asked by his wife to collect the children from school. He arrives in the chauffeured Audi, refuses the outstretched hand of a mother from the parent council, informs her he does not appreciate her attempt at contact, barges into a classroom to extract his son from detention, lectures the teacher about the value of his time, and, when the school’s director phones to address the incident, calls a member of his own supervisory board to have the man leaned on. Total elapsed time: one lunch break. Readers find the scene grotesque and then, uncomfortably often, familiar. The novel spends the rest of its pages walking Dirk down the spiral this behaviour reliably produces, which is why a clinical psychologist I had not yet met was giving the book to a narcissistic director as homework. That psychologist was Martin, and the book worked where advice had failed, for a reason worth stating plainly: narcissistic leaders can recognise themselves in a story who would fight the same content delivered as feedback. Stories get past the guards. (More on that mechanism in What a Fictional CEO Teaches About Real Ones.)
The polished alpha wolf has the same engine and a different transmission. The drive remains, the vision remains, the willingness to confront remains, and to it is added the one capacity the pattern structurally lacks: reciprocity. Not softness. Not the meditation retreat. The learned, practised ability to let others matter, to distribute credit, to hear dissent without processing it as attack, and to know which of the four leadership scripts the moment requires rather than playing the only one that feels like home. (The four scripts, the alpha wolf, the inspirator, the administrator and the manager, have their own guide.)
One more distinction belongs here, because it is the polished wolf’s core discovery: the difference between power and authority. Power is seized; authority is granted. Power rests on your dominance and other people’s fear of it; authority rests on other people’s trust. Power serves your interest; authority serves the group’s. The unpolished alpha wolf accumulates power and wonders why it keeps needing to be defended. The polished one is granted authority and finds, to his genuine surprise, that it defends itself. The full framework is in The Polished and the Unpolished Alpha Wolf.
Narcissism or strong leadership: telling the difference
The modern leadership industry has made this distinction harder, not easier, by deciding that leadership is a soft skill. Serve the group, sense the energy, connect from vulnerability. All fine, and Martin and I wrote an entire book against the excess of it, with a subtitle that translates as “soft leaders cause festering wounds”. Because when action is required and everyone is still connecting, when someone must stand up and state the intention and nobody will, organisations do not become kinder. They become mediocre, then resentful, then leaderless in every sense except the org chart. The alpha wolf must not disappear from leadership. He must appear polished.
So how do you tell strength from pathology, given that both arrive confident, decisive and allergic to committees? Not by volume, and not by charm. In practice the reliable distinctions are these.
Strong leaders can lose an argument in public and remain functional; the narcissistic pattern experiences visible correction as an existential event and retaliates or withdraws. Strong leaders distribute credit accurately, including downward; the pattern absorbs credit and radiates blame. Strong leaders seek information that contradicts them; the pattern curates a reality in which contradiction has stopped arriving, a mechanism I have described elsewhere as the reality distortion field. Strong leaders say what they do and do what they say, in both directions; the pattern preaches the connective values of the Rhineland and practices the extraction of the other model, and the gap between sermon and behaviour is itself the diagnostic. And strong leaders hold power lightly because they hold authority instead; the pattern grips power tightly because it has never been granted the other thing.
Notice what is absent from that list: decisiveness, directness, impatience with nonsense, comfort with conflict. Those are not symptoms. Those are the job. A board that treats them as symptoms will select for pleasant paralysis and deserve what it gets. The full comparison, with the practical test questions, is in Narcissism or Strong Leadership? How to Tell.
What it costs: the organisational bill
Before we get to remedies, the damage deserves precise description, because boards consistently misjudge both its size and its address. The cost of unpolished narcissistic leadership rarely appears where accountants look. It appears in four places, in a predictable order.
Talent leaves first, and it leaves best-first. The people with options exercise them; the people without options adapt. Within two or three years the leader is surrounded by a team selected, in perfect Darwinian fashion, for tolerance of him rather than for competence, and he will read this as loyalty. Exit interviews would reveal the pattern immediately, which is one reason they are so rarely read at the level that matters.
Information distorts second. Bad news learns to travel slowly and dress carefully before entering the executive floor. Forecasts acquire a systematic optimism. By the time the numbers force the truth into the room, the option space has usually collapsed. This is not lying in the ordinary sense; it is an entire organisation rationally protecting itself from the messenger’s fate, one softened sentence at a time.
Initiative dies third. Innovation requires people willing to be wrong in public, and the first casualty of a punitive leadership culture is exactly that willingness. What remains is compliance, which photographs well in an engagement survey right up until the market moves and nobody below the top floor feels licensed to say so. I have written elsewhere about what psychological safety actually is, and it is not comfort; it is the absence of humiliation, and it is non-negotiable fuel for collective intelligence.
The leader pays last, and pays privately. This is the part the villain story omits entirely. Behind the confidence is a person running an exhausting permanent performance, structurally alone, increasingly certain that everyone is replaceable and increasingly haunted by the suspicion of what that implies about himself. The endgame, when it arrives, is rarely dramatic exposure. It is the board conversation with the golden handshake, the sudden vineyard, or the quiet depression of a man who got everything he was chasing and found it was the wrong currency. In Red de Alfawolf we describe why so many outwardly triumphant leaders are privately miserable: they are pursuing, through conditional applause, a form of recognition that was only ever available unconditionally, and the pursuit cannot saturate. An organisation that understands this stops treating its narcissistic leader as a monster to be managed and starts treating the situation as what it is: an expensive, self-reinforcing system with a suffering human at its centre and a governance failure around him.
Add the numbers if you like: replacement cost of a departed senior executive at one to two times annual salary, the multi-year drag of a strategy built on filtered information, the write-off when a successor discovers what the filters concealed. But the deepest cost is the one no restructuring recovers: years of collective intelligence that was present in the building and never spoke.
If you work for one, or above one
The mail I receive about narcissism comes in two envelopes. The first is from senior professionals, usually a CFO, COO or director, working under a narcissistic chief. The second is from supervisory boards and chairs who have gradually understood what they appointed and now want to know what to do that is smarter than either capitulation or war.
To the first group I will say here what I say at greater length in Working for a Narcissistic Boss at Senior Level: your instinctive strategies are usually the wrong ones. Confrontation in public triggers the retaliation reflex. Silent endurance reads as applause and licenses escalation. What works, to the degree anything works, is the counter-intuitive move Martin once watched a director learn from a novel: reduce the war, not the contact. Narcissistic leaders escalate against resistance and, oddly, against servility, because both confirm that relationships are instruments. What occasionally reaches them is calm, boundaried usefulness: visible competence, no flattery, no fear, disagreement delivered privately and factually, and an unmistakable willingness to leave. That last item is not a bluff to perform. It is the load-bearing wall of your position, and of your health. Some situations do not improve, and a senior career spent managing one man’s inner weather is a career, and often a marriage and a body, being slowly spent. Know your exit price before negotiations begin, and on negotiating with this pattern specifically, there is a separate guide.
To the second group, the boards: you have more power than you use and less time than you think. The narcissistic CEO problem is rarely the CEO alone; it is the system that has reorganised itself around him, the filtered information, the departures nobody investigated, the board meetings that have quietly become performances. Governing this well requires exactly the things boards find awkward: structured contact with the layer below the CEO, unfiltered exit interviews, stakeholder data gathered independently of the person it concerns, and the willingness to act while the numbers are still good, which is precisely when acting feels unjustifiable. The playbook, including when coaching is the right intervention and when it is an expensive way to postpone a decision, is in The Board’s Guide to a Narcissistic CEO.
Can it change? What coaching can and cannot do
Now the question underneath every conversation on this subject: can narcissistic leaders change, or is coaching them an elegant waste of a board’s money?
The honest answer has three parts.
First: not everyone. Some are too defended, too structurally protected, or simply uninterested, and the narcissistic pattern includes a gift for converting every intervention into further evidence of persecution or further fuel for grandiosity. A coach who promises transformation to any board that pays is describing his revenue model, not the psychology. I decline these engagements, not from principle but from arithmetic: the work fails, expensively, in public.
Second: more than the villain story predicts. The leaders who can change share one feature, and it is not insight, humility or a sudden fondness for feedback. It is cost. They have begun to feel, privately and usually years before they say it aloud, that the pattern is charging interest: the third executive team that has stopped arguing back, the marriage running on protocol, the strange loneliness of being surrounded and unaccompanied. Pain is not sufficient for change, but it is necessary, and it is the only door that opens from the inside.
Third: what changes is behaviour, not biography. This is the methodological heart of the matter and the reason coaching sometimes succeeds where years of well-meaning feedback failed. You do not need to resolve a childhood deficit in oersoep to stop humiliating people in meetings. You need an accurate picture of how you are actually experienced, which is why my engagements begin with confidential interviews with fifteen to twenty-five people around the leader before anything is “worked on”. You need concrete, observable behavioural redesign tied to specific situations. And you need measurement by the only instrument that cannot be charmed: the perception of the stakeholders, gathered again later, in the stakeholder-centred discipline I practise. Self-report is worthless here; the pattern writes excellent self-reports.
I described in the book, and in an earlier essay, the founder I call Erik, who explained for forty-five uninterrupted minutes that everyone around him was lazy, political or ungrateful while his company quietly prepared to collapse underneath him. The turn came weeks later, in one quiet sentence: if I am not right, then who am I? That is what this work actually addresses. Not arrogance, which is the weather, but the fused identity underneath, where being wrong and being worthless are the same event. Separate those two, even partially, and the behaviour has room to change. The full anatomy of these engagements, including the failure modes, is in Can Narcissistic Executives Be Coached?
What does not work deserves one line each. Feedback without relationship: processed as attack. Insight without behavioural design: dissolves by the next bad quarter. Values programmes and culture campaigns: absorbed and weaponised. And the well-meaning demand that the leader become someone else entirely: refused, correctly, because the drive you are trying to remove is also the reason there is a company to save.
The mirror nobody wants
I will end where Martin and I ended the book, because it is the part readers report finding most useful and writers find least comfortable.
The collaboration behind Red de Alfawolf began when two professionals recognised the subject in each other. Martin writes openly about his depressive narcissistic pattern: too little oersoep, premature self-sufficiency, a lifelong reflex against anyone appearing to be the boss of him, and a strange calm in crisis that made people fetch him whenever the building was on fire. I recognise in myself what he calls the anxious variant: the gifted child in a conservative village school that punished deviation, and the permanent low-grade fury that still supplies what I have learned to call, politely, entrepreneurial fire. Neither of us wrote this to perform vulnerability, a genre I trust you find as tiring as I do. We wrote it because it is the finding: narcissism is everywhere, including in the people who study it, and the only leaders I genuinely worry about are the ones certain they are the exception.
That is also why the remedy we propose is not self-knowledge in the abstract but structure: people around you with standing permission to tell you the truth, data about how you are experienced that does not route through your own narration, and, for those who carry real weight, a relationship built for exactly this, which I have described elsewhere as critical friendship. Power does not change who you are. It enlarges what was already there, and it simultaneously removes, one by one, the people who would have told you what is being enlarged.
So the field guide ends with its only instruction. If you lead, arrange your mirrors before you need them. If you follow, remember that a leader without pushback is not being served but abandoned, and that teams get the alpha wolves they applaud. And if, somewhere in the sections above, you kept meeting yourself, that reaction is worth more than this entire guide, and I would take it seriously while it is still cheap to do so.
Frequently asked questions
What is narcissistic leadership? Narcissistic leadership is leadership driven by an inflated self-image that compensates for an early deficit in unconditional recognition, combining real strengths such as vision, decisiveness and crisis composure with a structural lack of reciprocity. It is a risk profile on a spectrum, not a clinical diagnosis of any individual.
Are all CEOs narcissists? No. But most of them are. There are successful leaders with strong narcissistic traits and (less) successful leaders without them. Selection mechanisms at the top do favour confidence, assertiveness and risk tolerance, which correlate with narcissistic traits, so the pattern is over-represented in executive positions rather than universal.
Is narcissism in a leader always bad? No. In crisis, transformation and confrontation, narcissistic energy is often exactly what a collective needs: decisiveness, courage and certainty under pressure. The damage comes from the accompanying deficit in reciprocity, especially once the crisis has passed. Directive leadership has a limited shelf life in a stabilised organisation.
What is the difference between a narcissistic leader and a strong leader? A strong leader can lose an argument publicly and remain functional, distributes credit accurately, seeks disconfirming information, and practises what he preaches. The narcissistic pattern retaliates against correction, absorbs credit and radiates blame, curates flattering information, and shows a persistent gap between stated values and actual behaviour.
Can a narcissistic executive really change? Sometimes. Change requires felt cost (the pattern must be hurting its owner, not only others), targets behaviour rather than childhood biography, and must be measured through stakeholder perception rather than self-report. Some executives are too defended or too protected to change, and honest coaching declines those engagements.
How should I deal with a narcissistic boss as a senior executive? Avoid both public confrontation, which triggers retaliation, and silent endurance, which licenses escalation. Calm, boundaried usefulness works best: visible competence, private and factual disagreement, no flattery, and a genuine, prepared willingness to leave. Protect your health and know your exit price.
Where does narcissism come from? The research points to early deficits in unconditional recognition. Too little emotional validation tends to produce driven, solitary self-sufficiency; unconditional over-validation tends to produce entitlement. Both routes end in the same structural deficit in reciprocity, reinforced over time in what Martin Appelo calls the narcissistic circle.
Am I a narcissistic leader? If the question genuinely worries you, that concern is itself moderately reassuring; the pattern rarely doubts itself. A more useful test than introspection: would the people around you describe you the way you describe yourself, and when did someone last change your mind in a meeting? If you cannot remember, treat that as data.
A note on scope. This guide is organisational psychology for professional contexts, written by an executive coach, not a clinician. It discusses patterns and risk profiles, never diagnoses of individuals, and named public figures appear only through their documented public behaviour. If you are dealing with narcissistic abuse in a personal relationship, this is not the literature you need; please seek support from a qualified mental-health professional.
Arvid Buit is a master executive coach (ICF, EMCC, APECS, Marshall Goldsmith SCC) and founder of TRUE Leadership. He is the author of Let’s Talk Leadership (2025), Red de Alfawolf (with Martin Appelo, Boom) and Wahlberg: Het verhaal van een CEO (Thema 2015). He works with CEOs, board members and owners of companies from €100 million revenue upward. About his work · Is this for you?