Main Character Energy

In 2024, Y Combinator's Paul Graham wrote an essay about "founder mode," the idea that leaders should stay close to the business and impose their vision directly. Graham was diagnosing something real: too many leaders drift away from the day-to-day trenches of their organization. His fixes were sensible, like holding cross function/cross level meetings and listening deeply. He also warned that once founder mode caught on, people would start misusing it.

They did. For plenty of leaders, founder mode now means their vision should be the entire story of the organization, pushed down from the top. Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki, writing in Harvard Business Review, calls this what it is: main-character energy, the self-absorbed social media trend, wearing a suit.

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, main character energy is an informal Internet expression for self-assured bearing or behavior. The phrase is used both to compliment self-confidence as well as criticize its excesses. 

Research shows that the more powerful people are, the more stuck they get in their own perspective. A leader in ‘main character energy’ mode isn’t self-reflective enough to see this and fight the tendency. In fact, often they celebrate it. Gallup global polls and surveys suggest that when employees have a leader who doesn’t listen and is self-absorbed, trust and performance worsen.

As for the leader themselves, Zaki notes that persistent self-focus is linked to more depression and loneliness over time. He also points to Gallup's global workplace survey, where manager engagement fell from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025. As main-character energy has risen, leaders' connection to their own jobs has slipped.

Zaki's larger point, drawn from decades of his own work, is that we think we flourish by focusing on ourselves when we actually flourish by serving others.

So what is the remedy? The alternative is supporting-character energy.  According to Don Miguel Ruiz, “The same way that you are the main character of your story, you are only a secondary character in everybody else’s story.” 

Zaki suggests two practices:

1. Get aggressively curious (listen: what do their lives look and feel like), and,

2. Help people “job craft” (connecting peoples work to their values, purpose and ‘why’).

Humble, supportive leader/mentors don't push power onto others, and that's exactly why they're powerful.