I suspect that leadership is unlikely to be found in places with at will employment. That is because much of the work of leadership is learning how to lead different personalities and align people with different goals. In a company with at will employment there is no need to do that. You simply get rid of anyone who doesn't naturally fit in with your preferred personality.
My company made it very clear I was being hired in an at will state when I was taking the job. They brought it up many, many times.
People are not fired every time there is a personality clash or a new leader with a different style. There is no way the company could run with that much turnover and brain drain on a regular basis. People need to learn how to work with all kids of people and personalities… especially if they are working in a leadership role. If a leader feels the need to fire everyone they don’t get along with, they have no business being in that role.
A good leader will figure out how to get the most out of each person on the team, not demand they all fit in a certain mold or get out. The boss I had who got the most out of me figured out that if I was interested in a project I would work 12 hour days on it and really go the extra mile, while if I wasn’t interested, I’d drag my feet and procrastinate. If he saw me pushing something off, or with more experience, if I didn’t immediately jump in with both feet, he’d give the project to someone else who would slog through the projects I hated, but flounder on the ones I excelled at. It’s all about resource management, and to do that, there needs to be some variety in the resources. Everyone has different strengths and weaknesses and it’s up to the leaders to align the people in a way where the strengths shine and the weaknesses are supported.
If there's one thing my nearly 10 years of capitalism has taught me, it's that many businesses can handle significantly more malfunction and rot than you could possibly imagine was tenable without going under. They might not soar, certainly, but "the business still exists, so it cannot be that bad" is just simply not valid reasoning.
I suspect you are wrong on the first part, at least for large technology companies.
I do agree with the view of what is needed in practice to be a good leader.
However, i think your assumption there is no need to do that is wrong.
Take an area like the bay area - it has about 120k software engineers. This is not a small number.
Even so, most companies the scale/size of Google, Apple, Facebook, etc have, at this point, interviewed 95+% of the bay area SWE population, and most (Apple is the exception here) had done so by the time they were ~10-12 years in existence.
That is a very short time period to go through the available population, and the population does not grow that quickly.
So even if there was zero rampup time, etc, none of which were true, they can't practically afford to churn people as quickly or as randomly as you suggest because they can't replace them fast enough except at very high cost.
If you talk about something that has a much much larger available population, or companies with much smaller need it might be true.
Its not free, but it can be cheap as in the recent times. You fire/"RTO"/"manage out" the well paid engineers of yesterday and hire cheaper engineers while the market is flooded with them.
I get a lot of reader correspondence from the U.S, and the prevalence of this seems to be the same in places with at-will employment, with an added dose of terror keeping anyone from admitting they hate it.
