Three Ways To Change Leaders
Three Ways To Change Leaders Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Contributor Fri, June 19, 2026 at 5:33 p.m. GMT+3 11 min read
Simple Motivation graphic on dark background. A blue fish climbs the tree.
getty There is a peculiar optimism embedded in the leadership development industry — a near-religious conviction that with the right workshop, the right coach, the right 360-degree feedback tool, any leader can be transformed into a better version of themselves. The global market for leadership development now exceeds $350 billion annually. The results, by most accounts, are underwhelming. Which raises an obvious question: are we spending a fortune trying to teach fish to climb trees?
To answer that, it helps to start with something more basic than how to change leaders. It helps to start with what leadership actually is.
Part One: Leadership Is Not a Job Title. It Is a Psychological Process. The word “leader” has been so thoroughly abused by corporate vernacular, motivational posters, and the self-help industrial complex that it has become almost meaningless. In popular usage, a leader is whoever has the biggest office, the grandest title, or the most impressive LinkedIn summary. This is a category error with real consequences.
Leadership, properly understood, is not a formal role. It is a psychological and social process — specifically, the process that enables a collection of individuals to function as a high-performing team. The distinction matters enormously. A person can have the title of leader and perform none of the leadership function. Conversely, someone with no formal authority can exercise genuine leadership. The title is the costume. The function is the thing.
What is that function? At its most fundamental, leadership exists because humans are simultaneously competitive and cooperative — and the balance between these two tendencies determines everything. Left to their own devices, members of a group will compete with each other: for status, for resources, for recognition, for the last piece of cake. This is perfectly natural and, without some mechanism to redirect it, perfectly destructive. Effective leadership is precisely that mechanism. It is what transforms intra-group competition into inter-group competition — what allows people within a group to stop fighting each other long enough to fight other groups instead. Nations do not build cathedrals, win wars, or put things into orbit through a collection of talented individuals pursuing their own agendas. They do it when those individuals are organised, motivated, and directed toward a common purpose. Leadership is the difference between a mob and an army, between a collection of musicians and an orchestra, between a set of brilliant individuals and an actually functional organisation.
Story Continues Think of it this way: without leadership, a group of talented people is like a Formula 1 car with all its components scattered on the garage floor. The parts may well be extraordinary. They don’t go anywhere. The leader is not the engine — the people are the engine. The leader is the assembly and the direction.
This is why leadership performance is really about team performance. The leader’s output is the team’s output. And this is as true for a football club as for a country, as true for a startup as for a multinational. When the team wins, the leader wins. When the team crashes, the leader was steering.
Part Two: Choosing (Un)Wisely Given the above, the quality of the person placed in charge of a group matters enormously. And here the science is usefully unambiguous: certain individual characteristics consistently predict whether a leader’s team will perform at a higher level. Intelligence , integrity, curiosity, emotional intelligence, humility, ambition, and resilience are not merely admirable virtues — they are empirically validated predictors of leadership effectiveness across contexts, industries, and cultures. The leader with these qualities tends to create teams that outperform. The leader without them — however charismatic, however confident, however impressively they perform at interview — tends to leave wreckage.
The problem, of course, is that the qualities that get people into leadership positions are not the same as the qualities that make them effective once there. Organisations systematically mistake confidence for competence, charisma for capability, and self-promotion for talent. The result is a reliable and costly selection error that no amount of post-hoc coaching can fully correct. We pick the wrong people and then spend fortunes trying to make them right.
But even when we pick reasonably well, context complicates everything. A leader who thrives in a turnaround may flounder in a steady-state environment. A visionary entrepreneur may be a catastrophic choice to run an established bureaucracy. Style, values, reputation, and temperament all interact with the specific demands of a role in ways that no general assessment of leadership quality can fully capture. This is the context mismatch problem — and it is why even talented leaders routinely underperform in the wrong setting. The best wine in the wrong glass is still a problem.
This is partly why the coaching and development industry exists. No leader — however gifted — arrives at a role as a finished product. The ones who think they do are, almost by definition, already in trouble. A leader who believes they have nothing more to learn is not expressing confidence; they are expressing the kind of closed-minded rigidity that research consistently links to declining performance and eventual derailment.
Which brings us, finally, to the subject of change…
Part Three: Three Ways to Change Leaders There are essentially three meaningful ways to change a leader. They are not equally effective, they are not equally popular, and they are not equally honest about what is and is not possible.
The First Way: Change the Leader The most intuitive approach is also the hardest. Change the leader themselves — their behaviours, their habits, their dispositions. This is the core promise of the coaching and leadership development industry, and it is not entirely without foundation. Leaders can, in fact, change. They can learn new communication styles, develop greater emotional self-regulation, improve their decision-making processes, and build capabilities they didn’t have before.
The catch is motivation. As the old clinical psychology joke goes: how many therapists does it take to change a light bulb? Only one — but the light bulb has to really want to change. This is not a trivial condition. Research consistently shows that the people who most need development are systematically the least likely to seek it, accept it, or act on it. Low curiosity, low humility, low openness to feedback — these are precisely the traits that both predict the need for change and predict resistance to it. The narcissistic leader who most needs a coach is the one most likely to spend the first three sessions explaining to the coach why they’re wrong.
What you want, then, if you are in the business of developing leaders, is leaders who actually want to develop. In practical terms, this means making coachability a first-order hiring criterion — not a nice-to-have, but a gate. Humble leaders who are genuinely open to feedback drive superior team performance and create organisational cultures that are adaptable and psychologically safe. Their uncoachable counterparts do the reverse, often while being wholly convinced that the problem lies elsewhere. The most expensive hire you can make is a brilliant, high-performing leader with no interest in growing — because you will eventually have to pay twice: once for them, and once for the damage.
The Second Way: Change the Environment If you cannot change the leader, you can change what surrounds them. This is the strengths-based approach to leadership — and it has real and underappreciated merit.
The logic is simple: rather than expending enormous effort trying to transform a leader’s natural weaknesses into passable competencies, you architect their environment to compensate for those weaknesses and amplify their strengths. The leader who is a strategic visionary but a chronically poor communicator gets a Chief of Staff or a COO who is a brilliant communicator. The leader who is off the charts on creativity and innovation but constitutionally incapable of operational discipline gets people around them who can execute. The introvert who generates extraordinary individual insight but struggles to inspire large groups gets an extroverted deputy to do the rallying.
This approach has genuine empirical support . Complementary teams routinely outperform teams of similarly talented individuals with redundant skill sets. Matching the environment to the leader — rather than vice versa — is often faster, cheaper, and more reliable than behavioural change. It is essentially substituting structural cleverness for personal transformation. As a short-to-medium-term performance lever, it works.
But it has a significant long-term cost: stagnation. A leader who never has to develop new capabilities because their environment has been engineered to make those capabilities unnecessary is a leader who is slowly becoming less adaptable, less resilient, and less valuable. “Be yourself” is excellent advice for a first date. As a leadership development philosophy, it is a prescription for arrested development. It limits people to their present self — and their present self was shaped by a past world. The world, regrettably, has a habit of changing.
Telling a leader to play to their strengths, taken to its logical conclusion, is like telling a muscle to only ever lift the same weight. It feels efficient. It is, over time, atrophy.
The Third Way: Change the Leaders Here is the most effective approach, and the one least likely to appear in a leadership development brochure: why would you waste your time trying to teach a fish to climb a tree (or wondering around looking for a lake) instead of just finding a squirrel?
The evidence on personality change in adulthood is, by now, fairly clear. After the mid-twenties, core personality traits are remarkably stable — not immutable, but resistant enough to change that large-scale behavioural transformation in established leaders should be treated as the exception rather than the plan. Rank-order stability of personality increases meaningfully with age. What was an adaptable young professional at twenty-five has, by forty-five, become a considerably more predictable system. This is not a pessimistic observation. It is a useful one.
Because if people are largely predictable — and they are — then paying careful attention to who someone is before placing them in a role allows you to predict with reasonable accuracy how they will perform, how they will need to change, and critically, whether the degree of change required is plausible given who they actually are. Talent, in the most useful definition I know, is personality in the right place. Not a fixed set of abilities, but a constellation of natural dispositions that, when matched to the right context, produce exceptional performance. The goal of selection, on this view, is not to find the best person and then reshape them to fit the role. It is to find the person who already fits — naturally, organically, without requiring an implausible act of self-reinvention.
This is why getting a high-definition picture of a leader — through rigorous assessment, psychometric profiling, structured reference gathering, and behavioural history — is not an optional extra in the selection process. It is the primary act. If you can accurately characterise who someone is, you can predict how they will perform and what they will need to do differently. And if the gap between who they are and what the role requires is large enough that bridging it would require a personality transplant, the honest and economically rational decision is to keep looking.
Some leaders can change themselves significantly. Most can change themselves somewhat. Very few can change themselves completely. The question that organisations routinely fail to ask — because hope is cheap and honesty is uncomfortable — is which category they are actually dealing with.
In Conclusion: The Honest Mathematics of Leadership Change Changing leaders is possible. It is also overestimated, under-resourced, and applied to the wrong people at the wrong stage with the wrong expectations far more often than it succeeds. Oh, and more often than not, nobody bothers to check whether the change intervention actually worked, or whether leaders improve their performance after all!
The three-part framework is, at its core, a descending order of difficulty and an ascending order of effectiveness. Changing the individual leader is the hardest and most celebrated approach. Changing their environment is more reliable and more neglected. Changing the leader entirely — replacing them with someone better suited — is the most effective and the most avoided, because it requires admitting that the original decision was wrong (back to humility, integrity, self-awareness, and coachability).
Organisations that are genuinely good at leadership, as opposed to theoretically passionate about it, tend to be honest about all three. They hire on coachability as much as capability. They architect environments that compensate for predictable weaknesses. And when the gap between leader and role is genuinely unbridgeable, they act on the evidence rather than on the sunk-cost fallacy of the development programme they’ve already paid for.
Leadership, as we said at the start, is a psychological process. It turns out that changing it requires rather more psychology — and rather less wishful thinking — than the industry has traditionally been willing to admit.
This article was originally published on Forbes.com
