Opinion Piece: Why The Best Leaders Start With Themselves.

Why Great Leaders Learn to Lead Themselves First — and Then Everyone Else

Leadership is often spoken about as if it is a set of techniques – how to motivate, how to delegate, how to manage change, and how to hold people accountable. According to Nokwanda Boarato, Head: People & Talent at 21st Century, these skills matter, but people do not experience a leader as a toolkit. They experience a leader as a pattern - a repeated set of decisions, behaviours, reactions and emotional cues that either creates momentum or quietly drains it.

That is why one of the most consistent differentiators between leaders who build trust and leaders who create strain is not confidence, charisma or intellectual horsepower. It is self-leadership - the ability to understand and regulate your own inner world so that you can lead the outer one with clarity, steadiness and purpose.

In South African organisations, this is not a theoretical nicety. Leaders are operating in a setting shaped by economic pressure, high workloads, rapid technological change, complex transformation imperatives and uneven levels of institutional trust. Gallup’s most recent South African country-level data reports that only 18% of employees are engaged at work, while 36% say they experienced significant stress the previous day. Edelman’s 2025 Trust Barometer also found that 67% of surveyed South African employees viewed a lack of training, particularly around new technologies, as a threat to job security (Gallup, 2026; Edelman, 2025).

These realities make leadership intensely practical. It is felt in the meeting you chair when you are tired, the email you send when you are irritated, the performance conversation you delay because it is uncomfortable, and the way you respond when someone challenges your view. If you do not lead yourself in those moments, your leadership becomes accidental. People then spend energy interpreting you, protecting themselves or working around you. Performance suffers quietly first, and then loudly.

The leadership shift: from performance to presence

A modern view of leadership is no longer simply “getting results through others”. It is creating the conditions in which people can do valuable work with clarity, accountability and psychological safety. Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson introduced team psychological safety as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. In plain language, people can ask questions, admit mistakes, challenge ideas and learn without fear of embarrassment, rejection or punishment (Edmondson, 1999; 2018).

This kind of culture is not created by posters, values statements or inspirational off sites. It is created through the leader’s observable presence - how you respond when someone disagrees with you, when work goes wrong, when a junior person says, “I do not understand”, or when the room goes quiet because everyone is waiting to see what is safe to say.

Presence, in this sense, is not charisma. It is not a performance. It is the disciplined ability to stay clear, curious and constructive when the situation becomes uncomfortable. Your nervous system will show up before your leadership theory does. Your default patterns will leak. That is why leading self is not a soft pre-module before the “real” leadership content. It is the engine room.

Leading self: emotional intelligence, mental models and the courage to look in the mirror

Daniel Goleman’s work on emotional intelligence made a simple but still-relevant point - effective leadership depends heavily on self-awareness and self-regulation, alongside motivation, empathy and social skill. When pressure rises, leaders do not suddenly become more rational; they often become more themselves. If “more yourself” means reactive, avoidant, controlling or conflict-shy, the organisation eventually pays for it.

Self-awareness is the ability to notice what is happening inside you in real time - your triggers, assumptions, biases, fears and habits. Self-regulation is the ability to choose a response aligned with values and purpose rather than impulse. The leader who develops both creates stability in the system - fewer emotional aftershocks, clearer decisions and less noise.

A key part of self-leadership is recognising the mental models that drive behaviour. Many leaders carry invisible rules such as; “If I do not drive everything, it will not happen”; “Conflict will damage relationships”; “I must always have the answer”; or “If people are not under pressure, they are not performing”. These beliefs often form early in a career, and then quietly become operating instructions.

The work of leading self is to make those rules visible and decide whether they still serve you, your team and the organisation. Sometimes they do. Often, they need to be updated. A belief that helped you succeed as an individual contributor may sabotage you as a leader of others.

This is also where ethical leadership becomes real. Ethics is not only about dramatic scandals or formal declarations of values. It is about daily consistency. Do you keep your word? Do you speak honestly but respectfully? Do you use power responsibly? Do you hold boundaries without becoming harsh? Self-leadership prevents leaders from outsourcing their integrity to the mood of the day.

From “me” to “we” - leading others through trust, coaching and accountability

Once a leader has built greater self-awareness and regulation, leadership expands outward. Leading others is the ability to create direction and support without stealing ownership. Many leaders either over-control because they are anxious, or under-lead because they fear being disliked. Both approaches create teams that are dependent, frustrated or unclear.

This is where more recent leadership thinkers have offered useful practical language. Brené Brown’s phrase “clear is kind” is a helpful corrective for leaders who confuse kindness with comfort. Real kindness includes clarity - clear expectations, clear feedback, clear boundaries and clear consequences. Without clarity, people do not feel safe; they feel uncertain (Brown, 2018).

Similarly, Liz Wiseman and Greg McKeown’s work on “Multipliers” highlights a leadership stance that amplifies capability rather than diminishes it. Multipliers do not need to be the cleverest person in the room; they make the room cleverer. They ask better questions, give people space to think, and set high standards without micromanaging the method (Wiseman and McKeown, 2010).

Leading others, therefore, is less about motivation as a speech and more about motivation as a system. It shows up in meaningful goals, protected focus time, honest feedback, coaching conversations, useful delegation and accountability that is fair, timely and specific. Leaders who lead themselves well can coach without ego, delegate without anxiety, and set boundaries without aggression.

Leading the organisation: culture, change and leading from the middle

Leadership at organisational level is not reserved for executives. Many of the hardest leadership roles sit in the middle - translating strategy into action, aligning stakeholders, maintaining morale, managing constraints and absorbing pressure from above and below. Middle leaders are often the organisation’s cultural hinge. They turn intent into experience.

Culture is shaped less by what leaders say and more by what leaders tolerate. If meetings punish dissent, you do not have innovation. If performance is rewarded while wellbeing is ignored, you do not have sustainability. If values are spoken but not enacted, you do not have credibility. Over time, a leader’s internal discipline becomes organisational culture in practice.

Change leadership is similar. It is not simply a communication plan or a slide deck explaining the “burning platform”. It is the ability to stay steady through uncertainty, invite participation, make trade-offs explicit, and create meaning when people feel destabilised. This is where leadership becomes both technical and human - clear decisions and clear care, at the same time.

South African organisations add extra layers of complexity - historical context, equity imperatives, multilingual realities, varied access to opportunity, and legitimate sensitivity around fairness and inclusion. Leaders who succeed in this environment tend to combine firmness with humanity, high standards without humiliation, inclusion without diluting performance, and care without rescuing.

A more complete definition of leadership

If we pull these ideas together, a broader and more useful definition of leadership might read as follows:

“Leadership is the practice of influencing direction and building the conditions for people to do valuable work through self-awareness, relational skill and the responsible use of power.”

That practice moves in three connected layers:

• Leading self - emotional intelligence, mental models, learning agility and ethical clarity.
• Leading others - coaching, delegation, team dynamics, motivation, boundaries and performance.
• Leading the organization - culture, change, diversity and inclusion, energy, sustainability and leading from the middle.

In a leadership development programme, these layers matter because they mirror how leadership is experienced. You cannot sustainably lead others if you cannot regulate yourself. You cannot lead culture if your day-to-day behaviour undermines trust. You cannot lead change if you cannot sit with discomfort - yours and other people’s.

The most impactful leaders are not perfect - they are practised. They do not outsource their leadership to title, personality or urgency. They develop the inner capacity to respond wisely, the relational capacity to grow others, and the organisational capacity to build alignment at scale.

If we want organisations that perform without burning people out, we need leaders who can do more than drive outcomes. We need leaders who can lead themselves first, because that is where every other leadership capability begins.

Ends.

Total Words: 1516