Consider the inventory of your professional formation. The MBA with its case studies and frameworks. The early manager who modeled a particular style of authority. The competency framework used in your first serious performance review. The 360 feedback that told you to work on executive presence. The three-dayleadership program to help you be more strategic.
These are real. They have had real effects. But hold them alongside a different kind of inventory: the experiences that never appeared on a development plan. The failures that reconfigured your relationship with risk. The colleague whose trust you broke and couldn’t repair. The loss that altered your understanding of what matters.
Most senior leaders can give a sophisticated account of the leader they were developed to be. Leaders have a harder time describing the leader they became through accumulated experiences, complete with wounds, compromises and unexamined beliefs.
Knowing the difference between your designed self and formed self has a direct bearing on how you make decisions, how you show up for the people you lead, and what kind of organization you are building.
The Designed Self
Leadership development operates on an additive model of the person. It layers on competencies, frameworks, behavioral tools, and self-awareness techniques. What it rarely pauses to ask is: who is already here, before any of this begins?
The psychologist Robert Kegan spent decades mapping the stages through which adults develop the structures they use to make meaning of their experience. His central finding, documented in the landmark In Over Our Heads (1994), was that genuine adult development is not primarily a process of acquiring new skills or knowledge. It is a process of transforming the meaning-making structures through which we interpret ourselves, our relationships, and the world. Kegan called this vertical development, distinguishing it sharply from the horizontal accumulation of capabilities that most leadership programs are designed to produce.
Horizontal development makes a leader more proficient within their existing way of seeing the world. Vertical development changes the way they see the world. The former is what executive education largely delivers. The latter is what experience, particularly difficult, disorienting, identity-challenging experience, tends to produce, when it is processed rather than simply lived.
The designed leader, then, is the product of horizontal accumulation. They can present to a board and facilitate a strategy retreat. They understand their DiSC profile. They know which behaviors they are being evaluated on. This is all valuable to a leader but is different to understanding their values, the beliefs that drive their decisions under pressure, and the unintentional relational patterns they recreate.
The Experiences That Formed You
The narrative psychologist Dan McAdams has spent three decades studying how people construct identity through the stories they tell about their own lives. His research, summarized in The Stories We Live By (1993), demonstrates that identity is not a fixed inner structure but an ongoing narrative construction. We are, in significant part, a product of the stories we tell about ourselves, particularly the scenes we return to, the turning points we think of as meaningful, and the characters who shaped our sense of trust, leadership, loss, and failure.
For example, early encounters with authority shape a leader’s relationship with power. The role someone learned to play in their family of origin, the responsible one, the peacemaker, the achiever, the one who managed the emotional weather of the household, tends to show up consistently in their leadership, despite years of executive development.
Failure also carries a weight in shaping leaders. Not the version polished for interviews, but the actual eventsthat changed their relationship with certainty and made them more cautious or more decisive. Organizational psychologist Karl Weick observed that sensemaking, the process by which people construct meaning from ambiguous events, is retrospective: we understand what happened by the story we construct after the fact. The stories leaders construct about their failures are among the most consequential narratives they carry.
Losses and bereavements belong in this inventory too. Not because grief is a leadership development tool, but because experiences that interrupt the momentum of a career and force a genuine reckoning with what matters tend to produce durable shifts in values and priorities, even though these are rarely articulated. The leader who has been through a serious illness, or lost someone central to their life, often reports a reprioritizing, a changed relationship with urgency and legacy. People who undergo significant adversity and who are supported in processing it rather than getting past it often report a genuine expansion of perspective, relationship quality, and sense of what is possible, which feeds into their leadership (Tedeschi and Calhoun, 1996).
The Parts That Weren’t Chosen
Every leader carries a set of beliefs, assumptions, and relational patterns that were formed before they knew they were forming them. About whether the world is fundamentally safe or threatening. About whether people are trustworthy by default or require management. About whether their own worth is conditional on their performance. These are the residue of early experiences, operating largely below conscious awareness and rarely explored during leadership development programs.
John Bowlby’s attachment theory, subsequently extended into adult contexts by Mary Main and Kim Bartholomew, provides a useful frame here. Attachment patterns, the strategies people develop in early life to manage proximity to caregivers, do not disappear at adulthood. They reorganize themselves around the relationships that matter most in adult life, including professional ones. We see these attachment strategies come to life in the leader who cannot tolerate dependence from their team members, the leader whoexperiences close collaboration as a threat to their autonomy, or the leader who responds to criticism with a disproportionate emotional charge.
In his book, Why Smart Executives Fail (2003), Sydney Finkelstein identified a recurring pattern in high-profile executives. The leaders who failed most expensively were not, in general, the least intelligent or least experienced. They were often among the most capable in their fields. What distinguished them was a cluster of master of the universe habits, the belief that their own perceptions were more reliable than data, that the rules others operated by did not apply to them, and that challenge from below was a problem of disloyalty rather than a source of useful information. These habits were not random character flaws. They were the logical extensions of behaviors reinforced by success across an entire career, until they calcified into failures.
Why This Matters
The leader who cannot distinguish between their designed self and their formed self is more likely to recreate relational patterns without recognizing them. More likely to make their own unresolved material someone else’s problem. More likely to respond to the present through the lens of the past, for example hearing a challenge as a threat, reading disagreement as disloyalty, experiencing a direct report’s success as a commentary on their own adequacy.
Manfred Kets de Vries, whose work on the psychodynamics of leadership spans four decades, has documented the ways leaders’ unresolved inner conflicts become ingrained in organizational culture. In The Leadership Mystique (2001), he describes the process by which a leader’s personal preoccupations become the preoccupations of the organization itself, embedded in decisions about structure, risk, talent, and communication. The organization shaped by an anxious leader looks different from the one shaped by a narcissistic executive. Neither is shaped by the leader’s stated intentions. Both are shaped subconsciously.
In her work on self-awareness, Tasha Eurich found that while 95% of people believe themselves to be self-aware, only 10-15% actually meet the criteria. The gap between perceived and actual self-knowledge is not evenly distributed. It tends to widen with seniority, as the conditions for providing corrective feedback progressively erode.
Toward a Different Kind of Self-Knowledge
Leaders who are interested in knowing themselves beyond a three-adjective description of their leadership style can work through the practices below. They are not a program. They do not need to be done in sequence, and they do not need to be done all at once. What they share is a direction of attention: inward and backward, rather than outward and forward.
Explore your past
Set aside ninety minutes alone to work through four questions in sequence, writing down your answers.
- What is the earliest experience you can recall of someone in authority behaving in a way that felt either deeply right or deeply wrong? What did you conclude from the experience about power?
- Identify the professional failure you have most thoroughly repackaged into a learning story. Now set the learning story aside. What actually happened? What did it cost you? What did you quietly decide about yourself in the aftermath? How is that decision still governing the way you behave today?
- Who in your working life have you been unable to reach, for example a team member you failed or a relationship you couldn't repair? What does the way you handled that situation tell you about the limits of your leadership?
- What experience, inside or outside your career, permanently changed what you understood to matter?How has that change shown up in your decisions?
Use the attachment lens to identify your pressure signature.
There are three broad attachment patterns worth knowing. Under pressure, leaders with an anxious attachment style tend to over-communicate, seek reassurance, and interpret ambiguous signals as confirmation of threat. Leaders with an avoidant style tend to withdraw, become self-reliant to a fault, and experience team members' needs as intrusions. Leaders with a disorganized pattern (often associated with unresolved loss or early relational disruption) can oscillate unpredictably between the two, creating confusion in the people around them.
Think of the last three occasions when you were under genuine pressure. For each one, answer these questions:
- What did you do first?
- What did you most need from the people around you?
- Did you ask for what you needed or did you suppress it?
- What story did you tell yourself about the other people involved?
Run a values audit
First, take your organization's stated values or your own leadership principles and for each one, identify a specific decision you made in the last six months in which holding that value came at a real cost. If you cannot identify one, that is information. Either the value has not been tested, or it was quietly set aside when tested and you have not noticed.
Second, take a blank page and complete these two sentences as many times as you can in five minutes:
- I would walk away from a role rather than...
- I would take a significant professional risk to protect...
The leaders who know this material before a crisis do not spend the crisis reconstructing their integrity under fire. They already know where they stand.
4. Commission a specific kind of conversation, not a 360.
Identify one person who has observed your leadership closely for at least two years and whose judgment you respect. Do not pick someone who reports to you or whose approval matters to you professionally. Ask them for a single, uninterrupted conversation. Before you meet, send them three questions in writing so they have time to think rather than react:
- When I am under real pressure, what do I do that I seem unaware of?
- What have you observed me doing repeatedly that you have never directly told me?
- If you were coaching someone who worked closely with me, what would you tell them to watch for?
In the conversation, your only job is to listen and take notes. Not to respond, not to provide context, not to explain. After the conversation, before you speak to anyone about what was said, write one paragraph: what in that conversation did I already half-know, but have ignored? That half-knowledge is already operating in your leadership. The conversation has given you permission to see it.
The Inventory, Revisited
Return to the opening inventory. The MBA. The 360. The competency framework. They are real, and they matter. But consider what they share: they are oriented forward and outward. They ask what you need to acquire, what gaps you need to close, and what the organization needs you to become.
The four practices above point in a different direction. Inward and backward, not as a retreat from leadership, but as the precondition for leading from solid ground. To name the pattern you revert to under pressure. To know what you would walk away from before a crisis demands the answer in real time. Leaders who do this work tend to stand out for their clarity and consistency.
References
Bartholomew, K., & Horowitz, L. M. (1991). Attachment styles among young adults: A test of a four-category model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61(2), 226–244.
Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss, Vol. 1: Attachment. Basic Books.
Eurich, T. (2017). Insight: The Surprising Truth About How Others See Us, How We See Ourselves, and Why the Answers Matter More Than We Think. Crown Business.
Finkelstein, S. (2003). Why Smart Executives Fail: And What You Can Learn from Their Mistakes. Portfolio/Penguin.
Kegan, R. (1994). In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life. Harvard University Press.
Kegan, R., & Lahey, L. L. (2009). Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization. Harvard Business Press.
Kets de Vries, M. F. R. (2001). The Leadership Mystique: A User’s Manual for the Human Enterprise. Financial Times/Prentice Hall.
Main, M., Kaplan, N., & Cassidy, J. (1985). Security in infancy, childhood, and adulthood: A move to the level of representation. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 50(1-2), 66–104.
McAdams, D. P. (1993). The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self. Guilford Press.
Tedeschi, R. G., & Calhoun, L. G. (1996). The Posttraumatic Growth Inventory: Measuring the positive legacy of trauma. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 9(3), 455–471.
Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in Organizations. Sage Publications.
