There’s this skill that I watch leaders perfect, subtly, over years. No one trains it directly and no performance review names it. And yet it’s often the very thing that gets someone promoted.
I’d call this skill self-abandonment, except no one would recognize it by that name. It looks to others like being endlessly reliable and indispensable. It’s the person who holds everything together so well that no one thinks to ask what it’s costing them to hold it. A few leaders I’ve worked with have invested decades being the calm beneath other people’s chaos – always steady, capable, and essential. And only much later did they realize that being needed had become a hiding place; that always being the one making the work run, they never had to risk being evaluated on who they are underneath all of that.
Another leader described, almost without noticing, the kind of thinking partner they want: strategic, grounded, unshakeable, and values-led. When I reflected that they’d just described themselves – the person they were already becoming, not a person they needed to find – something appeared to shift for them. They had been looking outward for the qualities they’d unknowingly disowned in themself.
This is the part that’s harder to sit with: some organizations don’t just tolerate this pattern, they often run on it. A leader’s identity gets built early, often for good reason. And then the organization rewards it so consistently that stepping out of it doesn’t feel like growth, it feels like exposure. An irony I notice often is that I’m invited in at the point where a leader has climbed high enough that the organization now wants something different from them - more voice, more conviction, more visible leadership – without acknowledging that it spent years requiring and rewarding the opposite. Much of my role is in supporting a leader to unlearn a version of themselves that an organization required for a decade, because that same organization now requires something different.
If success has ever felt hollow, if a promotion didn’t land the way you expected it to this might be part of why. A leader may have gotten very good at a role that needed them to stay smaller than they are. This is not because the leader lacked capability but because staying hidden felt safer than being fully seen.
I don’t think the answer is to swing hard towards self-interest or to treat every act of steadiness as self-erasure. A lot of what we give to others is freely given and not an abandonment of ourselves. I think the skill is in knowing the difference - whether underneath the reliability, the calm, the holding it together, there’s a fuller version of ourselves, and whether we’ve stopped to ask ourselves this. The real leadership skill is returning to ourselves, again and again, in small moments, until it stops being a return and starts being where we live.
Self-abandonment is costly. It takes real energy to keep overriding internal signals, to stay one step removed from what we think or want, or to manage everyone else’s comfort before we’ve checked in with our own. That energy must come from somewhere and it’s usually the same energy reserve that would otherwise go toward becoming the person we aspire to be, the person we’re capable of being.
A note of appreciation: this piece, like all my reflections, is inspired by leaders I have the privilege of working alongside. These are people navigating this exact territory, often without knowing others are walking it too. There’s a global community of leaders doing this same work of returning to themselves, each in their own way, each with something to teach others. I’m grateful to learn from each of them, and grateful I can share a small but important piece of it with you.
Photo by Francesco Albertazzi on Unsplash