The habits that got you here are now getting in the way
- May 27
- 6 min read
"I had even convinced myself that I was a collaborative leader, but clearly I was acting in exactly the opposite way. That's the contradiction I was living in."
Sixteen years ago I stepped into my first senior leadership role. I was responsible for a reorganisation of about 100 people and leading other leaders for the first time through that change. Within the first few months I felt completely overwhelmed by it. I felt the weight of the responsibility, so I did what I knew how to do: I set a clear vision, a change story, and a plan to get there. I presented it to my leaders.
The crazy thing was I employed them for their thinking and their ambition. What did I expect? And yet there I was, defending my ideas, shutting down the conversation, using my authority. I was feeling threatened. I was taking it personally, reading their challenge as evidence that they were against me. I had convinced myself I was collaborative, but I was acting in exactly the opposite way.
That contradiction sat at the centre of everything that followed. And what I've come to see, through my own experience and through working with leaders for years since, is that contradictions like this are everywhere. They're the rule, not the exception. And they're almost always driven by the same thing: an identity that was built for a different stage of leadership.
This post is about that gap. The one between who you believe you are as a leader and how you're actually showing up. If leadership has started to feel heavier than it used to, or if something that worked before seems to be costing more now, this might be why.
Key Takeaways
Your greatest leadership strengths can become your biggest constraints. The habits that built your success often become the very behaviours that hold you back when leadership asks something different from you.
Most leaders are living inside a contradiction they can't see. The gap between who they believe they are and how they actually show up is invisible, precisely because the habits creating it were once so effective.
Knowing what to do differently isn't enough. You can learn to delegate, give feedback, or manage your time differently. You can apply it for a few weeks. And then you revert, because the identity underneath hasn't shifted.
The mirror has to arrive before the map. Until the contradiction is visible, no tool, framework, or model is going to stick. Awareness is the threshold.
Discomfort is not the problem. It's the signal. If you're squirming, you're not falling behind. You're at the crossing where the real shift happens.
The contradiction you can't see
What I didn't realise at the time was what sat behind my behaviour in that room. Behind the defensiveness, the control, the authority I leaned on. It was a belief: I needed to have the answers to prove my worth. That if I didn't, I'd be seen as weak. Incompetent. And holding onto that belief gave me a sense of control. It's what I'd done before, and I held onto it even tighter.
So even though from the outside I was driving the team forward, on the inside I was holding a lot together. And worse, my team was learning to lean on me even more. I was becoming the bottleneck in my own system.
Leadership habits holding you back
I see this pattern constantly in the leaders I work with. The one who wants the team to step up but takes the work back every time it's not quite right. The one who values honesty but holds back from that direct conversation because they fear it will threaten the relationship. The leader who knows they need to slow down but treats rest like a threat.
Every one of them is living inside a gap. Between who they believe they are and how they're actually showing up. And when you're in it, it's very hard to see it.
There's a common reason for that. The habits creating the contradiction, the tension, are the same habits that built the leader's success. The same ones that earned the promotions, the reputation, the trust. And so they can't let go, because letting go feels like losing something essential about who they are.
The identity is fused with the behaviour.
This is what makes it so hard for HR and People leads to diagnose from the outside too. The leader in question is still performing. They're still delivering. But the cost is rising, for them and for the people around them. Team dependency, slow decisions, strategic time squeezed out, capable people leaving. The signs often show up in the system before the leader can name them in themselves.
The Knowing-Doing Gap: why new skills don't stick
This is the piece that trips most leadership development up. A leader learns to delegate. They practice giving feedback. They attend a workshop on time management or coaching conversations. Maybe they even apply it successfully for a few weeks.
And then they revert. Back to the pattern that was there before.
The habits come back because the identity underneath hasn't shifted. The leader still believes, at some level, that letting go means losing control. That being direct might cost the relationship. That slowing down means falling behind. So the new skill sits on top of an old belief, and eventually the belief wins.
I call this the Knowing-Doing Gap. It's not a knowledge problem. Leaders at this level are smart, capable, and often well-read. They know what they should be doing differently. They've probably been told. The gap is between knowing and being able to consistently do it, because doing it requires becoming someone slightly different. And that's harder than learning a technique.
This is why so much leadership development doesn't land. It aims at behaviour without touching the identity that drives it. The tools are sound. The frameworks make sense. But without the inner shift, they sit on the surface and eventually get overwritten by the older, deeper pattern.
The mirror before the map
So what does shift things?
Leaders change when they see and acknowledge the gap. When the contradiction becomes visible, felt, and named. That's the threshold.
I often say the mirror has to arrive before the map. Until you can see how you're actually showing up, and what's driving it, no amount of new tools or strategies will stick. The awareness has to come first. And that awareness is often uncomfortable, because it asks you to look at something you've been protecting for a long time.
This is why I believe lasting leadership development is an identity shift, not a surface fix. Leadership at higher levels doesn't ask for a better performance. It asks for a different way of showing up. And that means examining the beliefs, stories, and patterns that have been running underneath the surface, often for years. The ones that were once adaptive, that built your career, but that are now getting in the way.
The pattern matters more than the story. The specific situation, the difficult team member, the restructuring, those are the surface. Underneath is usually something more consistent: a way of protecting yourself, a way of maintaining control, a belief about what it means to be a good leader. That's where the shift comes from.
If this sounds familiar
You're not broken. You're not behind. You're at a juncture that many capable, intelligent leaders reach, often precisely because they've been successful enough to get here. The very success that brought you to this point has also brought the patterns that are starting to cost more than they should.
If you're noticing that leadership feels heavier than it used to, that you're holding more than you should, or that something you can't quite name keeps pulling you back to old habits, that's not a failure. That's a signal. You're ready.
I often say that if you're not squirming, you're not learning. It's that discomfort, and the willingness to lean into it, that opens the door to something different.
If you're curious about what that shift could look like for you, I'd welcome a conversation. Not a sales call, a real conversation about where you are and what's getting in the way.
Thanks for tuning in
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Bradley Baker is a leadership coach based in Munich, working internationally with senior leaders and high-performing managers whose success has started to cost more than it should. He holds an MBA, an MSc in Coaching Psychology and draws on over 25 years of senior leadership and business transformation experience. He works with individuals, organisations, and as a guest lecturer with the TUM Executive MBA programme.
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