Contempt and admiration — how leadership diminishes people
A year and a half ago the great hire, today the explanation for why nothing works. The person has not changed — the gaze has changed. Contempt and admiration are not opposites.
In a sparring session, a board member says: "A year and a half ago we celebrated him as our great hire. Today he is, for everyone here, the explanation for why nothing works." The person he is talking about hasn't fundamentally changed in that time. What has changed is the gaze.
The pattern isn't new. It shows up in every executive setup, in every supervisory board, in every other performance review: a leader is first lifted high — and later brought back down with the same energy. Contempt and admiration work in opposite directions. But they draw from the same movement.
Three questions that keep coming up in sparring work:
- What happens in us when we hold someone in contempt or admire them?
- Why does this hit leadership harder than other roles?
- What does it cost an organization when both run unchecked?
What drives us there
Contempt is described in emotion research as a blend of anger (toward a person perceived as wrong) and disgust (toward a person experienced as repulsive). It is a devaluing stance that marks the other as inferior or unworthy.
Admiration arises from respect and recognition. A person is perceived as especially competent, virtuous, or inspiring — and elevated for it.
So much for the definitions. It gets interesting in what both emotions do together — because neither is usually free of cognitive distortions:
Fundamental attribution error. Positive and negative traits get experienced as permanent. "He isn't assertive and never will be." — "She's highly competent and always delivers." Both sentences are rarely sustainable. Both get spoken constantly in steering committees and board rooms — and both end up producing the same kind of decision: fast, label-bound, hard to reverse.
Black-and-white thinking. A person gets marked as either admirable or contemptible, with no perception in between. The reality — that the same person can be both, depending on the situation — gets blanked out. This is precisely what produces the star–scapegoat movement that ends careers long before anyone notices that the evaluation itself was the problem.
Halo and horn effect. A single positive trait colors the whole person positively (halo). A single negative trait colors them negatively across the board (horn). A familiar phenomenon in performance reviews: one strong showing in the last quarter overshadows eleven months of solid work — and conversely, one failed pitch overshadows a full year of delivery.
Confirmation bias. We perceive information selectively that supports our existing evaluation. Contempt and admiration thus reinforce themselves. That is precisely why both are so stable — and so hard to correct, even when the original judgment is long out of date.
Dehumanization vs. idealization. Whoever holds someone in contempt withdraws shares of humanity from them. Whoever admires adds shares of super-humanity. Both prevent real encounter. In leadership relationships this is the most expensive form of simplification — because here it isn't just a private image that gets distorted, but decisions that other people have to carry.
That is the central point: contempt and admiration are not simply opposites. They are two variants of the same simplifying movement — only in opposite directions.
Why this hits leadership harder
The relationship research of John Gottman shows that contempt in partnerships is the single strongest predictor of separation — sarcasm, eye-rolling, mockery, dismissive remarks. What damages the relationship isn't the content, but the signal: You are not on my level.
In leadership relationships, the same signal works — only with a sharpened lever:
Contempt from above withdraws the working ground from the person it hits. Anyone who knows the eye-rolling of their board member in a meeting will act defensively from the next meeting on. Initiative drains away. Candidates for succession hold back their hand. The organization loses precisely what it needs — quietly, over months, without anyone naming it.
Contempt from below is less openly visible, but just as expensive. When a team has long since given up on its division head, things look fine from the outside for a long time — until key people resign and the real reasons only surface in exit interviews. By then it is too late for the organization, and for the leader as well.
Admiration on the way up can carry a career — as long as it is real and not idealizing. The board member who initially describes her new CFO as "finally someone who has the numbers under control" will find it hard to hold that sentence later. What at first relieved gets, over time, perceived as naive. And not infrequently the idealization then flips into contempt — sometimes within weeks.
The celebrated hire becomes the personification of every remaining problem. Without the person fundamentally changing. What has changed is the gaze. That is not the exception, that is the pattern.
Where admiration tips in leadership
Admiration in its reflective form is precious in organizations. Role models, mentors, colleagues with a clear stance — they can raise standards, give courage, set change in motion.
In its uncritical form, it does damage similar to contempt: it makes people untouchable, even when they make mistakes. It prevents correction. It establishes hierarchies that aren't justified by performance, but by collective idealization. This is exactly the story of many founders, many charismatic CEOs, many "indispensable" division heads: first carried high, then dropped hard — usually with substantial organizational collateral damage.
In day-to-day operations this means: whoever is marked as "the deciding man" or "the deciding woman" is rarely questioned critically. His judgment stands. Her idea gets waved through. And when the mistake then happens, no one is prepared — because no one checked beforehand. In such cases, admiration produces precisely the damage it was supposed to prevent.
What this does in the organization
Whoever holds others in contempt loses empathy. Whoever does so long-term isolates themselves — and gets isolated. Contempt also exhausts the one carrying it. It is expensive on the inside.
Whoever admires without reflection walks into a different trap: disappointment. When the admired person doesn't fulfill the image — and that always happens at some point — something collapses that was never built on real ground. The reaction is often precisely the opposite: contempt. Hence the careers in which someone is first celebrated and then dropped, without much having changed in their performance.
On the organizational level this adds up. A leadership team that sorts its members between star and failure isn't judging — it is labeling. Performance reviews become confirmation exercises. Succession planning becomes betting rounds. And whoever once wears the wrong label rarely gets rid of it — regardless of real development. That isn't only unfair. It is a systematic way of destroying talent that no one has on their books.
What helps
Three anchors that aren't heroic — and work for exactly that reason:
Separate observation from judgment. What is this person today, in this situation, with this task — regardless of what was said about them a year ago? That isn't a training exercise. It is an operational discipline that makes many performance conversations meaningful in the first place. Whoever manages to read the last quarter separately from the label of the last two years makes different — and usually better — decisions.
Name your own share. What is actually behind my contempt — or my admiration? What judgment underlies it? What information am I currently ignoring? What share of my own story am I projecting onto this person? In sparring work this is often the hardest question. And the most productive.
Critical admiration, critical contempt. Instead of asking Is this person good or bad?, rather: In what is this person strong, in what weak? In what reliable, in what not? The answer in most cases won't be a label, but a picture with shading. Based on that shading, tasks can be tailored — labels only let you distribute assumptions.
Closing
Contempt and admiration are two sides of the same coin. Both arise from the wish to reduce complex people to simple evaluations. Both are human. Both have their place — as long as they don't become a permanent stance.
Leadership that distinguishes between star and failure doesn't judge — it labels. And labels don't hold what they promise. They spare you the conversation, but they don't replace it.
The more demanding position is the middle. It is slower, less satisfying, less suited to fast personnel decisions. But it is the only one that does justice to the complexity of real people — and real leadership relationships.
Whoever sorts between star and failure ends up with both — and usually in the same person. The middle is the more expensive position. But it is the only one that doesn't bury a new career every year.
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Related perspectives on the same topic (German only):
- Der Halo-Effekt — wenn eine Stärke alles überstrahlt ↗ (on nusselt.gmbh) — the consulting view on the perceptual bias that turns admiration into systematic misjudgment.
- Der Horn-Effekt — wenn eine Schwäche alles einfärbt ↗ (on nusselt.gmbh) — the mirror image: how a single weak impression can outlast an entire career.