The privilege and burden of leadership: nursing and the politics of promised change.

Background: Leadership in nursing is widely celebrated and heavily promoted through policy, education, and professional rhetoric. It is often framed as a pathway to influence, transformation, and organisational improvement. Yet, despite extensive investment in leadership development, the structural conditions of nursing practice characterised by resource scarcity, workforce pressures, entrenched hierarchies, and cultural dysfunction, remain largely unchanged. Nurse leaders continue to carry significant moral burden, emotional labour, and exposure within systems that frequently constrain their capacity to lead ethically and relationally.Objectives/Aims: In this paper, we argue that leadership in nursing functions not only as a role or competency, but as a powerful discourse that shapes professional identity, responsibility, and moral burden. We critically examine how leadership rhetoric individualises systemic failure, obscures structural responsibility, and intensifies moral and emotional strain for nurse leaders working within constrained systems. We propose a person-centred, relational, and solidarity-based reframing of leadership as an ethical and collective practice.Methods: Using a discursive, critical-social discussion design, this paper draw on professional experience, conceptual analysis, and purposefully selected scholarship from nursing, sociology, and organisational studies to examine leadership as discourse.Findings: Leadership discourse can function as a technology of governance, individualising systemic problems and positioning nurse leaders as personally responsible for structural failures. The emotional and moral labour of leadership, including exposure, moral injury, and loneliness, is intensified further by organisational cultures marked by under-resourcing, toxicity, and unrealistic expectations. Person-centred and solidarity-based approaches offer a counter-narrative that re-humanises leadership, resists dehumanising managerial imperatives, and grounds influence in relationality, ethical presence, and collective care.Conclusion: A critical reimagining of nursing leadership is required; one that shifts from performative, compliance-driven models toward relational, ethically resistant, person-centred practices grounded in solidarity. Such leadership affirms dignity, challenges systemic injustice, and recognises leaders themselves as persons in need of support and connection.