For most of my early career I was performing leadership rather than practicing it, and I had no idea.
I was adaptable, responsive, and genuinely proud of my ability to read what a room needed and adjust accordingly. It took five years of PhD research in Brisbane and one quiet question from my thesis advisor to show me what I had been doing. She was busy making dinner during our first meeting and she asked me what I wanted to research. I said, "I want to hold a mirror up to leaders to help them become better." She stopped cutting carrots, looked at me, and said something I have never forgotten. "No Jill" she said, "It's not about holding up a mirror. It's about looking out a window. It is not about the leader. It is about how they relate with others."
Capabilities without a Compass
In that moment I saw my leadership behaviour with entirely new eyes, and what I saw was “cringy”. I had capabilities without a compass, skills without a philosophy. And these automatic behaviours, as I was beginning to understand, only hold up in stable conditions.
That realization now shapes every conversation I have with leaders today. When I ask a senior leader to tell me about their leadership philosophy, the response I get most often is a long thoughtful pause followed by something assembled from their LinkedIn feed. Filled with platitudes, jargon, half-remembered book titles, and vague principles that do not quite hold together under scrutiny. Not because the leader is unprepared. Most of the people I work with are sharp, experienced, and genuinely reflective. They go quiet because if they are honest, they do not have an articulated philosophy. What they have is a well-intentioned, decades-in-the-making collection of ideas that have never been distilled into something they truly own as theirs.
That gap between accumulated experience and genuine philosophical foundation is where I see leadership fail most consistently and most profoundly.
The pattern repeats itself across organizations at every level, in every sector, in every economic climate. A talented leader stalls on the way to the next level. A high performer who excelled in one role struggles badly in the next. An executive derails under pressure in ways that nobody saw coming. We attribute it to wrong fit, not keeping up with the times, or power struggles. While all of these are certainly derailers, the root cause is often the leader never being asked to articulate what they believe about leadership, and as a result, they never built the practices that would have sustained them when things got hard.
The Myth of Hard & Soft Skills
Before we move further, I want to be direct about something that makes some people uncomfortable. Many leaders are most comfortable with the hard stuff, and I don’t just mean a Martini. Leaders who fail to make the behavioral shift toward genuinely focusing on people are not being soft. Hard skills like strategy are just the beginning. Leadership is the operating system through which the plan either moves or stalls. The operating system is built from relational practices, not from strategic frameworks. And relational practices have to be rooted in developing a leadership philosophy.
A leader with a genuinely developed philosophy does things differently. In a strategy meeting they are not waiting to be the smartest person in the room. They are asking questions that lift the entire team's thinking. They know where they sit in the ecosystem. They are not the centre of it. And they have fostered what I call Autonomous Interdependence with their team. These leaders have the ability to give people genuine freedom to act while maintaining the coherence and shared direction that prevents freedom from becoming fragmentation. That capacity only comes from having done the philosophical work first.
This is what most leadership development misses entirely. We invest in skills, assess competencies, and people to programs, as if technique will eventually produce a great leader. But technique without philosophy is performance without passion. It works in good times but watch out when tough days throw your game. It’s at these moments that leaders break down under pressure, in transition, in the moments most consequential. Philosophy is the thing that holds. It’s what a relational leaders fall back on when the situation is genuinely novel, when credentials do not impress anyone in the room, and when the stakes are high enough that clarity of belief is the only reliable compass. The leaders willing to do the harder and slower work of building a genuine philosophy alongside the practices that express it are the ones who make the leap, not just to the next level, but to the kind of leadership that changes organizations.
A Way to Be, Not a Thing To Do
Developing your leadership philosophy doesn’t meet you have to wander the peaks and valleys of Gros Morne National Park (although a beautiful setting like that never hurts). What it means is asking five foundational questions to form your point of view,
· Who am I as leader?
· How do I wish to relate with others?
· What do people around me want or need?
· How do people change as a result of my leadership?
· What are the most important values that inspire my work?
These are hard questions and most of us will revisit them over and over throughout our life as our work and circumstances change. But it’s worth the time. After years of wandering in my own wilderness, it was ironically in Australia, where my Ph.D. studies that I finally developed my own philosophy: Leaders is a way to be, not a thing to do. For me embodied leadership is the key to developing the systematic practices that are the gateway to performance and productivity.
Philosophy and practice are inextricably tied. They evolve together and they are the foundation of every great leader I have ever worked with.
The question is not whether you have a leadership philosophy. Everyone does, even if it has never been articulated. The question is whether yours is coherent enough to build on, explicit enough to teach, and strong enough to hold when everything around you is pushing back.
So now that I’ve shared mine, what’s your leadership philosophy?