No One Is Coming to Make You a Better Leader

For years, I’ve been granted authority.

Most of my work comes from organizations investing in a promising leader. They bring me in for executive assessment, coaching, or both. Over time, I’ve completed more than 3,000 of these engagements. They’re in-depth, typically involving testing, interviews, 360 feedback, and ongoing support.

And because I hold a PhD in industrial-organizational psychology, I’ve often been positioned as one of the more credible voices in the room. That credibility has opened doors, built trust, and given me unusual access to how leadership development plays out inside organizations.

But over time, I’ve started to notice something important. I still do this work, and I still believe it can be valuable, but even in the best leadership development systems we too often allow the responsibility for growth to drift away from the person who’s supposed to be doing the growing.

In coaching, the process is usually initiated by HR. A coach is selected, a structure is established, and commitments are made. Although everyone shows up with good intentions, the message the leader receives is often “We’ve assembled a team to work on you.”

And although the leader will always say they’re open and that they genuinely want to improve, the structure itself starts to pull responsibility away from them. Literally from the start, the coach becomes the driver, HR provides oversight, and the boss holds the accountability. Meanwhile the leader becomes the subject of the system, rather than the owner of the growth.

The Handoff

At the end of many assessment and coaching engagements, there’s a moment I’ve come to call the handoff. It’s when the work is done, the active support ends, and the organization takes the next step. Maybe the person gets promoted, and maybe they don’t.

But over time, I’ve come to realize this handoff never should’ve happened, not to me, not to HR, and not to the boss. The responsibility for growth should never have left the leader’s own hands.

When coaching doesn’t deliver the expected change, we tend to look to the coach, the system, or the process, and in doing so, we sometimes let the leader off the hook for the responsibility that should have stayed with them.

And it’s not just external pressure that creates this drift, it’s internal, too. Even experienced leaders can slip into a kind of passive posture. When everything around them is carefully designed to support their development, it’s surprisingly easy to forget that real growth only happens when they take full ownership of it.

That’s because we’ve been working from the wrong mental model. In leadership, we’re not diagnosing a skin rash or prescribing medication. Leadership isn’t a technical problem to be solved by an expert, a boss, or HR. There is no “magic pill”, and the moment we apply a “fix-the-person” mentality to leadership growth, we risk pulling responsibility away from the one person who absolutely has to hold it.

I’ve seen this dynamic play out firsthand. In fact, I’ve become a better coach by stepping outside that structure. The more I’ve adopted this more clear-minded philosophy and brought it to life in my practice, the more I’ve seen how essential it is that the leader retain full responsibility. Not shared with HR or their boss or with me, but fully owned by the leader.

And while coaching can still play a vital role, I’ve come to believe that in many moments, the people I coach might get more value from structured leadership practice than from traditional coaching. Unlike traditional coaching, structured practice keeps the responsibility squarely with the person doing the growing, the leader.

In structured practice, it’s the leader who defines the problem, works through the structure, and reflects in real time. The practice doesn’t carry them, it prompts them. It mirrors the actual demands of leadership, where no one else can step in and do the learning or the leading for you. And that’s true whether they’re new, mid-level, or senior.

Yes, part of leadership is showing responsibility toward others, but that doesn’t mean you’re responsible for them. That’s what adults owe one another. No one can carry another person’s responsibility. That’s true in life, and it’s true in coaching.

I’m not shirking my responsibility as a coach, I’m simply refusing to take responsibility for the growth that only the leader can truly own.

We’ve spent decades building systems that, intentionally or not, dilute that truth. And once I saw this clearly, I couldn’t unsee it.