There is a particular moment, familiar to anyone who has watched a senior leader under real pressure, when a capable, apparently self-aware executive reverts, almost visibly, to an earlier version of themselves. The consultative tone drops. Decisions that would normally involve three colleagues get made alone, overnight, and announced rather than discussed. Colleagues who worked with this person for years describe the shift as someone becoming a different manager, but it is usually something narrower and more specific: a private story about what authority requires, formed long before the current job, reasserting itself the moment the story’s original conditions, threat, scrutiny, the risk of being seen to fail, return.
Where the Story Comes From
Many leaders arrive at senior roles with an established view of what leadership means. Long before any formal authority exists, people can form a working theory of it, drawn from an early manager who rewarded compliance, a parent whose approval depended on results, a first serious failure that got pinned, fairly or not, on a moment of hesitation. That theory is rarely examined again, because it works. It produces promotions. It produces results that colleagues and boards reward, and each success does not test the story so much as confirm it, and a theory that keeps getting confirmed has no obvious reason to be questioned.
The theory also tends to be invisible to the person carrying it, precisely because it was formed so early and confirmed so consistently. Ask some chief executives to describe their management philosophy and they may produce something reasoned, current, and responsive to the particular organisation they now run. Ask what happens to that philosophy on the worst week of the year, and a different, older pattern can surface, one formed well before the current title existed and rarely revisited since.
What Success Reinforces
The trouble is that a story about authority, hardened by a decade of confirming results, does not stay neutral under pressure; it becomes the default setting the leader reaches for automatically once the stakes rise. Control starts substituting for flexibility, because a story built on the idea that authority means holding the line does not have room for the possibility that the line should move. Action starts substituting for dialogue, because a leader whose private narrative equates decisiveness with worth will experience open discussion, even useful discussion, as a kind of failure to lead. Perseverance starts substituting for reflection, because stopping to reconsider looks, from inside that story, uncomfortably close to the hesitation that got punished the first time round.
Why the Costs Arrive Late
None of this shows up immediately in the numbers, which is precisely what makes it durable. A leader operating from an unexamined story about authority can produce genuinely strong short-term results: fast decisions, visible momentum, a team that has learned exactly what is required to avoid conflict with the person at the top. The costs surface later and elsewhere, in a senior team that has quietly stopped bringing forward difficult information, in successors who were never trusted with enough real authority to be ready when the role eventually changes hands, in a reputation for being difficult to work for that only becomes visible once recruitment for senior roles gets harder. By the time the pattern is undeniable, it has usually been operating, and being rewarded, for years.
Why It Rarely Gets Examined
Senior leaders are, in an important sense, protected from the kind of feedback that might surface this. Direct reports have an obvious incentive not to name a pattern in the person who sets their pay and their next role. Boards tend to focus on outcomes rather than on how those outcomes were produced, and boards may receive signs of a corrosive pattern relatively late, because the information has to travel upward through exactly the people least willing to raise it. Peers at other organisations offer sympathy and war stories rather than scrutiny. The genuine outside challenge that might interrupt an unexamined narrative, someone with no stake in the leader’s approval and no reason to soften the observation, is structurally rare at senior levels, which is part of why the pattern, once established, tends to persist for as long as the results hold up.
Professional isolation can increase with seniority. A newly promoted manager still has peers at roughly the same level willing to say, in private, that a decision looked wrong. A chief executive several years into the role has fewer and fewer people left who will say that plainly, and the ones who might have said it earliest are often the same successors the pattern has already taught to keep their real assessment to themselves.
Examining the Story Instead of Managing Its Symptoms
Coaching that addresses only the visible behaviour, the terse emails, the unilateral calls, the flashes of impatience under pressure, tends to produce short-lived improvement, because it treats the output of the story rather than the story itself. Work that goes further asks where the underlying narrative about authority actually came from, tests it against the leader’s own account of their formative professional experiences, and asks, directly, whether it still serves the person holding it or whether it has simply never been challenged. This is not a quick conversation, and it is one that few people in a leader’s professional life are positioned to have, given how much is usually at stake for everyone else in the room.
TRUE Leadership, Arvid Buit’s executive coaching practice based in the Netherlands and working with chief executives and board members in English and Dutch, is built specifically around this point of leverage: not the visible behaviour a leader shows under pressure, but the unexamined story about authority that produces it in the first place.
None of this promises a leader who never reverts under pressure; the earlier story does not disappear simply because it has been named. What tends to change, when the narrative has actually been examined rather than managed around, is the length of the reversion and how quickly the leader notices it happening. The executive in the windowless meeting room does not stop having an old story about what authority requires. Given the chance to examine it, they at least get to recognise, in the moment, that the story is talking, rather than mistaking its voice for their own considered judgment.
