Many Leaders Think of Changing the World. Almost None of Them Think of Changing Themselves.

More than a century ago, Leo Tolstoy observed something about human nature that remains remarkably relevant to leadership today. In his 1900 essay “Three Methods of Reform,” he wrote, “And yet in our world everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself.” The line is often modernized as “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself,” but Tolstoy’s original sentiment is both more precise and more challenging.

Leadership attracts people who want to change things. Sometimes those things are small: a dysfunctional organization, an inefficient process, a toxic culture, or a team that has lost its sense of purpose. Sometimes the ambition is much larger. People enter the military, government, business, education, and public service believing they can improve institutions, solve difficult problems, and perhaps leave some corner of the world better than they found it. There is nothing wrong with that ambition. In fact, we need more of it. The problem is that many leaders eventually become very good at identifying everything that needs to change except themselves.

It is easy to diagnose an organization from the top. The staff needs to communicate better. The employees need to work harder. Junior leaders need to take more initiative. The culture needs greater accountability. Meetings need to be shorter. The planning process needs more discipline. People need to stop operating in silos. Someone needs to take ownership. Sometimes all of those things are true, but there is another question leaders rarely ask with the same enthusiasm: What if some of the problem is me?

That is a considerably more uncomfortable question.

The Mirror Is Harder Than the Window

There is an old leadership habit of looking through the window when things go wrong and into the mirror when things go right. We look outside ourselves for the causes of failure and inward for the causes of success. Good leaders learn to reverse that instinct. When an organization repeatedly fails to communicate, perhaps the leader is not communicating clearly. When subordinates refuse to take initiative, perhaps they have learned that initiative gets punished. When people hide bad news, perhaps the leader has unintentionally taught them that bad news is unwelcome. When meetings are filled with silence and agreement, perhaps the leader has created an environment where disagreement carries too much professional risk.

Culture is rarely created by what leaders say they value. Culture is created by what leaders consistently reward, tolerate, punish, and model. That means the organization you are complaining about may, in uncomfortable ways, be a reflection of you.

This is particularly difficult for successful leaders to accept because success produces its own kind of insulation. The higher someone rises, the more evidence they accumulate that their instincts are correct. Promotions, awards, titles, selections, degrees, and increasingly important positions all seem to reinforce the same conclusion: Whatever I have been doing must be working. Usually, some of it is. But what made someone successful at thirty may make them ineffective at fifty. The leadership style that worked with twenty people may fail with two thousand. The decisiveness required during a crisis may become micromanagement during routine operations. Confidence can slowly harden into certainty. Experience can become rigidity. Standards can become perfectionism. Loyalty can become an unwillingness to hear criticism.

Strengths, left unexamined, have a strange habit of becoming weaknesses.

Experience Can Become an Anchor

We spend much of our professional lives accumulating experience, and we should. Experience matters. But experience is useful only when we are willing to interrogate it. The danger comes when experience stops being something we learn from and becomes something we hide behind.

“I’ve been doing this for thirty years.” “I know how this organization works.” “We tried that before.” “That’s not how we do things here.” Every one of those statements may contain wisdom. Every one of them may also be an excuse to stop learning.

The world changes whether leaders change with it or not. Technology changes. Institutions change. Generations change. Threats change. Markets change. Social expectations change. The people entering our organizations today were shaped by experiences very different from the ones that shaped those now leading them. That does not mean abandoning standards or chasing every new idea. It means maintaining enough intellectual humility to recognize that yesterday’s experience does not automatically answer tomorrow’s problem.

Sometimes the most dangerous sentence a leader can say is not “I don’t know.” It is “I already know.”

The Organization Learns From You

Leaders sometimes announce that they want a “learning organization.” They encourage professional reading, send employees to courses, establish mentorship programs, conduct after-action reviews, and talk about innovation, adaptation, and continuous improvement. Those things matter, but people pay much more attention to what the leader does than to what the leader says.

If the boss never admits being wrong, nobody else will want to admit it either. If the boss reacts defensively to criticism, honest feedback will disappear. If the boss dominates every discussion, eventually everyone will wait for the boss to speak before deciding what they think. If the boss treats questions as challenges to authority, people will stop asking questions. And if the boss behaves as though professional development is something junior people need but senior people have somehow completed, the organization will learn that lesson too.

The leader who wants a learning organization must first demonstrate what learning looks like. That means reading things that challenge your assumptions. It means asking questions when you do not know the answer. It means listening to people younger, less experienced, and lower in the hierarchy. It means occasionally saying, “I was wrong.” It means changing your mind when the evidence changes. None of that diminishes authority. Done correctly, it strengthens it.

Ask the Question You Do Not Want Answered

One of the most valuable questions a leader can ask is also one of the most dangerous: What is something I do that makes this organization less effective?

Do not ask it rhetorically. Ask people who actually know you, and then remain quiet.

The first answers may be safe because people understand power relationships, even when leaders pretend those relationships do not exist. A subordinate knows that telling a senior leader the truth can carry consequences, intentional or otherwise. So the first response may be something harmless: “You could delegate a little more.” “You send a lot of emails.” “Sometimes meetings run long.” Keep listening, because the real answer often arrives later.

Maybe you interrupt people. Maybe you make decisions before the staff has finished analyzing the problem. Maybe your standards change depending on your mood. Maybe you publicly criticize people who bring you bad news. Maybe everyone knows there is one topic that cannot be discussed around you. Maybe you have a favorite subordinate whose behavior you excuse. Maybe people spend enormous amounts of time trying to predict what you want instead of solving the problem.

Maybe the organization has become very good at managing you.

That last possibility should terrify any leader, because an organization that spends its energy managing the boss has less energy available for accomplishing the mission.

Change Begins Closer to Home

We like the idea of transformational leadership because transformation sounds grand. We imagine changing organizations, institutions, professions, perhaps even nations. But transformation usually begins somewhere much less impressive. It begins with changing a habit: listening longer, talking less, reading something uncomfortable, admitting a mistake, apologizing, delegating something you would rather control, allowing someone else to receive the credit, asking a junior person what they think before announcing what you think, or recognizing that a leadership technique that served you well for twenty years may have reached the end of its usefulness.

These are small acts. They will never appear in a biography. Nobody receives an award for them. There is no medal for changing your mind. But these small acts accumulate, and eventually they become character.

There is another reason self-change is so difficult: changing everyone else allows us to remain comfortably ourselves. Reorganizing a staff is easier than changing how we interact with it. Publishing a new policy is easier than acknowledging that our own behavior contributed to the problem. Launching a new initiative feels like leadership because it is visible, measurable, and usually comes with a briefing deck. Changing yourself happens mostly in private, often without recognition, and usually after confronting something you would rather not know.

Perhaps that is why Tolstoy’s observation has survived for more than a century. Changing humanity is an abstraction. Changing yourself is work.

The Hardest Person You Will Ever Lead

Most leaders spend enormous amounts of time thinking about other people. How do I motivate them? How do I develop them? How do I hold them accountable? How do I get them to communicate better? How do I make them understand the mission? How do I get them to change? Those are legitimate leadership questions, but there is another one that should come first: How do I continue changing myself?

Leadership is not a destination we reach after accumulating enough experience. There is no point at which we finally become a finished product. The moment we begin believing we have nothing left to learn is probably the moment we become most dangerous to the organizations we lead. That’s because when we stop learning, we stop leading.

The world does not suffer from a shortage of people who want to change it. Every generation produces politicians, generals, executives, professors, entrepreneurs, activists, and visionaries convinced that they know what everyone else should do differently. What is considerably rarer is the person willing to turn that same critical eye inward: to examine the assumptions that once served them, question habits that have become comfortable, listen when the answer hurts, recognize when experience has become an excuse, and acknowledge that sometimes the organization does not need another initiative, another reorganization, another strategic plan, or another speech.

Sometimes the first thing that needs to change is the person standing at the front of the room. Sometimes, you have to lead yourself first.

Tolstoy understood that more than a century ago. Everybody thinks of changing humanity. Almost nobody thinks of changing themselves.

The best leaders do.

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Charles served over 27 years in the US Army, which included seven combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan with various Special Operations Forces units and two stints as an instructor at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He also completed operational tours in Egypt, the Philippines, and the Republic of Korea and earned a Doctor of Business Administration from Temple University as well as a Master of Arts in International Relations from Yale University. He is the owner of The Havok Journal, and the views expressed herein are his own and do not reflect those of the US Government or any other person or entity.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.