The Quiet Danger in Wanting to Be a Great Leader

Photo by Steve A Johnson on Unsplash

There is a quiet danger in the pursuit of becoming a great leader.

Not in the ambition itself — the ambition is good, necessary, worth honouring. The danger comes later. When that ambition has been accompanied by enough books, enough frameworks, enough scrutiny of how leadership is supposed to look — and not enough permission to remain a human being while doing it.

I see a version of this often. Someone steps into a leadership role with genuine care, real commitment, and a sincere desire to do it well. They read widely. They reflect seriously. They hold themselves to a high standard. And somewhere in that process, without quite noticing, they begin to turn on themselves.

Every ordinary human moment becomes evidence for the prosecution.

A conversation where their attention drifted. A meeting where they felt flat rather than fired up. A moment of impatience they couldn't quite conceal. These things happen to everyone. But for the earnest, self-scrutinising new leader, they are treated as failures — proof of the gap between who they are and who they think a leader ought to be.

The tribunal we build inside ourselves

What I find striking is how quickly the literature itself becomes the tribunal. You absorb the standards. You internalise the ideal. And then you hold yourself against it, constantly, without mercy.

There is no shortage of material with which to build this tribunal. Leadership books have been published at a rate that suggests no one can quite agree on what good leadership looks like — and yet each one arrives with the confidence of settled science. Be vulnerable. Be decisive. Be consistent. Be adaptable. Listen deeply. Project certainty. The instructions multiply, and in doing so subtly communicate that the natural, unreconstructed self is not sufficient. That you must become something other than what you are.

The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott spent much of his career thinking about what he called the True Self and the False Self. His observation — made in the context of therapy but applicable far beyond it — was that when we feel under scrutiny, when we sense that our natural responses are not acceptable, we begin to construct a performance of ourselves. A self that meets expectations. The True Self goes underground. The performance continues. And the person inside becomes progressively less accessible, even to themselves.

Leadership development does not set out to do this. But it can, inadvertently, achieve

exactly that.

What is actually happening

A pattern I come back to often in these conversations: when I ask someone to set aside what they think a leader should do in a given moment — and to simply describe what was actually happening for them — something shifts.

Often, they were tired. Or bored. Or simply human in a situation that demanded something inhuman of them.

And they hadn't been giving themselves any latitude for that.

We don't talk enough about this in leadership: that the brain is, at its core, a novelty-seeking organ. Sustained attention is not generated by willpower — it is allocated by the brain based on what it anticipates learning. When a situation is familiar, when the territory has been covered before, the brain does what any sensible system does: it economises. Distraction in that context is not a character flaw. It is a feature.

The same is true of impatience, of flatness, of the days when connection just doesn't come easily. These are not indictments of your leadership. They are the entirely ordinary rhythms of being a person.

The leaders I work with who are hardest on themselves are often trying to override their own nature. And calling the inability to do so a professional failing.

The harder you reach

The poet Keats coined a phrase I find myself returning to often in this work. He called it Negative Capability — the capacity to remain in uncertainty and doubt "without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." He considered it the mark of a genuinely creative and sensitive intelligence.

What the self-critical leader tends to do is the opposite. They reach — hard — for the right answer, the correct response, the behaviour that will vindicate them. They refuse to sit in the discomfort of not knowing whether they're doing it right.

Simone Weil, the philosopher and mystic, wrote something quietly devastating about attention. She argued that real attention is not an act of will. It is, in fact, the suspension of will — a kind of open, receptive waiting rather than a muscular effort of focus. The harder you try to pay attention, the more you push away the very thing you're reaching for.

This applies, I think, to leadership more broadly. The harder you try to perform presence, care, authority — the more hollow it tends to feel. To you, and to the people around you.

What people actually feel

There is something important here for anyone in the early stages of leading — and honestly, for anyone at any stage.

The pursuit of becoming a great leader is a worthy one. The reading, the reflection, the honest self-examination — these matter. But they can tip, imperceptibly, into something else. A project of self-overriding. Of becoming so preoccupied with how you are leading that you lose touch with the part of you that actually knows how to connect.

People do not, in my experience, primarily feel the leadership theory you have internalised. They feel whether you are real. Whether you are present in the way that presence actually means — not effortful and performed, but genuinely available.

The most useful shift I see in these conversations is not the acquisition of a new technique. It is someone deciding to hold themselves to high standards and grant themselves the latitude their own humanity requires. To still care — but to stop punishing themselves for being a person while doing it.

That, in my view, is real leadership development.

The standard worth holding

The irony is this: the leaders people remember rarely seemed to be performing leadership. They seemed to be fully themselves — with all the gaps and uncertainties that implies. The authority didn't come from having transcended their humanity. It came from not being ashamed of it.

There is a version of growth that asks you to become something other than what you are. And there is another version — harder, in some ways — that asks you to understand yourself well enough that you can lead from your own nature rather than constantly against it.

The training wheels, eventually, have to come off. Not because you have mastered all the frameworks. But because you have learned to trust yourself enough to move without them.

If any of this resonates — if you're somewhere in the gap between who you think a leader should be and who you actually are — I'd be glad to talk. That space, in my experience, is exactly where the most useful work tends to happen.

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Justin Sheehan is an executive coach working with leaders, career changers, and people navigating meaning and direction in life.