The unconscious leader behind every title: why holding a role title is not enough to deliver competent leadership
There’s a fallacy we carry through life: that when you become an adult, you’ll automatically know how to be one, and that when you become a leader, you’ll automatically know how to lead. Neither is true. I’ve coached founders and executives who thought they’d have it figured out by now, and are quietly disappointed, sometimes ashamed, that they don’t. I have to confess I felt the same about adulting. It was a difficult reality to face.
Like becoming an adult, becoming a leader is a lifelong process. And yet we talk about both as though they’re destinations you arrive at the moment a title changes or an age boundary is reached.
An industry built on the wrong question
Leadership in principle is one of the most analysed and least defined concepts in the modern world. There are more leadership books published in a single year than most of us could read in a lifetime, more frameworks, models and acronyms than most industries produce in a decade. Yet ask ten CEOs to define leadership in a sentence, and you’ll likely get ten different answers.
An entire industry has been built on trying to pin down an external model of leadership, and there’s a good reason for that: if we can define it, we can adopt it, and then we can’t fail. And if we do fail anyway, it isn’t our fault. We can blame the framework, or the training course or that book that promised more than it delivered.
But this is a nonsense, and a convenient one, particularly in an age of external quick fixes. It absolves us of responsibility in exactly the way blaming outward circumstances absolves us of responsibility for our own lives, ‘that person is responsible for my situation’ or ‘that opportunity was always out of reach for me’. What it conveniently leaves out is our own role in any situation.
Where leadership actually gets built
As a systems-psychodynamic coach, I work with the unconscious, the early life behaviours and ongoing patterns that shape how we show up, long before we’re consciously choosing anything. This isn’t about how externalised people or situations shape our behaviour. It’s about how our earliest experiences, internalised as models of the world, do.
It starts with parenting, or our primary care model, and the relationships within our first system: the family. That’s where authority, leadership and our role within a system were first modelled to us and where we first took up our role within the system, years before anyone handed us a job title.
As an example, imagine someone who experienced a parent as withholding, or who could only really ‘validate’ them through academic or other achievement. That person is likely to internalise a model where love, authority and worth are conditional, and to carry it entirely into the next system they enter. They may strive excessively at school, feeling the full weight not just of external expectation but an internalised feeling that achievement equals love and acceptance. That belief doesn’t stay in the classroom. It is carried with them into the workplace, where achievement becomes the only currency that counts. From the outside, this can look like drive and is often rewarded highly. It can also manifest as ruthlessness, or lacking empathy for anyone who may struggle, because on some unconscious level, struggling means a person is unworthy. What’s actually happening is a transference, an internal belief about one’s own conditional worth, projected outward onto everyone else.
What happens when that person becomes the leader
Now take that same person and hand them a promotion, or a company of their own. They’ve spent a lifetime running on an internal model built in infancy, and it isn’t a preference or a chosen behaviour, its core architecture. Their whole sense of self has been built around one equation, ‘achievement equals acceptance or more extreme, love’.
Imagine now that this leader wants to upskill themselves in their leadership role, they are after all looking to be the best in all that they do. They buy one of the thousand leadership books on the shelf. They subscribe to a podcast, follow a thought leader, yet something isn’t quite internalising for them. The issue here is that the theory describes leadership in an idealised, academic world, with no reference to the internal self to whom it is being applied. A person whose entire sense of worth is fused to success can’t easily adopt a concept on collaborative leadership, or the idea that mistakes are simply part of growth, when their internal model says otherwise.
And when we are ruled by our subconscious leader, the one without accountability it can have a detrimental effect on our workplace. The culture whilst high achieving, is short on kindness, support and psychological safety. Competitiveness rises, mistakes get hidden rather than surfaced, because surfacing them is dangerous. The environment becomes, in every meaningful sense, unsafe.
And the leader themselves rarely arrives at their own end point – the optimum place of success. They keep striving, because what they’re actually looking for was never achievement, it was the kindness, empathy and love missing from the model they built their life on. Left unexamined, this will come at a cost: personal relationships will be difficult as achievement crowds out everything else; a private, persistent sense of unworthiness even amid outward success; and, over time, the kind of health toll that comes from asking the body to sustain what the mind is unable to sustain indefinitely.
Leading 1 or Leading 100 – it doesn’t matter
None of this changes with headcount. The unconscious, internalised leader doesn’t gain clarity because a team grew from five people to fifty. It has to start with the individual, whether they’re a solo founder or the CEO of a corporation, if you haven’t worked out who your internalised leader is then chances are they will negatively impact your leadership potential.
Why find your internalised leader
Recognising the internalised leader, you’re carrying is what allows you to see your own patterns, rather than be run by them. Without that recognition, your decision making isn’t fully yours, it’s fuelled by something operating well beneath conscious awareness. Freud referred to ‘the ego not being master in its own house’ when he talked about leaving our unconscious world unexamined and it is also true for the leader and their organisation. Back to our example, a drive to succeed is not the problem, this is of course as necessary in leadership as in anything else. The problem is a drive to succeed that overrides everything else: relationships, safety, honesty about failure, because that drive is never about the organisation, or about success at all. It’s about being worthy of love.
If any of this resonates or you are interested to consider your own internalised leader then a simple starting question is worth sitting with, ‘what was modelled to you in early life in relation to what you had to do to be seen?’ And do you notice it showing up in how you lead now?
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