Leadership Success Pattern #2

Henrik, a senior leader I work with had built a strong organisation over many years. The culture reflected his standards. The meetings reflected his way of thinking. The people who advanced often resembled him in how they communicated, prioritised, and solved problems.

For a long time, that worked.

He was decisive, highly available, and proud of solving problems quickly. If a process broke down, he stepped in. If people were stuck, he unblocked it. If a customer issue escalated, he handled it himself. His leadership created speed and commitment. It also created a pattern: the organisation learned to rely on his judgement, his interventions, and his assumptions.

Then the context changed. Expectations from younger employees shifted and AI began changing workflows and judgement demands. The organisation grew. The outside world became less predictable. The same leadership patterns that had once created strength now began to reproduce dependency, firefighting, and inconsistency. As one of the executives noted in my research, “working in a strong and embedded culture can make it extremely difficult to shift the needle when the culture is no longer fit for purpose.”

What changed the situation was not a new slogan about culture. It was that Henrik realised he had to change two things in his own leadership.

First, he had to stop treating firefighting as a sign of commitment and start role modelling disciplined use of processes. Second, he had to empower more decisions downward to avoid reproducing his own assumptions in every important issue.

That is why “just be yourself” is incomplete leadership advice.

Authenticity matters. But authenticity is not the same as leading from habit, preference, or personality. Authenticity is better understood as something relational: trust built through genuine interest and care, fair treatment, consistent principles, predictable behaviour, and frequent quality exchanges. As my research confirmed, “Trust builds through frequent quality exchanges and converts into perceived authenticity.”

That is an important distinction. It means authenticity is not a fixed trait. It is accumulated social capital that translates into followership. And it means something else: adapting your leadership is not becoming fake.

In The Contextual Leader, leadership is defined as intentional behaviour exercised to influence others to realise the organisation’s intentions. So the starting point for leadership should not be:How do I stay fully true to my natural style? It should be: What does the organisation now need from my leadership?

That is the first relevant consideration for us as leaders: intentions. What performance, collaboration, and cultural qualities are we actually trying to strengthen?

The second is hidden standards. Where have my own preferences quietly become the default definition of good leadership, good work, or good collaboration? This was where Henrik woke up and where many leaders go wrong. They confuse what feels natural with what is effective. A leader who prefers speed may unintentionally reward fast responses over sound judgement. A leader who values autonomy may underprovide coordination. A leader who is used to solving problems personally may keep firefighting deviations from process — and teach the organisation to do the same.

That may work for a while. But in a growing organisation, the same pattern often undermines efficiency, learning, and consistency. The better move is deliberate leadership development. Not development as a private self-improvement project, but as a way of creating different results.

A leader should continuously work on 1–2 aspects of his own leadership because he wants to alter his influence on the organisation. He may decide to empower more in order to stop reproducing his own assumptions and let better thinking emerge. Or he may decide to stop tolerating firefighting as the default reaction pattern and instead role model disciplined adherence to process, because growth now requires reliability more than heroic improvisation.

That brings in the third consideration: authenticity drivers. Am I building trust through fairness, consistency, care, clarity, and reliable follow-through while I make that shift?

And the fourth: alignment. Do our structures, processes, metrics, culture, people composition, and leadership approach reinforce the behaviour the organisation now needs — or merely the behaviour I am most comfortable with?

This is why self-awareness is not enough. Leaders need deliberate self-development tied to organisational purpose. What got you here will not necessarily take the organisation where it needs to go. Not because your values are wrong, but because your old assumptions, habits, and preferred patterns may no longer fit the context.

Good leaders are authentic. But they do not make themselves the template.

They deliberately develop their leadership to produce stronger organisational behaviour, better fit the shifting environment, and help the organisation realise its intentions. So perhaps the more useful question is not whether you are being yourself enough. Instead: Which 1–2 changes in your own leadership would create the organisational response your context now requires?