Last year, I sat in on a senior leadership meeting that felt less like a strategy session and more like an orchestra rehearsal gone wrong. It felt chaotic! Everyone was playing their hearts out, and no one was listening. Each leader came armed with their slides, metrics, updates, entrenched points of view, and well-rehearsed arguments. Every function was defending its priorities. Everyone was articulate, intelligent, passionate, and striving to be 'seen'. There was no shared tempo; no collective score, and no one stepping back to ask, “What is best for the collective? What does the whole need?”
I have been noticing this pattern for years, in coaching sessions, in corporate events, and across media feeds: a steady tilt toward self-protection and self-promotion over shared purpose. Call it ambition if you like, but it feels like something deeper to me. The rise of a “me-first” workplace has been building for a long time.
HOW DID WE GET HERE?
Over the past three decades, Western societies have undergone a measurable shift toward hyper-individualism. Sociologist Robert Putnam wrote about the decline in civic participation and social capital in his book, Bowling Alone, showing how community involvement, from clubs to volunteerism, steadily decreased across North America. The patterns he identified in the 1990s have only intensified.
Journalist Sebastian Junger explored a related theme in his book Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, which is one of my favourite books about how we are stronger together. Drawing on history, anthropology, and his reporting on war veterans, Junger points out that humans are wired for tight-knit interdependence, and that modern Western society has weakened many of the shared hardships and collective bonds that once gave people a sense of meaning. When belonging erodes, people don't simply become more independent; they often become more anxious, more isolated, and more likely to build their identity around status rather than contribution. That observation has profound implications for workplace culture.
Technology is also reshaping how we construct identity. Sherry Turkle’s work at MIT points to how digital platforms nudge us to 'perform ourselves' rather than fully engage with others authentically. Algorithms reward visibility and amplification. Attention, likes and follows become currency, and we learn to chase it.
Add to this the rise of monetized identity, influencer culture, and personal brand as career insurance in unstable labour markets. LinkedIn profiles become highlight reels, Instagram turns daily life into curated narratives, and the gig economy encourages workers to market themselves continuously. In many Western democracies, competitive market thinking has gradually pushed the language of individual rights to the forefront, with no room for conversations about shared responsibility.
Layer in performance-at-all-costs organizational environments, where individual metrics, dashboards, and promotion systems reward personal achievement far more visibly than collective contribution.
None of these forces are malicious. They evolved gradually, and responded to real economic and technological shifts. But together, they've shifted our centre of gravity. As a culture, we've elevated individual identity above shared responsibility and obligation. We've optimized for recognition over reciprocity, and it's showing up at work.
WHERE THE DRIFT BECOMES VISIBLE
We see this slide into soloist mode appears inside organizations, in leaders who protect their function instead of tending to the enterprise as a whole. Or when personal brand building starts to consume more energy than team building. “Not my job” thinking creeps into conversations. We celebrate the hero who stayed late to save the day, but overlook the disciplined and collective coordination that would have prevented the crisis in the first place. Performance conversations begin to feel like personal threats rather than shared calibration. Visibility edges out contribution, and underneath much of it sits our old pal, anxiety.
Research on social comparison theory by psychologist Leon Festinger, and later extended in contemporary social media studies, shows that constant exposure to curated success increases comparison behaviour. And comparison fuels insecurity, which narrows the focus toward self-protection. When leaders feel perpetually evaluated, they protect reputation. When employees feel constantly compared, they guard status. When attention narrows to self-preservation, collective awareness declines.
Belonging research consistently shows that strong social connection predicts wellbeing and performance. When connection weakens, anxiety increases. And when anxiety increases, collaboration suffers. It becomes a reinforcing loop. More comparison, more self-focus, less collective trust, and more anxiety.
We are social pack animals, and evolutionary psychology is clear on this point. Human survival historically depended on cooperation, shared labour, and mutual protection. “Every person for themselves” has never been a sustainable survival strategy. And yet culturally, here we are.
WHY THIS MATTERS FOR ORGANIZATIONAL PERFORMANCE
If you look at Edelman’s annual Trust Barometer, you’ll see just how shaky institutional trust has become across Western democracies, including here in Canada. Trust is not abstract; it's a performance variable. When trust declines, decision-making slows, innovation drops, and defensive behaviours increase.
McKinsey has done some interesting research using their Organizational Health Index which shows that companies scoring highest on shared direction and collective accountability are significantly more likely to outperform their peers financially.
When leaders optimize for personal recognition over shared outcomes, there are always telltale signs. See if any of these sound familiar: silo protection increases, succession planning weakens, cross-functional friction grows, innovation slows as risk becomes reputational, and burnout rises as individuals feel they must constantly prove their value.
Think back to that leadership meeting that felt like a rehearsal gone wrong. A real orchestra is disciplined, coordinated in their desire to create something collectively, and anchored in a shared purpose. Musicians spend years learning not just how to play, but how to listen. They watch the conductor. They track subtle shifts in dynamics, and soften when another section carries the melody. They know when their role is to lead and when their role is to support. And everyone is playing from the same score.
When that discipline disappears, and each musician pushes for the spotlight, the result is chaotic noise. Volume replaces harmony, timing fractures, and the piece loses its shape. In organizations, the same thing happens in the absence of shared intent and collective restraint. Having a team of strong soloists doesn't create better performance; it creates distortion.
THE CULTURAL WAKE-UP CALL
This 'me-first' culture we're witnessing reflects a broader cultural current that's been building for years. As leaders, we decide which behaviours get reinforced, so if we reward individual heroics over collective stewardship, we accelerate the drift. Corporate incentives tied to individual performance often create counterproductive behaviours, damage relationships and create burnout in their wake. Why would we want to reward the amplification of personal brand more than enterprise contribution?
When we prioritize what is individually visible over what advances a shared objective, we make our values unmistakable: in effect, our metrics and incentives teach people that personal exposure matters more than collective impact. Left unchecked, that lesson becomes the culture.
This reaches far beyond workplace harmony. Organizations that can't coordinate beyond individual ambition struggle and even collapse when conditions tighten. And most leaders I work with can feel that tightening in their bones. The margin for error is thinner, decisions travel faster, and reputational consequences land harder. You can feel it in your calendar, in your inbox, in the pace of change your teams are absorbing. This moment in time demands that we think beyond ourselves and act for the good of the whole.
Prioritizing the collective good is key to institutional resilience, and yet, much of our development energy still tilts toward individual visibility and positioning. Far less attention goes to teaching leaders how to share power, hold tension, or step back so the whole can move forward.
A corporate culture that prizes the soloist over the symphony eventually forgets how to play together. And as complexity accelerates around us, losing that collective capacity carries real consequences for trust and performance. A room full of screeching soloists creates one hell of a cacophonous noise. But beautiful music happens when every player focuses on contributing to the collective whole.
YOUR COACHING CHALLENGE: 30-MINUTE LEADERSHIP DISCUSSION GUIDE
Share this article with your peers and leader, and put it on the agenda for your next weekly meeting. Use the handy discussion guide below to have a conversation about how this shows up in your organization, and how you might address some of the challenges that come along with it.
Facilitation Guidance
• Allocate 30 minutes for the discussion, and frame it as a curious, blame-free exploration of the topic
• Encourage candour without defensiveness
• Capture patterns and themes, not names
PART 1: OBSERVATION
Where do we see “me-first” behaviour inside our own organization?
What behaviours are we currently rewarding that may unintentionally reinforce individual over collective thinking?
Where do we see personal brand overtaking enterprise stewardship?
PART 2: IMPACT
4. How is this affecting cross-functional trust?
5. Where has anxiety or reputational fear limited collaboration?
6. What is the cost to performance when we protect our own metrics rather than the shared outcome?
PART 3: SELF-EXAMINATION
7. In what ways might I personally be reinforcing individual recognition over shared responsibility?
8. What would it look like for our team to operate more like an orchestra and less like competing soloists?
If you see any of the following behaviours, gently guide participants back to the discussion objectives:
Leaders defending territory more than strategy
Reluctance to share credit
Hesitation to challenge peers for fear of optics
Metrics optimized locally but not globally
High visibility, low cohesion
Close the discussion by asking: What is one behaviour we will experiment with and consciously shift over the next quarter, to strengthen the “we”?
If you or your leadership team want help in facilitating these important cultural conversations in your organization, reach out for a free exploratory conversation at www.leslierohonczy.com.