Why Passive Leadership Might Be Your Team's Biggest Problem
I’ve recently read Caroline Castrillon’s Forbes article on passive leadership, published on 5 February 2026 (LINK), and I have to say, it struck a nerve. Not because I haven’t seen this behaviour before (I absolutely have, in almost every sector I’ve worked with), but because it clarifies something that leadership coaches and researchers have known for years yet struggle to articulate to busy executives: the absence of leadership is just as damaging as bad leadership. Perhaps more so, because it’s harder to spot.
The article describes passive leadership as a pattern of inaction and disengagement. These are the leaders who withdraw from making decisions when decisions are needed. They avoid providing feedback when feedback would help someone grow. They fail to intervene in problems until those situations have already become critical and much harder to resolve.
What really caught my attention was her distinction between passive-avoidant leaders (who deflect responsibility entirely, telling their teams to just deal with it themselves) and passive-aggressive leaders (who handle issues indirectly, blame the messenger, or make decisions behind closed doors without explaining their reasoning). Both styles leave teams confused, unsupported, and increasingly disconnected.
The Scale of the Problem
Here’s where it gets uncomfortable. Research from the British Journal of Management found that between 33.5 and 61 per cent of Norwegian employees reported exposure to destructive leadership behaviour. The really sobering part? Laissez-faire leadership (the passive form) had the highest prevalence of all. More than one in five respondents reported experiencing at least one laissez-faire leadership behaviour quite often or very often during the previous six months.
The researchers conclude that destructive leadership behaviour is not a low base-rate phenomenon. In other words, this isn’t some rare outlier that only happens in dysfunctional organisations. It’s something that most subordinates will probably experience at some point during their working life.
When I read that statistic, it aligned uncomfortably well with what I hear from leaders and coaches around the world. The manager who never replies to requests on time. The executive who is permanently unavailable. The leader who is strategic in name only, because they never engage with the operational reality their team is facing.
The Real Damage
Castrillon highlights five key patterns of damage that passive leadership creates.
First, confusion and role overload. Without clear direction, employees experience role ambiguity and role conflict. They’re left guessing what’s expected of them, and they often take on responsibilities that should have been clarified or delegated by leadership in the first place. This leads to chronic stress and burnout.
Second, unchecked toxic behaviour. When leaders fail to address incivility, bullying, or poor performance, it sends a message that such behaviour is acceptable. Over time, this absolutely destroys morale and engagement.
Third, erosion of institutional trust. Employees lose faith in leadership when they witness compounding problems that are left unaddressed. The trust that holds an organisation together simply evaporates.
Fourth, suppressed innovation. Passive leaders rarely coach or mentor their teams. Without active guidance and feedback, creative employees feel their autonomy is restricted, and their ability to tackle complex challenges gets suppressed.
Fifth, spillover effects. The damage doesn’t stay inside the organisation. Exhausted, unsupported employees reduce their engagement with customers and external stakeholders as a way to conserve their own dwindling resources.
That list could have been lifted directly from many of the coaching sessions I’ve run with burned-out middle managers and disillusioned high performers.
Why Good Leaders Drift Into Passivity
Castrillon offers a compassionate answer to why passive leadership happens. She writes that it rarely stems from who someone is as a person. Instead, it’s often a symptom of deeper organisational issues.
Bandwidth depletion is a significant factor. Leaders are stretched thin, overwhelmed by operational demands, and they simply don’t have the mental or emotional capacity left to lead effectively. Fear of confrontation is another. Many leaders were promoted because of their technical skills, not because they were trained to navigate difficult emotional conversations. The need for approval plays a role too. Some leaders avoid tough decisions because they want to be liked, and they worry that holding people accountable will damage relationships. Finally, there’s a lack of training. Many organisations promote people into leadership roles without giving them the skills they need to succeed.
In my book Enhanced Leadership, I describe what I call the synthetic impersonator leader. This is someone who appears polished and competent on the surface. They say the right things in meetings and follow the processes. But underneath, they’re essentially running on autopilot, following rules and habits without making conscious, values-aligned choices. Reading the article and diving into the research behind it, I realised that passive leadership is a key pathway into that state. You stop making deliberate decisions. You stop engaging with the discomfort of real leadership. And before you know it, you’re drifting rather than steering.
I’ve been there myself. In my early leadership roles, whenever things weren’t going well, my default reaction was to step in and do the work of my team rather than lead them through the difficulty. It felt like the right thing to do. I was helping. I was getting it done. But what I realised much later is that I was simply retreating to the technical work where I felt competent. My real job was to support the team through their difficulties, to allow performance to dip temporarily so they could learn and grow. That took me a long time to learn, and it was deeply uncomfortable.
The AI Dimension
Here’s where things get particularly interesting for leaders navigating this era of rapid technological change. Research published in Frontiers in Psychology in 2021 explored passive leadership in digital roles. The authors define it as a style where leaders ignore their responsibilities and do not empower employees, and they do not deal with employee issues and workplace problems until it is too late.
The study found that passive leadership has a significant negative effect on how social media engagement editors interact with fans and followers. At the same time, it increases role overload and reduces employee resilience.
Two themes really jump out here for any modern leader. First, passive leadership directly reduces performance in roles that depend on real-time, emotionally demanding customer interaction. Second, there is a spillover effect beyond organisational boundaries. When employees are exhausted and unsupported, they dial back their engagement with customers to protect themselves. That means passive leadership inside your organisation leads to poorer service, damaged reputation, and lost opportunities outside your organisation.
If you push technology into your teams without attending to resilience and autonomy, and then you absent yourself as a leader, you are creating the perfect conditions for burnout and withdrawal. But if you stay engaged, if you design roles that balance clear outcomes with genuine discretion, if you invest in people’s emotional capacity to cope with change, then technology can be genuinely enabling rather than overwhelming.
From Passive to Present
So how do we move from passive to present?
Create space for leadership by delegating or eliminating low-value tasks. You cannot lead effectively if you are drowning in operational minutiae. In Enhanced Leadership, I write about automating the noise so we can focus on the work that only humans can do. AI offers immediate relief here. The 80/20 rule remains as relevant as ever. AI is the perfect tool to attack the 80 per cent of low-value, high-volume, repetitive work that consumes our time and drains our strategic energy.
Develop confrontation skills deliberately. This is not about becoming aggressive. It is about learning to have honest, respectful conversations about difficult topics. Many leaders were promoted because of their technical skills, not because they were trained to navigate difficult emotional conversations.
Establish clear feedback rhythms so that feedback becomes a regular part of how you work rather than a rare and uncomfortable event.
Reframe support as active engagement. This means not just being available but actively reaching out, checking in, and coaching.
Make decisions visible so that teams understand not just what was decided but why.
Address problems early before they escalate into crises.
For Leaders
The leaders I speak to who navigate AI, disruption, and uncertainty most effectively are not the ones with the most sophisticated tech stack. They are the ones who have consciously stepped away from passivity. They have made a deliberate choice to show up. They have the uncomfortable conversation. They make the contested decision. They stand between their people and the chaos rather than hoping someone else will handle it.
Reading Castrillon’s article and diving into the research by Aasland and the Frontiers team has only reinforced that conviction for me. Passive leadership is more common than we like to admit, and it is more harmful than we often see. The antidote is not more dashboards, more tools, or more slogans about empowerment. The antidote is the oldest work of leadership in the world: being present, being clear, and being willing to act.
If you’re a leader reading this, ask yourself honestly: where am I actively engaging? Where am I setting direction, coaching, giving feedback, making decisions visible? And where am I absent?
The patterns that research identifies suggest that even occasional, repeated avoidance is enough to place you into a destructive category from your team’s perspective. Addressing issues early prevents them from escalating into the kind of chronic patterns that destroy trust and well-being. This doesn’t mean being harsh or aggressive. It means being clear, honest, and timely. It means caring enough about people to tell them the truth.
For Coaches
If you’re a coach working with leaders, this research gives you powerful language and evidence to help your clients recognise passive patterns. One framework I use is to help leaders audit their presence, not just their diary. It is not enough to be in meetings all day. The question is: where are you actively making a difference?
I also encourage coaches to help leaders design for resilience and autonomy. If passive leadership depletes resources, then the job is to reverse that by design. The Frontiers findings on resilience and job autonomy are a powerful reminder that how you structure roles, decision rights, and support has a measurable impact on performance and well-being. This is especially true in digital work, where the boundaries between roles can blur and the pace of change can feel relentless.
Help your clients understand that confrontation and feedback are not one-off events but everyday habits. Castrillon’s focus on developing confrontation skills and establishing clear feedback rhythms is strongly supported by the evidence. In Enhanced Leadership, I emphasise that authentic leadership is the alignment between what you believe, what you say, and what you do. When leaders stop making deliberate decisions and stop engaging with discomfort, they begin to drift. And drift is the enemy of intentional leadership.
