What is the problem with Cork? Is it fear?

It is not a characteristic. Great leadership is authentic leadership and it comes with varying degrees of analytical, emotional, and system intelligence.
Emotional is about self-awareness and empathy, while spiritual is the ability to decipher right from wrong. System intelligence is viewing the individual components of a situation and being able to put them together to form a bigger picture. Personality assessors call this ‘Intuition’. The intuitive ability to get organisational excellence from a task, a situation or even from a group of individuals.