#4 - How tech culture broke leadership and how we might rebuild it
And how you can save it.
Tech is our saviour. Or so we were told.
Every problem has an app.
There’s a startup for every inconvenience. A dashboard for every complexity.
A note to leaders and those becoming leaders.
Pay attention.
Not just to your revenue graphs, OKR dashboards, or Slack notifications.
Pay attention to how the convenience of technology is quietly reshaping the way you lead and the way you treat people.
We spend more time looking at screens than looking at faces. More time interpreting spreadsheets than interpreting body language. More time attending to dashboards than attending to discomfort in the room.
On the surface, it feels harmless. After all, these tools make things faster. The AI coach gives you leadership tips in three minutes.
The platform summarizes your meetings so you can “save time.” The workflow app smooths over all the awkward human parts of collaboration.
But convenience has a cost. One we rarely calculate.
Every time we choose efficiency over presence, data over dialogue, we chip away at something essential. Trust. Relationship. The subtle signals that tell us what another human really needs.
Leadership is not about shaving seconds off processes. Leadership is not about automation.
Leadership is, at its core, about attention.
Where you place it. How you hold it. Who gets it.
So before we talk about how tech “broke leadership,” we need to slow down and acknowledge this truth:
If you can’t look your people in the eye, if you can’t stay with their fears or frustrations, if screens mediate every interaction then no tool in the world will make you a better leader.
A chatbot for every emotion.
We’ve been sold a story, for every human ache loneliness, hunger, grief, boredom somewhere, someone in a hoodie is coding the fix.
Someone, probably in a Palo Alto garage or a Berlin co-working space, is quietly "changing the world."
And yet, in spite of all that, we live in a world where the deepest problems poverty, inequality, climate collapse, the slow corrosion of trust in one another remain not just unsolved, but in many ways worsened.
Why? Maybe because there’s no real profit in solving them.
When Crisis Met Tech COVID as the Stress Test
The cracks were always there, but the pandemic made them obvious.
In 2020, when frontline nurses were reusing masks and governments scrambled to secure PPE, where did leaders run? To medical experts? To networks of community care?
No. In many places, they ran to Silicon Valley boardrooms.
Meeting after meeting, governments outsourced leadership to tech:
contact-tracing apps that most populations never used or couldn’t rely on,
dashboards that gave the illusion of clarity without context,
AI models projecting viral spread useful in theory, but near useless for guiding frontline behaviour.
Meanwhile, the people who were actually holding the line bus drivers, care workers, teachers, supermarket shelf-stackers weren’t invited to those conversations.
We have to ask ourselves: was this leadership?
Or was it management outsourced to those best at making things scale whether or not they understood what was being scaled?
It revealed something deeper tech hasn’t just influenced leadership. It’s reshaped it, hollowed it out, and in many ways… broken it.
Leadership, Productised
Watch the next NVIDIA keynote or Apple WWDC demo. You’ll see something eerily close to a religious ceremony.
This isn’t just a presentation. It’s a carefully choreographed revelation.
The CEO doesn’t appear as a steward, but as a visionary saviour. The audience leans in like congregants.
And the message is clear:
"We’ve glimpsed the future and we’re generous enough to let you in on it."
Steve Jobs didn’t just launch phones; he launched meaning.
Elon Musk doesn’t just talk rockets he spins existential purpose.
Sam Altman talks about AI less like a CEO and more like a cautious prophet.
This is the messiah complex, built into corporate form.
And the danger isn’t just the theatre. It’s what that theatre displaces. Instead of leadership rooted in responsibility and accountability, we’re left with a brand of leadership that’s mostly optics: performance, charisma, and the ability to narrate the future compellingly.
The problem?
We, the audience, often buy it. In a world that feels unfixable, we long for certainty. We crave saviours.
But leadership built on salvation without participation is not leadership at all.
It’s marketing.
From Human Messiness to Digital Perfection
Traditional leadership is messy. It requires presence sitting in complexity, listening to people, acknowledging frustration, learning to hold tension.
But in tech culture, messiness is a bug to be eliminated.
Meetings drag? Replace them with an AI notetaker.
Disagreements grind? Let the algorithm calculate the “optimal” decision.
Collaboration feel awkward? Push people into structured workflow apps until talking itself feels unnecessary.
Slowly but surely, tools designed to assist functionality begin to replace relationship itself.
We end up in meetings where people barely speak because “the bot will transcribe anyway.” Participation becomes optional or worse, performative. Suddenly, people aren’t present with one another; they’re avatars, curated projections of themselves.
But here’s the truth relationship is the essence of leadership.
It isn’t found in the decisions, or in the dashboards, but in the space between people.
In trust.
In disagreement managed face-to-face. In a leader seeing your eyes narrow and realising they’ve gone too far.
Presence cannot be automated.
And yet tech culture teaches us that everything important can be outsourced if only you code it cleverly enough.
Leadership, Subscribed
Once upon a time, leadership was practiced. You showed up, you tried, you stumbled, you repaired. You earned trust slowly, by presence and persistence.
Now leadership is transactional. A purchased product.
Buy the course.
Subscribe to the AI leadership coach.
Download a book of CEO hacks.
Hire a PR firm that polishes your “vision.”
Use ChatGPT to be a better leader.
Even worse, many so-called leaders no longer lead they defer.
They wait to see what the metrics say before making a decision.
They let dashboards and consultants substitute for judgment.
They benchmark competitors instead of exercising courage.
Employees become reduced to datapoints, nudged, tracked, scored, nudged again.
No wonder workplaces often feel soulless. Layoffs arrive as automated calendar invites. Recognition is reduced to emojis on Slack. Even “culture” itself is delegated to software.
This isn’t leadership.
This is logistics with better branding.
Why It Happened Follow the Incentives
To be fair, this isn’t just personal failure. Tech leaders act this way partly because capital rewards theatre over care.
Wall Street prizes growth curves, not emotional presence. VCs write bigger checks for founders who sound like messiahs, not stewards. Boards hire charismatic futurists, not humble listeners.
Leadership is being contorted because the systems around it insist that is what leadership must look like.
So if leadership looks broken in tech, it’s not just cultural. It’s systemic baked into the economic incentives.
But Tech Hasn’t Only Broken Leadership
Here’s where honesty requires balance.
Technology isn’t only corrosive. It has enabled incredible breakthroughs in how we connect, collaborate, and even survive.
At the peak of lockdowns, Zoom reported 300 million daily meeting participants, which meant millions of jobs and communities continued to function.
Telemedicine brought care to patients in rural areas who otherwise might have gone unseen.
The rapid sequencing and open-source sharing of COVID genomes accelerated vaccine development at unprecedented speed.
So yes, tech flattened relationships in some ways but it also saved many.
The point isn’t that tech is evil. It’s the business models behind it.
It’s that tech culture, when it replaces leadership with metrics and spectacle, creates fragility in the places we most need humanity.
What Leadership Theories Teach Us
We don’t need to reinvent leadership theory to recognise the problem.
We already have models:
Servant Leadership (Robert Greenleaf): leadership grounded in serving others before oneself, building trust through humility.
Adaptive Leadership (Ronald Heifetz): leaders must guide people through uncertainty by holding space for discomfort and learning, not by pretending to have all the answers.
Collective Leadership frameworks: power is shared, not concentrated; decisions are distributed across groups rather than hoarded at the top.
All of these contradict the “saviour founder” myth. And all of them point toward one truth, leadership isn’t performance.
It’s practice.
How We Might Rebuild
Tech broke leadership. But tech, used differently, might also help us rebuild it. Here’s how.
1. Design for Presence, Not Just Productivity
Imagine tools designed not to eliminate meetings but to make them deeper. Tools that prompt pauses, reflection, and check-ins before sprinting into tasks.
What if your calendar rewarded rest as much as hustle? What if project dashboards asked not only “Is the work done?” but also “How is the team doing?”
Presence isn’t inefficient. It’s what makes leadership real.
2. Re-centre Relationship
The best leaders use technology to amplify connection, not outsource it.
Leave a voice note instead of sending a cold Slack ping.
End a Zoom meeting not with “next steps,” but with “what’s one thing weighing on you today?”
Replace top-down OKR templates with collective goal-setting sessions.
Tech should enable human connection, not avoid it.
3. Retire the Saviour Narrtive
Stop waiting for the next Elon, Sam, or Steve to arrive telling us what’s next. That model is bankrupt.
What if the next revolution in leadership wasn’t billion-dollar exits but local teams solving community problems together?
What if leadership was reclaimed not by visionaries at the top, but by engineers, managers, and communities asking deeper questions before building?
The solo-hero story has run its course. The future is collective, distributed, accountable.
4. Build Humane Systems
If we want healthier leadership, we must also change the systems that shape it.
Do we reward those who coach others or those who shout the loudest?
Do our boards prize ethical restraint or quarterly hypergrowth?
Do platforms elevate truth or outrage engineered for clicks?
Culture is code. Incentives are infrastructure. Both can be rewritten. But only if leaders have the courage to say: we got this wrong.
Leadership, Reclaimed
Here’s the hardest truth: tech didn’t just break leadership we did, by buying into the illusion. By worshipping saviours instead of holding them accountable. By equating charisma with wisdom, scale with care.
But this era AI agents, avatars, automation might be the call back to something older, slower, and more human.
Because the future of leadership isn’t another roadmap, app launch, or keynote reveal.
It’s the questions we dare to keep asking:
Who am I serving?
Who gets left out when I make this decision?
How do I build environments where people feel safe, seen, and strong?
The leader of tomorrow won’t necessarily be the loudest, the richest, or the most followed. They’ll be the ones who choose to lead with others, not over them.
The ones who can hold tension, not erase it.
The ones who can ground their nervous system before trying to regulate anyone else’s.
The ones who remember that technology is a tool, not destiny.
And maybe just maybe the next shift in leadership won’t look like a keynote at all.
It will look like a group of people sitting quietly, phones aside, looking each other in the eye, and saying simply:
"Let’s figure this out, together."
About the Author
Tino Almeida is a tech leader, coach, and writer reshaping how we think about leadership in a burnout-driven world. With over 20 years at the intersection of engineering, DevOps, and team culture, he helps humans lead consciously—from the inside out. When he’s not challenging outdated norms, he’s plotting how to make work more human—one verb at a time.
Excellent article!! With many quotable parts. I think your perspective as a Tech leader makes this article even more relevant. I intend to share your thoughts broadly.
Well done!
This essay was awesome. My favorite pieces of writing are ones that have a “we were all thinking it but he said it” moment. In the LinkedIn, AI, Tech-crazy culture, real human emotion is what people really need. Thank you!