There is a particular kind of director I meet often.
She has been told, in every performance review for fifteen years, that she needs to be more decisive. So she has worked on it. Courses, coaching, books. She has learned to make faster calls in meetings, and she has learned to look comfortable doing it.
She is exhausted. Not by the work. By the performance.
What nobody told her is that she is not indecisive. She processes differently. She needs to sit with a problem before she can see it whole, and when she finally moves, she is almost never wrong. That is not a weakness that needs correcting. That is her actual strength, and she has spent fifteen years apologising for it.
The default assumption of leadership development
Most leadership development starts from a deficit. Here is the model of a good leader, here is where you fall short, here is the training to close the gap.
It is a reasonable-sounding idea. It is also why so much of it does not stick.
If the gap between the model and you is a skill gap, training works. If the gap is that you are not the person in the model and never will be, training gives you a costume. You can wear a costume for a long time. Most senior people I work with have been wearing one for years. But it costs something, and the bill arrives eventually — usually as the flat, tired feeling of doing well at work you no longer recognise as yours.
What forcing actually costs
Three things, in my experience.
Energy. Working against your own grain takes more out of you than the work itself. Leaders who are forcing are not tired from the workload. They are tired from the translation.
Judgement. When you are performing a style, part of your attention is on the performance. That is attention not on the decision.
Trust. People can tell. They may not name it, but they register that something does not quite line up, and they hold back accordingly. Authority that is borrowed reads as borrowed.
The alternative is not "just be yourself"
I want to be careful here, because there is a lazy version of this argument and it is everywhere. Be authentic. Bring your whole self. It sounds good and it helps nobody, because it gives you nothing to actually do on Monday.
The useful version has two parts.
First: know specifically what your nature is. Not a vague sense of it — specifics. What kind of problem do you solve without effort? What have you been criticised for in the same words by three different managers? Where do you consistently do your best work, and what were the conditions?
Second: build the role around it where you can, and be honest where you cannot. The decisive-sounding director does not need to become fast. She needs to stop pretending to be fast, tell her team she will come back with an answer by Thursday, and then be right on Thursday. That is a leadership style. It is defensible, it is consistent, and it is hers.
The part people resist
Leading as you are means giving up the idea that you will eventually become the leader you think you should be.
That is a loss, and it is worth naming as one. Most people carry a picture of the version of themselves who has it together — who is calmer, faster, more commanding, less bothered. Letting go of that picture feels like settling.
It is not settling. It is the point at which your development can finally start compounding, because you are building on something real rather than maintaining a fiction.
The best leaders do not fight their own nature. They know exactly what it is, they stop apologising for it, and they build everything else around it.