Into Temptation
The leadership habits you don’t notice (but everyone else does)
If you find this weeks post helpful hit the ❤️ button at the top of this email so that more leaders can find it.
Leadership isn’t just about vision, strategy or driving execution. It’s about managing your own impulses.
The higher up you go, the more your personal temptations scale - and the more their impact ripples across your team and organisation.
We all have patterns.
Some of them are strengths taken too far - a love of innovation that becomes constant disruption; a sharp intellect that prefers debate over decision; a drive for excellence that tips into perfectionism. Others are shortcuts - favouring speed over depth, answers over questions, comfort over tension.
When you’re in a leadership role, these aren’t just personal quirks. They’re system-wide signals. What you indulge, your team absorbs. What distracts you, distracts them. The temptation to follow your default becomes riskier when the consequences don’t just affect you.
This is what makes leadership hard. It’s not that you suddenly become someone else. It’s that who you already are now carries weight. The small things scale. Your preferences shape what gets attention. Your habits influence what others copy. Your tone becomes the atmosphere.
A useful way to think about this is as self-awareness at scale. It’s not just knowing your strengths and weaknesses - it’s understanding how they land on others, and how your inner patterns play out across the wider system. Many temptations show up subtly in how we lead: favouring action over reflection, stepping in instead of coaching, valuing novelty over stability, or simply leaning into what feels comfortable rather than what’s needed.
These moments may seem small. But they add up. And left unchecked, they shape culture, behaviour and direction. What starts as a personal tendency can quietly become an organisational truth.
In fact, poor leadership isn’t usually caused by a lack of strengths - it’s more often due to overused strengths or unchecked blind spots. And as you become more senior, fewer people are willing to challenge you on them. The result? Your temptations get less visible, and more powerful.
It is one of the reasons why I love working with CEOs and business leaders. Often, when they make just one or two shifts in how they show up - how they listen, what they focus on, how they decide - everything changes around them too. Because their team is a product of their leadership.
And the system always adjusts to the energy at the top.
If you want to lead with more intention, it’s worth getting curious about your own temptations. Not to judge them, but to recognise the influence they carry.
Here are four things to consider to help you get started.
Reflect: Our temptations often begin as strengths. But over time, they become familiar patterns - habits we reach for without thinking. The more senior your role, the more important it is to notice not just what you do, but why. And what it costs.
What kind of leader do you want to be remembered as?
If you were starting fresh tomorrow, what habits would you choose to bring with you? Which would you leave behind?
What’s one temptation you could notice - and interrupt - more intentionally over the next 30 days? What impact would that have, beyond yourself?
Explore: Your team often reflects your energy, your pace, your preoccupations. If you’re unaware of your patterns, they may be shaping the team’s norms more than you realise.
What feedback do you most frequently hear about or give to your team?
To what degree could this feedback also be true for you?
What’s one decision or conversation coming up that deserves a different version of you?
Scale: Small patterns at the top tend to cascade. Over time, your leadership habits can become part of the organisation’s cultural DNA.
How is your current leadership style shaping the next generation of leaders around you - and is that what you intend?
If your habits were contagious (and they are), which ones would you be proud to see multiplied across the organisation?
What’s one inner discipline you could develop now that would have a disproportionate effect in the future?
Read/Listen: Patrick Lencioni’s Five Temptations of a CEO is a thought provoking read to delve further into the challenges that simple behaviours can present.
If you find this helpful, please share it with your friends and colleagues.
Meantime if you haven’t already, you can subscribe to receive the next issue straight to your inbox.
