You Don't Need 40 Years to Know What Kind of Leader You Want to Be
Perhaps I don't need to become an entirely different leader to become a more senior one.
Becoming a Leader · Leadership Confidence · Self-awareness
You don't need 40 years to know the leader you want 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.
Recently, I had the opportunity to speak to one of my senior executives, working for a billion-dollar SaaS business, talk about their leadership journey. Decades of experience, an enormous organisational responsibility, and a career that had clearly involved navigating situations far more complex than many of us will encounter in our current roles.
I expected to learn something. What I didn't expect was to leave feeling more confident about something I already believed.
As the conversation unfolded, the executive spoke about curiosity, empathy, developing people, and the responsibility leaders have to create environments where others can succeed. There was nothing particularly revolutionary about the words themselves. We've all heard people talk about putting people first. It's practically a corporate requirement at this point.
But there was something different about hearing someone who had spent decades leading people explain that these weren't simply nice principles to put on a slide. They were the foundations of how they actually led.
At one point, the executive shared that they had received feedback earlier in their career suggesting they were perhaps too focused on motivating and developing people. That this wasn't necessarily the responsibility of a leader.
Their response was to disagree. Strongly. And rather than abandon that philosophy, they doubled down on it.
I remember sitting there thinking, well, that's interesting.
Because I've heard variations of that criticism myself.
I've been told, directly and indirectly, that my enthusiasm can be excessive, that I place significant emphasis on the people side of leadership, or that my approach isn't necessarily what a particular team needs.
And suddenly, here was someone operating at a completely different organisational scale describing a remarkably similar philosophy.
I don't think that means my leadership is automatically right. That would be an absurd conclusion. Two people believing the same thing doesn't make it universally effective.
But it challenged an assumption I'd been carrying around.
Perhaps I don't need to become an entirely different leader to become a more senior one.
We have a strange tendency to associate seniority with the idea that someone has unlocked a different set of leadership truths. We imagine that somewhere between manager, director, vice president and executive, people discover the secret to leadership that the rest of us haven't yet earned the right to understand.
And sometimes we interpret feedback through that lens. Perhaps I'm not sufficiently mature yet. Perhaps I'll understand in another five years. Perhaps the way I naturally approach leadership is something I'll eventually grow out of.
But what if the foundations of your leadership philosophy are already there?
One of the most interesting parts of the conversation was hearing that this executive's philosophy had started taking shape with the very first person who gave them an opportunity to lead.
Not after forty years. At the beginning.
The decades that followed didn't necessarily replace those beliefs. They tested them. They challenged how those beliefs could be applied. They demanded different levels of judgement, influence and accountability.
That's a distinction I think we overlook.
Experience doesn't always teach us what to believe. Sometimes it teaches us how to practise what we already believe in increasingly complicated circumstances.
There's another lesson here, too.
We shouldn't wait until we've reached some imaginary level of seniority before documenting what we're learning.
I've often wondered whether writing about leadership while I'm still actively figuring things out is premature. Whether I should wait until I have a bigger title, a longer career or some extraordinary achievement that gives me permission to have a perspective.
But that would mean missing the most interesting part of the journey.
The way I understand leadership today won't be identical to the way I understand it in ten years. And I want to know what changed. I want to be able to look back and see which convictions survived, which assumptions fell apart and which experiences genuinely reshaped my thinking.
That's partly why I write.
Not because I think I've arrived at an answer, but because I want to capture the thinking while it's happening.
I left that conversation with more than a few useful notes. I left with a different appreciation for my own development.
I don't need forty years of experience to start knowing what kind of leader I want to be.
I need the willingness to practise it, the humility to recognise where it doesn't work, and the patience to keep developing it.
And perhaps, forty years from now, I'll look back and discover that some of the things I believed at the beginning were worth holding on to after all.
