Most public stories about leadership failure follow the same script. A high-profile chief executive or founder makes a reckless decision, ignores warnings, destroys value. Commentators pick apart the personality, the ego, the greed. It gives everyone a neat villain and a tidy ending.
It is also a weak explanation.
When you read the underlying material from inquiries, regulators, courts and long form reporting, you see something quite different. Many of the leaders involved were experienced, intelligent and, at least at the beginning, well intentioned. They did not arrive at work planning to damage the organisation. Yet the organisation still ended up in crisis.
That gap between the simple surface story and what actually happened underneath is what I call the leadership trap. It is the problem that has kept Aravind Sakthivel busy for a long time.
The question is not why bad people do bad things. The real question, which Aravind Sakthivel tries to answer in The Leadership Trap, is why capable leaders inside apparently successful organisations make a long series of decisions that only look obviously wrong after the damage is done.
If you step back from individual cases and look across sectors and decades, the failures start to look less like freak accidents and more like repeatable patterns. The language changes. The products and markets change. The underlying mechanics hardly move at all.
You see leaders who stop hearing uncomfortable truths. You see cost programmes that quietly cut into the capabilities that make the organisation competitive. You see activity presented as innovation, but very little reaches the customer. You see insiders who stay protected long after their value has gone. You see dashboards glowing green while frontline teams know something is wrong.
From a distance, each collapse looks sudden. Up close, it is a long chain of small, trapped decisions.
In the book, I group these recurring patterns into six traps: the Echo Chamber, the Cost Cutting Illusion, the Vanishing Act, Innovation Theatre, Fortress Culture and the Metric Mirage. They do not always appear in that order, and they rarely appear alone. Once one trap is active, the probability that the others will follow increases.
Here is the uncomfortable part. You do not need bad actors for any of this to happen.
You only need systems that reward short term outcomes over long term health. Systems that make it risky to raise unwelcome information. Systems that celebrate activity and announcements over adoption and results. Systems that attach pay, status and reputation to narrow metrics without checking what sits behind them.
People adapt to the system they find. If career progression depends on making the story look good, smart people will learn how to make the story look good. If raising concerns regularly creates friction, they will stop raising concerns. You do not need a conscious decision to become part of the problem. You only need a series of small adjustments to the environment.
That is the leadership trap in practice. Leaders, including good ones, get pulled into patterns that are bigger than any single decision. They think they are making pragmatic trade-offs. In reality, they are feeding self-reinforcing loops that will eventually turn on them.
A practical place to start is to take one decision from the last year that did not work the way you hoped and look at it more honestly. Ask yourself three questions.
What was difficult for people to say at the time, and to whom.
What capability you weakened or put at risk in order to make the numbers look acceptable.
Which metric was driving the decision, and what it failed to show you about reality.
You will not enjoy every answer. You may find them uncomfortable. That is the point.