There is a fantasy that leadership is about strategy. About vision. About execution. It is a beautiful, clean, MBA-approved fantasy. And it is almost entirely wrong.
A leader does not broadcast their strategy into the organization. They broadcast their desire. Their unconscious, unresolved, barely-understood desire — and the organization picks it up with a precision that would embarrass any intelligence service.
This is not a metaphor. This is the mechanism.
Lacan wrote that desire is always the desire of the Other. We don't know what we want until we see it reflected back through someone else's gaze. The infant looks at the mother and reads: am I lovable? Is there enough? The employee looks at the leader and reads the same thing: what is actually valued here? What is really being asked of me?
And here is what most leadership theory refuses to say plainly: the leader answers that question not with their words, their values slides, or their quarterly OKRs. They answer it with the structure of their own desire — with what they pursue, what they avoid, what they can't tolerate, what secretly excites them.
The organization doesn't lie. It is a perfect mirror of the person at the top.
Jung called it the shadow. Everything the leader cannot acknowledge in themselves gets pushed down, sideways, out of conscious awareness — and then reappears, untouched, in the behavior of the team. The conflict-avoidant leader builds an organization that explodes in passive aggression. The leader who cannot tolerate uncertainty micromanages until everyone stops thinking. The leader who is secretly ashamed of their own ambition creates a culture where ambition is punished in others.
It is not policy. It is not culture. It is unconscious broadcast.
The organization is always running the software of the leader's inner world.
I have spent years working with leaders in clinical settings. One pattern repeats without exception: the issues they bring to therapy are isomorphic with the issues their organizations are experiencing. The man who cannot feel desire in his marriage leads a company that cannot innovate. The woman who needs to be needed at home leads a team she has quietly made dependent on her. The executive who was never allowed to be angry as a child runs a company full of suppressed rage — always directed sideways, never up.
This is not psychology as soft skill. This is the hard structure of power.
When you take authority over others, you do not simply gain the right to make decisions. You gain the capacity — and the responsibility — to shape the unconscious field in which others live and work. Eight hours a day, sometimes more. People spend more waking time inside the desire-structure of their leader than inside their own marriage.
That is not a small thing.
There is also the erotic dimension, which is the one that everybody avoids.
Power and desire are not adjacent topics. They are the same topic. The libidinal economy of an organization — who gets attention, who gets punished, what is exciting, what is shameful, what must never be spoken — is organized precisely by the same drives that organize a person's intimate life.
Freud was not being provocative when he connected Eros and authority. He was being accurate.
In my research on leadership and sexuality, the correlation is striking: leaders with a rich, accepted, integrated erotic life tend to build organizations with genuine vitality. Leaders who are in flight from their own desire — through workaholism, through moral rigidity, through obsessive control — tend to build organizations that are also in flight from something. Productive on the surface. Quietly dying underneath.
This is why the question "how is this leader's inner life organized?" is not a personal question. It is a structural one.
Girard adds another layer: desire is mimetic. It spreads. The leader's desire is not contained at the top — it becomes the model for what everyone around them desires, or believes they should desire. Status, recognition, the approval of the powerful figure: the entire hierarchy reorganizes itself around the leader's unconscious template.
Which means the leader's unresolved hunger becomes everybody's unresolved hunger. Their fear of failure becomes the organization's performance anxiety. Their need for admiration becomes a culture of performance without substance.
The broadcast never stops. The only question is whether it's conscious or not.
What does this mean in practice?
It means that organizational development is, at its core, psychological development of the person at the top. Not coaching them to communicate better. Not helping them run better meetings. But asking the harder question: what is this person's desire, and how is it organized? What are they running toward? What are they fleeing? What do they want that they cannot admit they want?
Because until that is visible — to them, and if necessary, to someone working with them — no amount of strategy, no off-site, no restructuring will change anything fundamental.
The organization will keep running its current software. Until the programmer changes.
Authority is never neutral because a human being is never neutral. We are always organizing around desire — ours, inherited, projected, denied. The leader who believes they are running a meritocracy may be running the clearest possible expression of their childhood wounds. The leader who speaks endlessly of values may be most ruthlessly organized around the one value they have never examined.
This is not a condemnation. It is an invitation.
The most powerful thing a leader can do — for themselves, for the people in their charge, for the organization they are trying to build — is to become curious about their own desire. Not to eliminate it. Not to sanitize it into mission statements. But to know it. To take responsibility for it. To stop pretending that authority is a neutral instrument in neutral hands.
It never was. It never will be.
The only question is: whose desire is running your organization — the one you've examined, or the one you haven't?