The Perils of Epicaricacy: A Quiet Leadership Instinct I Had to Unlearn. I didn’t recognize it the first time it happened. A competitor I knew reasonably well lost a key regulatory approval. Nothing dramatic, no headlines, no scandal. Just a delayed expansion that quietly stalled their momentum. I remember reading the update on my phone between meetings. My first reaction wasn’t concern.
It was relief. I didn’t smile. I didn’t say anything out loud. But internally, something loosened. Pressure eased. The bar felt lower for a moment. And that’s what bothered me later, not the thought itself, but how natural it felt. There’s a word for that reaction: epicaricacy. Most people know it as schadenfreude—taking pleasure, however small, in someone else’s misfortune. I used to think this was a personal flaw you either had or didn’t. Over time, I’ve come to see it differently. In senior leadership roles, especially in competitive and regulated environments, this instinct is surprisingly easy to acquire and dangerously hard to notice. Not because leaders are malicious. But because the conditions quietly reward it. I know some will agree and others won’t. But this exist.
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Where It Creeps In?
Leadership, at scale, is lonely in specific ways. You’re accountable for outcomes you only partially control. Decisions compound slowly. Feedback arrives late and distorted. And the stakes -reputational, financial, personal all keep rising. In that environment, comparison becomes a coping mechanism.
If someone else is struggling, it creates a momentary sense of balance. At least it’s not just us.
If a peer’s strategy fails, it reassures you that your own might be right or at least less wrong.
That emotional release is subtle. It rarely announces itself as cruelty. More often, it disguises itself as professionalism, realism, or even competitiveness.
I’ve seen it play out in small ways:
- A half-joke about another team’s miss.
- A dismissive comment when a partner stumbles.
- A leadership meeting where a failure is analysed with just a bit too much satisfaction.
None of this looks dramatic. That’s the problem.
The First Cost: What Your Team Learns When You’re Not Paying Attention
People are exceptionally good at reading leaders. Not what they say, what they react to.
I once worked with an executive who never openly mocked failure. But when someone missed badly, his curiosity disappeared. His body language changed. Meetings got shorter. Follow-ups stopped. Nobody needed this spelled out. The signal was clear: “Don’t be the person who gives me a reason to disengage“.
Over time, the team adjusted. They took fewer risks. They delayed surfacing problems. They framed updates carefully, optimizing for tone rather than truth.
Performance didn’t collapse overnight. In fact, it looked stable for a while. Then innovation slowed. Decisions became conservative. And by the time leadership realized something was off, the organization had already trained itself to hide early warnings.
That’s one of the quiet dangers of schadenfreude in leadership: it turns failure into a social event instead of a learning input.
The Second Cost: What It Does to Your Own Judgment
This part is harder to admit.
When you start emotionally investing in other people being wrong, you narrow your own field of vision. I’ve seen leaders dismiss legitimate market shifts because they didn’t want to credit a rival’s approach. I’ve done a version of this myself, downplaying an external signal because acknowledging it would have meant admitting someone else saw it first. That’s not strategy. That’s ego management.
The irony is that in complex systems, payments, banking infrastructure, enterprise SaaS your competitor’s failure is rarely just their failure. It’s often a signal about regulation, customer behaviour, or cost structures that will eventually affect you too.
Treating those moments as entertainment instead of intelligence is expensive. You just don’t see the invoice immediately.
Why This Is So Common at the Top?
Schadenfreude persists in leadership circles not because people are callous, but because insecurity doesn’t disappear as you move up. It changes shape.
At senior levels, success is diffuse and failure is personalized. Wins are attributed to teams, timing, or market conditions. Losses stick to names. In that context, watching someone else stumble can feel stabilizing. It reassures you that the ground is shaky for everyone, not just you.
The problem is that this instinct, if left unchecked, slowly rewires how you relate to people:
- Peers become benchmarks, not collaborators.
- Setbacks become proof, not prompts.
- Culture becomes something you manage, not something you inhabit.
None of this happens overnight. It accumulates quietly, like technical debt.
What Helped Me Unlearn It (Imperfectly)
I don’t think you eliminate epicaricacy completely. I think you notice it faster and act on it sooner. Three things helped me, none of them comfortable.
First, I started paying attention to my first internal reaction, not the one I presented. If someone else’s failure brought relief instead of curiosity, that was usually a sign I was under pressure or avoiding something in my own domain.
Second, I became more deliberate about how failure was discussed around me. Not softer, just cleaner. Less theatre. Fewer side comments. More focus on causality and constraints. That meant giving up a certain kind of authority. Fear is an efficient tool. It just comes with a long tail of consequences.
Third, I forced myself to treat external failures as data. Not as validation. Asking, What broke? Under what conditions? Where are we exposed?
That shift alone changed the tone of several leadership conversations. None of this made leadership easier. It made it more honest.
A Word About “Empathy”
Empathy gets overused in leadership writing. This isn’t about being warm or indulgent. It’s about recognizing that complex systems fail for reasons that are rarely visible from the outside, and that today’s struggling executive is often operating under tomorrow’s constraints.
Leaders who appear generous in how they interpret failure are often just more realistic about how markets actually work.They know the wheel turns through experience.
Why This Matters More Now?
The next few years will be harder for most leadership teams. Capital is tighter. Regulation is heavier. Tolerance for error is lower. In those conditions, the temptation to quietly enjoy someone else’s stumble will increase. It will feel earned. Even rational.
That’s exactly when it does the most damage. Organizations that hold up will be the ones where bad news travels fast, learning beats blame, and leaders resist the cheap emotional relief of comparison.
Schadenfreude doesn’t destroy companies directly. It just makes them slower, quieter, and less honest, right up until they need those qualities most.
Disclaimer: This article reflects professional insights based on publicly available information and anonymized industry experience. The views expressed are personal and do not constitute financial, regulatory, or investment advice.