Early in my leadership journey, I thought I had to know everything. I was fast, smart, technically excellent. My job was to provide answers, solve problems, demonstrate expertise. Leadership meant being the intellectual authority in the room. Then I got promoted—and that model broke instantly.

Suddenly I had to lead others. My performance was no longer the point—the team's was. So I shifted from knowing the answer to hitting the numbers. OKRs, psychological safety, empathy, engagement scores—I was fluent in the language of outcomes. And I was good at it. But despite all our PIPs and growth conversations, I realized we were neglecting genuine development. The machinery of total achievement had stunted our becoming into programmable authenticity, mine included.

So I let go. I stopped leading. I trained in coaching and facilitation. I learned to hold presence and support autonomy. I empowered, delegated, created space for others to self manage, disrupted performance management. I came to believe leadership itself was the problem—my job was to disappear, create conditions for emergence, and get out of the way.

This felt more human and alive. But I soon began to suspect I’d exchanged one illusion for another. What I had let go of was not power—but responsibility.

Servant leadership promises emancipation, but remains captive to liberalism’s core fiction: that freedom alone leads to progress, and justice will emerge through inclusive participation. But freedom without formation degenerates. We confuse choice with maturity—unguided autonomy breeds vice and eventually demands new forms of control.

That’s the trap: in retreating into facilitation, we abandon the task of formation. Without moral development, organisational freedom defaults to the system’s inherited goals—productivity, share price, performance. The machinery stays intact; only its colour changes. Judgment dissolves into procedure. Empathy becomes the endpoint.

To lead well is not to disappear, but to take responsibility for what our structures enable—who people become within them. Institutions are never neutral; they shape perception, organise aspiration, and reward particular selves. Leadership is not presence or posture—it's a moral office.

It requires designing architectures of potential—systems that cultivate character, wisdom and virtues. And that responsibility extends beyond individuals. Organisations are intermediaries in the moral economy: they shape communities, ecosystems, and the wider society.

Leadership, then, is neither control nor its absence. It is moral mediation—between person and institution, organisation and society, what is and what could be. The point was never to let go, but to lift up: to face the system and its contradictions, imagine its potential, commit to the good, and design the structures through which people and systems grow toward greater flourishing. Not to care less, but to care more. 

#LeadershipFormation #VirtueInBusiness #BeyondEmpowerment #OrganisationalDesign #MoralResponsibility