Week 9 Day 2: The Galvanizer's Curse -- Lighting Fires You Do Not Tend

Galvanizing is the genius of rallying people around an idea. Galvanizers are magnetic -- they create energy, excitement, and buy-in. But galvanizing is not sustaining. The rally is the spark, not the engine. Some of the most frustrating leadership patterns I have seen come from Galvanizing-genius leaders who mistake their ability to excite people for their ability to sustain them.

I worked with a CEO who was a textbook Galvanizer. Every all-hands meeting was electric. He would paint a vision of the future that made you want to run through walls. People left those meetings buzzing. Then weeks would pass with no follow-up, no structure, no resource allocation to turn the vision into reality. The next all-hands would introduce a slightly different vision -- still exciting, still compelling, but subtly different from the last one. After eighteen months, his senior leadership team had learned to filter his enthusiasm. They called it the '72-hour rule': do not act on anything the CEO says for 72 hours, because by then he will either have forgotten it or replaced it with something new. That filter was a rational adaptation to an unreliable signal. But it also meant that when he had a genuinely important strategic insight, it got the same delayed response as his throwaway ideas. The cost of the Galvanizer's Curse is not just abandoned projects -- it is a team that stops believing their leader's enthusiasm signals real commitment.

The pattern described here maps to what organizational psychologists call the 'charismatic leadership paradox,' documented by Vergauwe et al. (2018) in the Journal of Applied Psychology. Their research, analyzing data from 306 leaders, found a curvilinear relationship between charisma and leadership effectiveness -- moderate charisma predicted the highest effectiveness, while very high charisma predicted declining effectiveness. The mechanism is exactly the pattern described: highly charismatic (Galvanizing-genius) leaders generate excessive enthusiasm that creates misalignment between inspiration and execution capacity. Conger (1990) identified this as a specific failure mode in charismatic leadership, where the leader's vision-casting ability outstrips the organization's ability to act. The solution, documented by Antonakis et al. (2016), is not to reduce charisma but to pair it with what they call 'instrumental leadership' -- the pragmatic, follow-through-oriented behaviors that translate vision into systems. In Working Genius terms, this means the Galvanizing leader must intentionally partner with Tenacity and Enablement geniuses to create the sustaining structure their natural enthusiasm cannot provide. Research by Collins and Porras in 'Built to Last' reinforces this: visionary companies are not led by visionary individuals alone -- they are led by complementary leadership teams where vision and execution are structurally coupled.