Caught in the Spotlight

Caught in the Spotlight

It took less than two seconds. One camera pan. One involuntary facial freeze. And suddenly, two executives found themselves turned into a storyline. At a Coldplay concert. On the kiss cam. Arms entangled like weekend furniture. The moment they realized they were being broadcast to tens of thousands, plus the internet was visibly kinetic. She covered her face. He tried to fold into himself like a startled meerkat. The band’s frontman, Chris Martin, reading the crowd's energy, made a comment about an affair. Laughter ensued. But the scene had already left the realm of interpretation and entered the age of viral prosecution.

This was not an orchestrated PR moment or even a self-aware faux pas. It was something more telling. A system-level hiccup in an ecosystem that feeds on performance and then punishes overexposure. The accidental tension between presence and persona. One of those rare pauses where the curtain lifts and reveals the fragility of image curation in real time.

What happens when leaders, conditioned to control narrative, are caught in a frame they didn’t compose? In The Age of Narcissus, I’ve explored how power today doesn’t just attract narcissistic traits, it demands them. The culture selects for impression management, not character; exhibition over ethics. And like any organism built on constant performance, it has no immune system for candid moments. There’s a peculiar symmetry in watching a tech CEO, a title now more myth than role, suddenly facing investigation not over financial mismanagement or product failure, but because he appeared… too intimate. On camera. At a concert. With his Head of HR. 

It echoes the diagnosis I offered years ago in Are You CEO Material? A tongue-in-cheek checklist that was never meant to be aspirational, but now reads like a growth plan. The system doesn’t need villains. It only needs optics, algorithms, and a revolving door of photogenic ambition. The rest takes care of itself.

If the Coldplay moment was an accidental freeze-frame, the RBC scandal was a slow, composed unraveling. In 2024, Canada’s largest bank made headlines when Nadine Ahn, then CFO of RBC, was abruptly fired following an internal investigation. The reason: she had maintained a years-long personal relationship with another senior executive, Ken Mason, while allegedly playing a direct role in his promotions and compensation. According to internal sources, Ahn had repeatedly denied any such relationship when asked. Mason, too, was quietly let go. Neither leader publicly commented. The language remained clinical: a breach of internal policies, a process underway, nothing more to see.

But there was plenty to see.

This wasn’t just about office romance. It was about institutional trust being eroded behind closed doors while the public-facing performance of professionalism carried on. The emails between Ahn and Mason revealed an intimacy that blurred every professional line: career advice laced with late-night familiarity, praise passed upward, and influence disguised as meritocracy. At least one promotion and a pay increase appeared to pass through her desk without disclosure of their relationship. Behind every org chart lies a story; this one just became harder to ignore.

What made the scandal cut deeper wasn’t the affair itself, those are regrettably common but the revelation that senior leadership operated with a quiet assumption of impunity. The breach wasn’t romantic. It was structural. It confirmed what many already suspected: that corporate hierarchies often mask selective loyalty, favoritism, and personal agendas. The damage was about coherence. And once coherence breaks, leadership becomes theatre that’s lost control of its script.

In The Age of Narcissus, I argued that leadership today is less about what’s done and more about how it’s perceived. Leaders aren’t just expected to act they’re expected to appear as if every move is made for the right reasons. Once a leader’s personal entanglements disrupt that narrative when performance and reality separate, the institution reacts to the inconsistency.

This is the paradox: the system demands control, but it selects for those who manipulate perception. In other words, it creates the exact conditions under which trust is quietly commodified. You can hide proximity behind performance until someone turns the lights on.

Executives like Andy Byron or Nadine Ahn aren’t aberrations, they’re products. The system doesn’t just tolerate narcissistic traits; it efficiently incubates and promotes them. Charisma is mistaken for clarity. Confidence for competence. And if you can remain calm while lying convincingly to investors, you’re considered “seasoned.” The performance is so normalized that even seasoned insiders forget it’s a mask. Until, of course, something leaks.

But here’s the catch: the system punishes disruption, not pathology. You can violate trust, bend ethics, even rewire entire compensation structures but only if you keep the performance clean. The moment it feels sloppy, personal, or off-brand, the antibodies activate. The leader isn’t removed for what they did, but for breaking the fourth wall. For reminding people that power is still, fundamentally, human and therefore messy.

This is why so many leaders start believing the rules don’t apply. The performance is rewarded so consistently that it becomes reality. Promotions follow projection. Internal loyalty is built on curated proximity. And slowly, the leader becomes convinced that their version of the story is not just preferred but true. The architecture of the organization begins to reflect their temperament. People adjust, hesitate, flatter. Doubt is rare, and costly. Accountability only arrives when something leaks or when a camera pans a little too far.

In The Age of Narcissus, I described this as a feedback loop of curated delusion. Institutions create the conditions for narcissistic leadership then act shocked when narcissists lead them. Boards look for “vision,” shareholders want “confidence,” and teams crave “clarity” but none of these require depth, accountability, or moral weight. They only require fluency in performance.

And when things break down, the response is procedural, not cultural: an investigation, a resignation, a realignment. The deeper question “why was this individual elevated and protected for so long?” goes unanswered. Because the answer is always the same: they played the part too well.

If narcissism has become a job requirement, then the obvious question is whether it's possible to lead without succumbing to the performance. Can one reject the costume and still keep the title? Or is the role itself so compromised, so wrapped in optics, branding, and affect management that only those fluent in illusion can thrive?

There is no romantic alternative waiting in the wings. The post-narcissistic leader isn’t a humble sage meditating in a corner office. Nor is he or she or they a charismatic rebel who disrupts the status quo by sheer authenticity. The real alternative is much less cinematic. It looks like restraint. Like institutional loyalty over personal legacy. Like showing up to the meeting even when there’s nothing to gain. It’s untelegenic. It doesn’t trend.

The real challenge is not identifying such people. They exist. They live and breathe among us. They’re just often passed over, too quiet, too measured, not “CEO material” in the language of the current paradigm. They don’t curate their lives for visibility. They don’t treat the boardroom like a TED Talk. They don’t scan every room calculating narrative leverage. And they tend to make others a little uneasy, because their authority isn’t being advertised, it’s being exercised.

But for these individuals to ascend, the system itself must develop a taste for boredom. It must reward clarity over charisma, and discretion over drama. That’s not just a hiring change, it’s a cultural shift. It means designing leadership pipelines that don’t just test for competence, but for ethical stamina. It means teaching boards and shareholders to look past the perfectly-lit executive summary and ask: who is this person when no one’s watching?

Until then, we’ll continue recycling the same familiar pattern: an executive rises through charisma and calculation, is eventually exposed by the very traits that brought them power, and replaced by someone who looks and sounds suspiciously similar. The problem isn’t the individual. It’s the casting process.

What the Coldplay incident and the RBC scandal ultimately reveal is not new misconduct, but a broken expectation model. We say we want transparency, integrity, and emotional intelligence in our leaders—but reward the opposite. We design systems that elevate image over introspection, repetition over reflection. And then we’re surprised when leaders behave as though the rules don’t apply. They’re not anomalies. They’re acting exactly as they were trained to.

The question isn’t whether executives should be better people. The question is: why do we keep designing organizations that discourage better people from rising?

In The Age of Narcissus, I suggested that this isn’t a glitch, it’s a feature. Our culture, with its constant demand for attention, encourages every leader to become a product. A profile picture. A personal brand. But once leadership becomes branding, truth becomes optional. Only coherence matters. Not character. Not consistency. Just the illusion of control, performed well.

And that illusion has limits. A camera turns unexpectedly. A private relationship becomes a headline. A trusted figure breaks script. And in those moments, the system doesn’t know how to respond. Because the system was never built for sincerity. It was built for performance.

For years, in every leadership session I’ve taught, I’ve offered a simple mental audit for communication: write every email as if your boss’s boss might read it. Would the tone hold? Would your phrasing survive hierarchy? Then I added a second layer: imagine that same email as a screenshot circulating on social media. Are you still comfortable with how you come across: Clear, ethical, human? After last night, I may need to introduce a third test: are you comfortable if that email, that posture, that half-second facial expression ends up frozen on a Jumbotron, mid-song, mid-speculation, mid-narrative? Because in the Age of Narcissus, the margin between private behavior and public consequence has effectively collapsed. 

It’s tempting to end with optimism, to declare that a better model is emerging, that Gen Z or “teal consciousness” or decentralized governance will heal all this. But maybe the real hope lies not in reinvention, but in rejection. In simply refusing to play the role. In letting go of the need to look like a leader and instead, quietly, being one.

The next time the camera pans your way, ask yourself: are you ready for the still frame? The one that captures who you actually are, unfiltered, unplanned, unperformed.