[pagana]

I used to work in executive training and have worked with many CEOs of large orgs - to get to the top, for the most part, you have to be incredibly empathetic.

You also have to be incredibly outcome-oriented. You need to prioritize a range of objectives against a mountain of constraints. Sometimes that means deprioritizing parts of a product or company mission to further the longterm success of the business, using the information you have. If they didn’t, then they wouldn’t be doing their job. Sometimes that also means deprioritizing people. This is why every leader will always be able to be portrayed as a sociopath.

The actual sociopaths are one or two levels beneath - those that are jockeying for good standing by pushing themselves up and others down. They rarely make it to the top and if they do, aren’t there for long.

In my experience, those who do not see this tend to hold different levels of either empathy or outcome-orientation.