Do you know the kind of leader your job is asking you to be?
When the leadership instincts that once made you useful meet a role that now asks for something different.
Becoming a Leader · Self-awareness · Ambiguity
Do you know the kind of leader your job is asking you to be?
YouTubeThis article is inspired by real workplace and leadership experiences. I do not use real names, company names or identifying details. Roles, teams, organisational structures, projects and business context may be removed, generalised or combined to protect the people and organisations involved while preserving the underlying leadership reflection. Where conversations are referenced, wording may be edited for clarity and anonymity.
I have spent a lot of time over the years thinking about the kind of leader I want to be. I have thought about how I want people to experience working with me, what I believe good leadership looks like and which behaviours I want to avoid as I become more senior.
I am starting to think I have spent less time on a different question: what kind of leader does the environment I am working in actually need me to be?
That sounds similar, but I do not think it is.
I know something about myself quite clearly now. I tend to do well in messy environments. I like situations where the answer is not obvious yet, where something needs to be built, where responsibilities are still being worked out or where the existing way of doing something is clearly not getting us where we need to go.
There is a term often used for this kind of environment: VUCA — volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. I am not particularly attached to the terminology, but I recognise myself in the idea. Give me the finished operating manual and ask me to maintain it indefinitely and I will probably become restless. Give me a problem, an outcome and some room to work out how we get there and I tend to come alive.
I described it recently as simply as I could:
“I prefer the messy structures. I prefer outcomes-based leadership. Is there a goal? Good. We’re going to figure out how to get there.”
For a long time, that was unquestionably useful.
I have worked in situations where structure needed to be created. Teams needed clearer foundations. Responsibilities needed defining. Processes either did not exist or had reached a point where they no longer served the people using them. Being willing to question things, create something new and operate without complete certainty was part of what allowed me to contribute.
But something happens when the environment changes.
The structure eventually exists.
The organisation becomes more mature. The team becomes more established. The foundations you once needed to create are now foundations somebody needs to operate within. The question changes from what should we build? to how consistently can we run what we built?
I am beginning to realise that a strength can look very different when the problem around it changes.
The same behaviour, in a different environment
If you challenge structure in an environment that desperately needs new structure, you can be seen as someone helping the organisation move forward.
Challenge structure constantly in an environment where predictability and consistency are now more important, and exactly the same instinct can start to look disruptive.
Neither interpretation is necessarily unfair.
That is the part I find interesting.
It would be quite easy for me to look at a more structured environment and conclude that it is too bureaucratic, too rigid or unwilling to change. Sometimes that criticism may even be justified. Organisations absolutely can protect processes that should have disappeared years ago.
But I also have to be willing to turn the question back towards myself.
Perhaps the organisation is no longer solving the problem that I particularly enjoy solving.
That is different from the organisation being wrong.
There are roles where structure is part of good leadership. Project and programme leadership are easy examples. People around a complicated programme need confidence that somebody understands where things stand. They need dates, dependencies, risks, ownership and regular updates. The discipline is not bureaucracy for its own sake; it creates predictability for everyone depending on the work.
Someone could be an excellent leader and still find that environment exhausting.
Likewise, someone who is brilliant at creating predictable execution may find an early-stage team enormously frustrating because there simply is not enough certainty available to provide the level of order they normally create.
The mistake is probably assuming that one of those leaders is more evolved than the other.
They may simply be suited to different leadership problems.
Adaptation is still part of the job
There is a danger in taking this argument too far.
“I am better in chaos” can very quickly become an excuse for not developing discipline. “I am an outcomes-based leader” can become a convenient reason for ignoring processes that other people genuinely depend on. Every preference can sound like a leadership philosophy if we phrase it carefully enough.
I do not want to do that.
Part of leadership development has to be increasing your range. If an environment needs more predictability from me, becoming better at providing it makes me a stronger leader. If I naturally want to challenge something, maturity sometimes means understanding why it exists before deciding that I can improve it.
That is adaptation, and I think good leaders have to be capable of it.
What I am less convinced about is the assumption that every mismatch should be solved through adaptation.
There must be a point where self-awareness also means recognising the conditions in which you tend to do your best work.
I am still figuring out where that line sits for me.
There is a difference between learning a leadership capability that does not come naturally and spending years working in an environment that requires you to suppress most of the instincts that make you effective.
The first might be growth. The second might simply be a poor fit.
And from inside the situation, those two things can look remarkably similar.
The job can change even when your title does not
I think this matters particularly when we make career decisions.
We tend to evaluate opportunities through title, compensation, scope, company, industry and progression. I am beginning to think there is another dimension worth understanding much earlier: what behaviour does someone need to demonstrate repeatedly to be successful in this job?
Not in the job description. In reality.
Some organisations place enormous value on predictability and executive polish. A leader is expected to know where everything stands and communicate that confidently. Others are much more comfortable with leaders openly saying that something is still being worked out.
Some cultures reward challenge. Others value alignment more heavily. Some roles require constant consensus-building, while others give leaders considerably more permission to make the decision and move.
None of those things automatically tell you whether the company is good or bad.
But they tell you something about what working there will ask of you.
It also changes over time.
The role you joined might genuinely have needed somebody willing to build, question and redesign. Three years later, the organisation may need somebody who can scale, standardise and protect what was created. You can still have exactly the same title while the real leadership requirement underneath it has moved considerably.
I think that can be confusing when you are the person experiencing it.
You continue doing things that were previously rewarded, but the reaction around you starts to change. You may begin wondering why behaviours that once made you valuable now seem to create friction.
Perhaps sometimes the answer is simply that the environment has moved to a different stage.
And then there is a decision to make.
Not immediately a decision to leave. Not a judgement that the company has lost its way. Just a more honest conversation with yourself about whether you want to develop into what the next version of the role requires.
I find that a much more useful question than asking whether the organisation should become more like me.
There will always be things I want to influence about the places where I work. Leaders should challenge systems when those systems stop serving the outcome or the people inside them. I do not think self-awareness means becoming passive.
But neither can every organisation be reshaped around the leadership environment in which I personally thrive.
Sometimes the mature starting point is recognising the difference.
I know that I enjoy building in ambiguity. I know that I like being given an outcome and working with people to find the route towards it. I also know that becoming a more complete leader probably requires me to become better in environments that offer less of that freedom.
What I am still learning is how far that adaptation should go.
Perhaps knowing the leader you want to become is only one part of career self-awareness. The other is noticing the leader your role is gradually asking you to become, and being willing to ask whether that is still a direction you genuinely want to travel in.
Continue exploring
- Article
Do You Want to Lead, or Do You Want to Be a Leader? - AI Skill
Manager Coach - Free resource
Reflection without a record is just mood
