Self and role: staying human in your leadership

One of the quiet realities of senior leadership is that the role changes how you experience conversation.

Leaders often tell me that as their responsibilities grow, spaces for open reflection begin to shrink. People look to you for clarity and direction. Your words carry weight, and the effects ripple outward. One executive shared “I spoke a thought, and I thought would drop and make a tiny ripple of impact. Next thing I knew, it had turned into a big wave that swamped boats across the organization.” Over time, it can feel harder to think out loud without consequence.

This is not simply a personal experience, it’s a structural feature of leadership. Senior roles require judgment, discretion, and emotional steadiness. What many leaders do not anticipate is how isolating that responsibility can feel.

The challenge is not to eliminate isolation entirely. Instead, we have to learn how to remain connected to ourselves while carrying the expectations of the role.

The tension between self and role

Executives often move between two internal mindsets or “modes.”

One is the person with values who asks questions, models curiousity, and holds evolving perspectives. The other is the role that requires someone who models consistency, representation, and authority. When those two become blurred, leadership can start to feel heavy.

Some leaders handle this by choosing to stay in one role or the other most of the time. You may feel more comfortable in questioner mode, holding space for endless “what ifs”, ready to point out other ideas and perspectives, then hand the decision back to other people. The advantage of this is that if you never adopt a strong position, you can never be wrong. But this habit will leave your team feeling that you aren’t providing the clarity they need.

Other leaders handle this by aligning themselves to the strong, certain leader image. You might choose to keep your thoughts to yourself, hide your uncertainty, and perhaps adopt a a strong position early in a discussion. These habits will influence your organizational culture by closing down dialogue. When you model this way of leading, it can limit the information that comes to you and the value of your decisions. Your colleagues may feel pressure to perform certainty rather than explore uncertainty. Over time, this disconnect reduces clarity rather than strengthening it.

Some leaders may swing back and forth unconsciously between these models, reacting to factors such as the flow of the conversation and their emotional responses to it, awareness of time pressures, or other influences. This can be mentally exhausting, both for yourself and your team.

You don’t have to pick one way of being. Strong leaders learn to consciously move between these two positions instead of merging them.

Creating intentional reflection

Reflection is not a luxury at senior levels, it’s a leadership discipline.

Some practices that help include:

·       Identifying trusted thinking partners who can hold ambiguity without rushing to solutions.

·       Creating short, recurring moments of pause before and after key decisions.

·       Asking regularly: What belongs to me personally, and what belongs to the role I am stewarding?

One executive described this practice as stepping back into themselves before stepping forward as the leader.

Another truly impactful approach is to invite to your team into these two thinking modes with you. A helpful way of describing these modes is divergent thinking mode and convergent thinking mode.

When you invite people to join you in divergent thinking mode, it’s about asking questions to ensure you build the full picture, explore other points of view, see what new perspectives will turn up. This is where active listening and a curiosity mindset are essential. You might find your own nickname for this model. “First, let’s take ten minutes to explore questions, make sure we have all the information and points of view on this issue.”

But when it’s time to make a decision or provide clarity for your team on a path forward, it’s important to shift consciously into convergent thinking. You don’t want to make your team guess when it’s time to make this shift with you. You can signal that shift by asking questions like:

• “From all we’ve learned and discussed, what facts do we agree upon?

• “What patterns or trends can we infer from this information?

• “What do we know to be true?

• “What options do we have?

• “What choice needs to be made?” - and here’s where you can give guidance if you need to make the decision, or make it clear if you are delegating the decision.

Remaining human in leadership

Leaders don’t need to remove their humanity to be effective. In fact, clarity often emerges when leaders allow themselves to acknowledge uncertainty privately and reflect before taking action.

Leadership becomes more sustainable when self and role are held in balance rather than forced into alignment. The goal is not to eliminate tension, it’s to navigate it consciously.

If you have trusted colleagues, advisors or a coach, why not share these tensions with them- you might open up valuable conversations that help you (and them) be fully human, even as you carry the responsibilities of leadership.