By Manfred Kets de Vries
Many of the challenges leaders face are timeless.
Asked what was most difficult in the world, the Greek sage Thales is said to have answered: “Know thyself.”
More than two millennia later, the advice remains as relevant as ever. Much of what drives us lies outside our awareness. Consequently, there is often a considerable gap between the leaders we believe ourselves to be, the way we actually behave, and the way others experience us.
During five decades of working with senior executives, I have watched the same leadership challenges recur.
The first is a lack of self-knowledge.
Deeply rooted behavioural patterns, unresolved conflicts, fear of failure, impostor feelings, perfectionism, and hidden anxieties can undermine even the most gifted executive. Many leaders do not fully understand their strengths, their vulnerabilities, or the emotional effect they have on others.
Without self-knowledge, leaders are condemned to repeat themselves. The same conflict reappears with different colleagues. The same defensive reaction undermines another important decision. The same fear is disguised as control, impatience, perfectionism, or excessive ambition.
Reflection helps interrupt this repetition. It narrows the distance between intention and impact, enabling leaders to become more deliberate about the influence they exert.
The second challenge is hubris.
As executives acquire power, they can become enamored of their own importance. The people around them reinforce this illusion by filtering unwelcome information and saying what they believe the leader wants to hear. As I often put it: “The moment you become a senior executive, you are surrounded by liars.”
This does not mean that everyone around the leader is deliberately dishonest. But truth begins to travel through layers of fear, ambition, diplomacy, and self-protection. People soften their language, conceal mistakes, postpone difficult conversations, and present problems in ways that protect their careers. By the time information reaches the top, it may bear little resemblance to what is actually happening below.
Power therefore creates a paradox. The more authority leaders acquire, the more information becomes available to them, and the less likely they are to hear the truth. Unless they consciously invite dissent, reward candor, and tolerate uncomfortable feedback, they may become prisoners of their own importance.
The third challenge is getting the best out of people.
Leadership means helping others move beyond what they thought they could accomplish. It requires understanding what genuinely motivates them and creating the conditions in which they can flourish.
Many leaders have little idea what drives the people around them. They assume that everyone is motivated by the same things that motivate them such as status, money, recognition, competition, purpose, autonomy, or intellectual challenge. As a result, they get it wrong.
Some micromanage and overcontrol. Others claim credit for their colleagues’ work or make themselves indispensable to every decision. Instead of expanding the capabilities of those around them, they create dependency. Their people stop taking initiative, withhold ideas, and wait to be told what to do.
The leader becomes increasingly overworked while everyone else becomes increasingly disengaged. It is a remarkably inefficient arrangement, although many executives continue to
regard it as evidence of their importance.
Effective leaders do something different. They provide direction without suffocating initiative. They set demanding expectations while giving people enough psychological safety to
experiment, make mistakes, and learn. Their success becomes visible not in how dependent others are upon them, but in how capable others become in their presence.
The fourth challenge is building an effective team.
Teams are essential, yet many function poorly. Virtual and geographically dispersed work has made genuine collaboration even more difficult. Cross-functional teams frequently become arenas for territorial conflict, competing priorities, concealed mistrust, and carefully negotiated noncooperation.
A top executive team can be an especially unnatural act. Its members are expected to collaborate with the very people against whom they may be competing for resources, influence, recognition, and succession. The colleague sitting beside them today may become tomorrow’s rival for the chief executive’s position.
Under these conditions, disagreement easily turns into a turf war. Information becomes political currency. Executives optimize their own divisions while neglecting the organization as a whole. Meetings acquire the appearance of cooperation, while the important battles take place before or afterward.
The cost of dysfunction at the top is enormous. A divided leadership team makes poorer decisions, sends contradictory signals, slows execution, and spreads confusion throughout the organisation. Employees become skilled interpreters of political weather: Which executive’s priorities matter today? Which initiative will survive? Which conflict should be avoided. And
what happens in the executive suite never stays there. It becomes everybody else’s problem.
The fifth challenge is creating a healthy organisation.
Most of us aspire to build meaningful workplaces, the kinds of places where we would be happy for our children, partners, or closest friends to work. Yet such organizations remain surprisingly rare. Too many people feel isolated, disengaged, unheard, or unfulfilled.
Organisational cultures reflect the psychology of those who lead them. An anxious executive team creates a cautious organization. A combative team teaches everyone to fight. A distrustful team produces silos. A grandiose leader encourages impression management. And a leadership group that cannot tolerate bad news will eventually stop receiving any, usually just before something goes seriously wrong.
Culture is not primarily what an organisation declares on its website. It is what people learn they must do to survive. They notice who gets promoted, which mistakes are forgiven, what cannot be discussed, and how leaders behave under pressure. These repeated signals teach people far more than any list of corporate values.
More than 35 years ago, I designed the leadership program now called The Leadership Mystique to address these recurring challenges.
Its purpose is to develop reflective leaders, people capable not only of acting, but of pausing long enough to understand what may be driving their actions. Reflection does not mean indecision or endless introspection. It creates the internal space needed to choose a response instead of automatically repeating an old pattern.
The programme centres on the actual challenges its participants face. Leaders revisit the experiences that shaped how they exercise authority and test their self-understanding against the way others experience them. The objective is not introspection for its own sake. Insight matters only when it produces visible changes in behaviour.
Three elements drive this process.
The mirror: Personal storytelling and candid feedback from peers and colleagues reveal the distance between intention and impact. Leaders begin to recognise how their recurring
assumptions, fears, and defences affect the people around them. The mirror is not always flattering. That is precisely why it is useful.
The group: Leaders tell their own stories and listen carefully to those of others. They often learn as much from another person’s predicament as from their own. As trust develops, defensiveness diminishes. Participants discover that many apparently unique leadership problems have recognisable psychological roots. The group becomes a laboratory in which new ways of behaving can be tested before they are carried back into organisational life.
The contract: Commitments made aloud, in front of people whose judgment has come to matter, possess greater force than private resolutions. The contract turns self-knowledge into
accountability and intention into action. Without commitment, insight can become another elegant form of avoidance. We understand ourselves beautifully and continue behaving exactly as before.
When I consider the responsibility carried by senior leaders whose decisions affect hundreds, sometimes thousands, of lives, I return to a simple question: Can we help them become a little more effective, a little more self-aware, and a little more human?
If we can, the effects may extend much further than we imagine. A more reflective leader can create a healthier team; a healthier team can build a more humane organisation; and a more humane organisation can improve the working lives of countless people. Employees who feel valued, engaged, and psychologically safe are also more likely to perform at their best. Humanity and effectiveness are not competing priorities: together, they create healthier workplaces and stronger organisational results.
Perhaps that sounds idealistic. But I am reminded of the story of the starfish. After a storm, thousands of starfish lie stranded on a beach. A woman walks along the shore, returning them to the sea one by one. “You cannot save them all,” someone tells her. “No,” she replies, throwing another into the water. “But I can make a difference to this one.”
Applications for the 2027 cohort of The Leadership Mystique are now open: