There is a question I have started asking in almost every leadership conversation I have.
Not “what are your goals?” Not “where do you want the organization to go?” Those questions have ready answers — polished, practiced, professional.
The question I ask is this: “When did you first decide what kind of leader you were allowed to be?”
The pause that follows is the most honest thing in the room.
Because most leaders — regardless of title, tenure, or track record — are operating from a story about themselves that was written by someone else. It was written early. It was written fast. And in most cases, it has never once been examined.
The Internal Narrative That Runs Everything
Leadership identity is not formed in leadership programs.
It is formed long before the first promotion, the first direct report, the first time someone looked to you for direction and you had to decide whether you were ready.
It is formed in the moment a young person watches how authority is held in their household — and files a silent judgment about whether that is who they want to become.
It is formed in the first workplace experience with a manager who never explained their reasoning. Or who did — and in doing so, quietly taught you what leadership could actually look like.
It is formed the first time you made a decision that didn’t land — and decided, in the space of ten seconds, whether that failure meant you were courageous or reckless, learning or fundamentally not suited for this.
Those moments become narratives. Those narratives become beliefs. Those beliefs become behavior. And that behavior becomes, over time, your leadership culture.
The problem is not that these stories exist. Every leader has them. The problem is that most leaders have never surfaced them — which means they have no ability to choose which ones to keep.
Four Stories Leaders Most Commonly Carry
In my work through Narrative Business Practice, I have identified patterns in the internal narratives that most reliably shape — and sometimes limit — leadership effectiveness. They do not present themselves as stories. They present themselves as convictions.
“I have to have the answer.” This story is often written by environments that punished uncertainty — early academic pressure, high-achieving families, competitive professional cultures that rewarded certainty and read hesitation as incompetence. The leader who carries this story makes decisions faster than the situation warrants, avoids admitting gaps in knowledge, and creates teams that mirror the performance of confidence rather than the practice of honest inquiry. The story feels like competence. It functions as isolation.
“Showing emotion is losing ground.” This story is nearly universal in traditional professional settings, and it has a particular grip on leaders who came up in industries — medicine, law, finance, the military — where emotional expression was explicitly or implicitly sanctioned out. The leader who carries this story is often deeply feeling, deeply perceptive, and deeply convinced that their emotional reality has no place at the leadership table. The cost is not just personal. It is organizational. Teams read through emotional flatness immediately. When a leader’s presentation does not match the emotional weather in the room, the team does not feel reassured. They feel managed — and managed people stop bringing their real thinking to the table.
“Leadership means carrying this alone.” Somewhere in the formation of this leader, help became a liability. Delegation felt like losing control. Asking questions seemed to reveal weakness. The leader who holds this story works extraordinarily hard, produces impressive individual results, and quietly depletes the capacity of every team they lead. Because teams learn from what leaders model. A leader who does not ask for help teaches teams that asking for help is not safe.
“I am the exception to the rules I set.” This one is rarely conscious. It surfaces in small moments — the deadline adjusted for the leader that the team is held to, the conduct standard applied selectively, the values statement that applies to everyone until it becomes inconvenient for the person who wrote it. Leaders who carry this story do not see themselves as hypocritical. They see themselves as pragmatic. What their teams see is something else entirely. They see a story about who this organization actually protects.
Why Surfacing the Story Is Not Optional
Leadership programs often focus on skills: communication, strategy, change management, emotional intelligence. These are valuable. But they rest on a foundation that most programs never touch — the underlying narrative of who the leader believes they are, what they believe they deserve, and what they believe leadership demands of them.
A leader who believes that showing vulnerability is a form of failure will not sustain a communication style built around transparency, regardless of how many workshops they attend. The skill is real. The story underneath contradicts it.
This is why Narrative Business Practice begins not with organizational diagnosis but with leadership narrative. Not because the organization does not matter — it matters enormously — but because the story the leader carries is always, always, already shaping the story the organization tells.
When I work with executives in narrative leadership development, one of the most consistent revelations is this: the moment they trace their most persistent leadership challenge back to an internal narrative rather than a strategic problem, the problem does not disappear — but it becomes workable. You cannot revise a story you have never read.
Becoming the Author, Not Just the Subject
There is a distinction I return to often in leadership development conversations: the difference between being in the story and being the author of the story.
Leaders who have never examined their internal narratives are subjects of stories they did not consciously choose. They repeat patterns. They make the same kind of decisions under pressure that they have always made. They are surprised by outcomes that, on reflection, follow predictably from beliefs they have held for decades.
Leaders who have done the work of surfacing, examining, and deliberately revising their internal narratives begin to experience something different — not ease, not the absence of challenge, but a quality of authorship. The awareness that when they act, they are choosing the story. Not reacting to it.
That shift is not permanent. It requires practice, reflection, and often a thinking partner who can hold up the mirror without flinching. But it is among the most significant transformations a leader can make.
Not because their organization needs a better version of them.
Because they deserve to understand the story they have been living.
