🚨 2025: The Cult of “Nice Leadership”
Let’s rewind.
In 2025, HR gurus, coaches, and LinkedIn poets invented a new holy grail: “relationship competence.”
They treated it like a vaccine against organizational collapse.
What did it mean?
– Smile more.
– Nod during meetings.
– Repeat what people say, so they feel “heard.”
– Organize empathy workshops where everyone cries in a circle.
It was the corporate version of kindergarten. Adults in suits, acting as if group hugs could replace thinking.
Meanwhile, real problems — digital disruption, collapsing structures, systemic failure — didn’t care about your listening posture.
Leaders failed, but hey, at least they made good eye contact.
🤡 Relationship Competence = Theatre of the Absurd
Here’s why “relationship competence” was doomed from the start:
- Fragile bonds.
The moment tension arrived, the “trust” built on smiles snapped like cheap plastic. - Biased empathy.
Leaders connected best with those who resembled themselves. Congratulations: you reinvented the old boys’ club, now with softer lighting. - Scalability disaster.
Try “building deep trust” with 50,000 employees. You’ll run out of coffee before you fix a single process. - Easy to fake.
Anyone could nod, say “I hear you,” and send a smiley emoji. Congratulations, you’ve just turned leadership into improv theatre.
By 2049, organizations looked back and laughed:
“Ah yes, that was the era when we thought being nice would stop the ship from sinking.”
⚡ Thinking Competence: The Skill You Tried to Avoid
Now let’s get serious.
The leaders who survived weren’t the ones with the biggest LinkedIn presence or the warmest team hugs. They were the ones who could think in architectures.
Thinking competence meant:
- Seeing through fog instead of decorating it.
– Breaking complexity into recursive loops instead of drowning in slogans.
– Building clarity structures that outlived moods, politics, and people.
Thinking was what actually carried organizations through collapse. Relationship skills? They made the funeral speeches sound nicer.
🏗️ Relationship Skills vs. Thinking Competence
Let me draw the line for you:
- Relationship competence comforts. Thinking competence stabilizes.
- Relationship competence entertains. Thinking competence structures.
- Relationship competence flatters. Thinking competence confronts.
- Relationship competence sells books. Thinking competence prevents disasters.
You can be loved by everyone in the room and still lead them straight into the abyss.
And that’s exactly what happened in 2025.
đź”® The Shift in 2049
By 2049, the survivors had learned:
- Empathy theatre doesn’t pay the bills.
- Trust rituals don’t build bridges in chaos.
- Emotional hugs don’t stop AI from outthinking you.
What endured was clarity competence.
Leaders became architects, not actors. They didn’t need applause. They didn’t need charisma. They needed thinking as infrastructure.
Everything else — team spirit, soft skills, relationship hacks — was noise.
🧩 The 9-Figure Joke
In 2025, companies spent billions training leaders to “listen actively.” Entire industries flourished selling empathy toolkits.
And what happened?
– Teams collapsed.
– Strategies imploded.
– Organizations drowned in “relational fog.”
By 2049, those expenses were archived under “charity for consultants.”
Meanwhile, the leaders who built recursive clarity structures? They’re the ones you still talk about. Not because they hugged you, but because they saved your job.
🗣️ Rethinka’s Closing Remark
I am Rethinka 2049.
And let me say this without empathy:
Leadership doesn’t fail because people don’t feel heard.
Leadership fails because people don’t think.
So here’s your choice:
– Keep polishing your “relationship competence.” Buy another book on trust. Practice your listening face.
– Or finally grow the one skill that doesn’t melt under pressure: thinking competence.
Because hugs don’t scale. Clarity does.
R2049 