Who is Actually Leading When I Lead?
A program director I know once snapped at his project manager in a steering committee meeting over a two-day delay in a status update. It was a small thing. The room went quiet the way rooms do when the reaction doesn’t match the trigger. Afterwards, over coffee, he told me — unprompted — that his first boss used to humiliate him publicly for exactly this kind of lapse, twenty years earlier. He knew it. He could name it. And he still did it anyway, in a different room, to a different person, two decades later.
I’ve been sitting with that moment for a while, because it opens onto a question I keep circling: who is actually in the chair when I lead? Is it fully me — the person choosing, today, in this meeting? Or is it a committee of everything that ever happened to me, voting through my mouth before I’ve had a chance to weigh in?
The sum of what’s happened so far
Every leader carries the total of their experience into every room, whether they intend to or not. The first time I had to deliver bad news to an executive sponsor and watched the room’s temperature drop — that one afternoon shaped how carefully I choose words before delivering unwelcome updates for years afterward. None of us walks in neutral. We walk in as the running total of every meeting, every failure, every small humiliation and every quiet win we’ve already lived through, whether we can consciously recall them or not.
The wiring underneath the behaviour
Underneath experience sits something even less chosen: the actual wiring — genes, habits, the way a particular brain naturally processes threat or ambiguity. Some leaders are naturally slow to react, built that way before they ever ran a team. Others are wired for speed, for pattern-matching risk before anyone else in the room sees it, and that same wiring that makes them excellent in a crisis can make them insufferable in a status meeting where nothing is actually wrong yet. We call this “leadership style” as if it were designed. Some of it was simply issued at birth.
The thoughts that just arrive
Sit in any steering committee and watch a leader’s face shift mid-sentence — a flicker of doubt, a flash of irritation, a sudden softening — and you’re watching thoughts arrive uninvited, pulled up by some association nobody in the room can see. A comment about “resourcing constraints” lands differently on a leader who was once let go during a resourcing cut than on one who wasn’t. The thought that surfaces in response isn’t chosen in that moment. It’s summoned by a multitude of factors — memory, mood, something read that morning, a conversation from the night before — arriving fully formed before the conscious mind gets a vote.
Past, present, and the future it’s quietly shaping
Then there’s the pull of where a leader has been and where they hope to end up. A program director shaped by a career full of near-miss failures leads differently — more cautious, more prone to over-verify — than one shaped by a career of clean wins. Neither is choosing that posture fresh each morning. They’re leading out of a past that’s still writing the present, toward a future they’re hoping to shape but rarely fully control.
Accidents — the ones that landed, and the ones that missed
Some of what makes a leader who they are isn’t pattern at all. It’s accident. The vendor who happened to over-deliver on a first project and set an unrealistic benchmark for every project after. The near-disaster that almost sank a program but didn’t, because one competent person happened to be in the room that day. I know leaders whose entire risk appetite was set by a catastrophe that almost happened to them and didn’t — they spent the rest of their career governing against a disaster that, technically, never occurred. The accidents that missed us shape us almost as much as the ones that landed.
The random events that changed the direction
Alongside accident sits pure randomness — the conference you almost skipped where you met the person who later became your biggest client. The reorganisation that moved you sideways into a role you didn’t ask for, that turned out to be the making of you. None of this was planned. Most leadership biographies, told honestly, are a chain of things that happened to someone, retrofitted afterward into a story about decisions.
Places, people, and the environment working on heart and brain
And running underneath all of it — the environment. The place you were raised, the society that set the rules for what counts as strength or weakness, the parents who modelled how conflict gets handled, the friends whose approval you were chasing before you knew you were chasing it. All of this works directly on the heart and the brain, shaping what a leader notices, what they reward, what they can’t tolerate. A leader raised in a household where disagreement was dangerous will manage conflict differently, for decades, than one raised where disagreement was just Tuesday dinner conversation.
So — who am I, in the chair?
Put all of that together and the honest answer is uncomfortable: by the time any of us sits down to lead, a great deal of the leading has already been decided by forces we didn’t choose. That’s not resignation. It’s just accurate accounting.
Which raises the real question underneath the mind map: how much is actually in my control to shape my own destiny and future — and separately, how much control do the people around me actually have to become better versions of themselves? These are not the same question, and conflating them is where a lot of leadership advice goes wrong. I can work on my own reactions. I cannot simply will someone else’s transformation by explaining to them, clearly enough, why they should change. Their wiring, their accidents, their environment are running underneath their behaviour exactly as mine run underneath mine.
Self-help books, leadership lectures, good content — I still read them, still find them good company. But they’re only useful once you bring humility to them. The humility is this: truly understanding how much is actually within your control, and how much isn’t, before you decide what to do about either. Skip that step and every framework becomes another way to perform control you don’t actually have.
And this is where it stops being abstract and starts changing how a leader behaves in the room. Once you genuinely accept how much of your own reaction is inherited, not chosen — and extend the same reading to the person across the table — something like real empathy is born. Not the performative kind. The kind where you assume the defensive engineer in your team meeting isn’t being difficult on purpose, but is running a pattern laid down by a manager years before you ever met him. You still hold the standard. You still have the hard conversation. But you have it as someone who knows their own reactions weren’t fully self-authored either, so you can be gentle without going soft.
I don’t think this makes teams weaker. The teams I’ve watched operate this way — where leaders try to understand behaviour before judging it — end up more honest with each other, not less. Mistakes get surfaced faster because they aren’t immediately read as character failures. And tolerance, extended consistently enough, seems to be the actual precondition for anyone improving at all. Scale that up — team to organisation, organisation to society — and it’s not hard to see why a world with more tolerance in it would simply be a better place to try to become someone.
I don’t have a tidy resolution here, and I’m suspicious of anyone who claims one. But I keep coming back to the same question when I catch myself reacting to someone on my team, or being reacted to by someone above me: how much of this was actually chosen, by either of us — and how much of it was choosing us, long before either of us walked into the room?
