We'd love to hear from you! Click this link to text us feedback or to share your thoughts.

Meta Description:
Loyalty is often treated as a virtue without examination. Scott Smith explores how misplaced loyalty quietly undermines fairness, distorts judgment, and leads leaders away from just outcomes over time.

🎙️ Episode Summary

“It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity.” — Seneca, Letters to Lucilius

Loyalty feels virtuous, which is why leaders rarely question it.

But not all loyalty is just.

In this episode, Scott Smith examines a subtle leadership failure mode: when loyalty remains fixed while reality changes. Leaders often stay loyal to people, projects, or habits long after they stop serving fairness or alignment. Not out of fear—but out of obligation, history, or misplaced responsibility.

Stoic justice is not sentiment. It is proportion.
Attention given where it is actually due.

Over time, misplaced loyalty protects comfort instead of truth, familiarity instead of fairness. High performers adjust quietly. Standards blur. Alignment thins. And by the time the imbalance becomes visible, the cost has already been paid.

Justice rarely collapses in a single decision.
It erodes through unexamined loyalty.

🧠 What You’ll Learn Today

• Why loyalty often goes unquestioned in leadership
• How misplaced loyalty creates internal conflict and misalignment
• The Stoic understanding of justice as proportion, not kindness
• How fairness erodes quietly over time
• Why leaders lose alignment by protecting what no longer fits

🔍 Tags

Stoicism, Seneca, Leadership, Justice, Loyalty, Judgment, Decision Making, Authority, Inner Strategy

Support the show

—

The Stoic Inner Strategy is your daily shortform podcast—your blueprint for modern leadership rooted in timeless truths.

Hosted by Scott Smith, founder of Akhada Consulting, co-founder of ChatWorx, and host of The Outsourcing Blueprint podcast, this series blends ancient Stoic wisdom with real-world business strategy to help you lead with clarity, manage both your teams and yourself effectively, and move with purpose.

No fluff. Just focused, grounded insight you can apply right now.

🔹 Subscribe to the show and leave a review if today’s insight helped you lead with more clarity and strength.
🔹 Connect with Scott at akhadaconsulting.com or on LinkedIn.

Follow for daily episodes. New drops every weekday morning.

Memento Mori — so live today to your fullest!