Why Your Strongest Leader Is Becoming Your Biggest Risk

I need to tell you about a moment I had this month that I have not been able to stop thinking about.

It was a senior executive I have worked with for nearly a year. By every external measure, exactly the leader his organization wants. Promoted three times in five years. Running a portfolio that did not exist eighteen months ago.

He sat down across from me, and before I could ask him how he was, he said this:

“Marderé. I think I am becoming someone I do not like.”

I have heard that sentence enough times in twenty years to know what it is. It is not a confession. It is a signal. The moment a high-capability leader notices that the person their role is making them into is not the person they set out to be, and they do not yet know what to do with that gap.

This piece is for you if you have ever heard that signal in yourself, or noticed it in someone you are responsible for growing.

The Two Ways A Leader Grows,  And Only One Of Them Is On Your Development Plan

It is the end of May. And Star Wars is in my head since May 4th.  The more coaching I do at the senior level, the more I think George Lucas wrote the most accurate leadership development case study of the last fifty years and almost nobody in our industry uses it that way.

There are two ways a leader grows.

1. The first is the one your organization has been paying for. More skills. More tools. More credentials. A bigger title. A wider remit. The research field calls this horizontal growth. It is real, it matters, and it is what most leadership development is built around.
2. The second one is the one almost nobody talks about. It is called vertical growth, and it is what happens when the person inside the role becomes a different order of person. Less ego. Wider lens. Able to hold complexity without collapsing into control. Not more knowledge sitting on top of the same operating system, the operating system itself getting bigger.

The research comes from Harvard, from Cook-Greuter, from Torbert, from Garvey-Berger. Kegan’s work on adult development estimates around 80% of leaders are in roles whose complexity has outpaced their current developmental stage.

The job got bigger than the person, and we are quietly hoping the person catches up on their own. Most of the time, they do not.

Why The Strongest Leaders Are The Most At Risk For Burnout And Collapse

The people most at risk for collapse are not the weak ones. They are the strongest. The ones with the most capability and the least developmental practice for digesting what the work is costing them.

Capability is not the protective factor we want it to be. Twenty years in, I do not think it is anymore. Beyond a certain stage, capability without interior development is a risk multiplier. The more capable a leader becomes, the more weight the system gives them, the faster their decisions move, the more people are downstream of their state. If the interior has not been built to hold that weight, the capability does not protect the leader. The capability is what amplifies the fall.

I have watched this happen in almost the same sequence more times than I can count. The leader becomes a Bottleneck Boss,  not because they were controlling, but because the role outpaced the person inside it. It never starts with weakness. It starts with capability. They get sharper. Then faster. Then harder. And somewhere around month fourteen, you notice the people around them have changed. The team stopped pushing back.  (This is what the science of trust in executive teams tells us happens long before the resignation letter does.)  The peers stopped engaging. The spouse stopped asking how the day was. The capability is bigger than it has ever been. The person inside the capability is smaller than they started.

Honestly, the part I do not say out loud often enough, there are leaders I have not been able to reach in time. Leaders who came to me at month fourteen, when the team had already stopped pushing back, when the person inside the leader had already started to disappear. The work is too late by then. What I can do is help the ones who arrive at month four notice the trajectory they are on, and choose differently.

The Anakin Warning: What Star Wars Teaches Senior Leaders About Burnout

Anakin Skywalker is the warning the saga will not let any of us forget. By every external measure, the most capable Jedi of his generation. Strategic. Decisive. Self-directed. He commanded armies. The Jedi Council recognized his talent. He delivered results.

And then, under the weight of fear, attachment, and unintegrated grief, he collapsed. Not down one stage. All the way down. The Vader inside the suit is not an Achiever gone bad. He is operating from something much earlier on the developmental arc, power organized around fear and impulse, no perspective-taking, other people as instruments. The capability is enormous. The interior is hollow.

Anakin’s tragedy is not that he was weak. He was extraordinarily capable. His tragedy is that nobody in his life gave him the developmental container that would have let him metabolize his fear into wisdom rather than into rage. He had teachers. He did not have a teacher who could hold him steady enough to see himself without flinching.

What Vertical Leadership Development Actually Looks Like: The Five Stages

If Anakin is the warning, Luke is the developmental arc the research has been describing for decades, in dryer language. Cook-Greuter, Kegan, and Torbert have been mapping these stages for forty years. I use Star Wars to teach them because almost no senior leader needs the stages explained twice once they see them through Luke.

Stage One: the Conformer. Luke on Tatooine. Identity is borrowed. He defines himself by his absent father’s mythology and his uncle’s expectations.

Stage Two: the Expert. Young Obi-Wan. Brilliant, disciplined, deeply skilled within the Jedi code, and unable to see the Jedi code from outside it. Mastery is identity. Any threat to the mastery feels like a threat to the self.

Stage Three:  the Achiever. Han Solo’s pragmatism. Leia’s principled commitment. Mature Obi-Wan. Self-authored values, command of the mission, delivery under pressure. This is where most senior leaders settle. It is a magnificent stage. It is also a ceiling, and the ceiling is invisible from inside it. The Achiever-who-thinks-they-are-a-Catalyst is the most common developmental gap I see.

Stage Four: the Catalyst. Luke in the throne room at the end of Return of the Jedi. Vader and the Emperor offer him a binary, kill your father and join us, or be destroyed. Luke refuses the binary. He drops the lightsaber. He says, “I am a Jedi, like my father before me.” That refusal is not strategy. It is a different order of mind. From that interior, he changes the room without raising his voice.

Stage Five: the Sage. Yoda. Obi-Wan as guiding presence. Influence without control. They no longer need to be central to be useful.

Cook-Greuter’s research suggests fewer than 15% of leaders ever develop past the Achiever stage into post-conventional territory,  into Catalyst and beyond. That is the gap I keep meeting in the coaching room. Senior leaders extraordinarily good at the Achiever stage, in roles quietly asking them for Catalyst-level work, with no developmental container around them.

How To Develop Senior Leaders Vertically (Not Just Horizontally)

Three things I would offer you, if you are looking at your bench right now and trying to figure out what to do.

1. Locate your leaders honestly. Most senior people are Achievers pretending to be Catalysts, or Experts pretending to be Achievers. The Achiever-pretending-to-be-Catalyst pattern is the one that breaks businesses, because the role is asking for a developmental stage the person has not yet reached, and no amount of harder work will close that gap. Only growing into a different order of person closes that gap.
2. Stop investing only horizontally. Course-stacking on a leader whose interior has not grown is the developmental equivalent of pouring water into a glass that has not been built bigger. It will not hold. I have watched organizations spend extraordinary sums on capability development for a leader who needed a developmental container, not a new skill, and watched the leader leave or collapse anyway.
3. Build the container. Vertical growth does not happen from a podcast or a workshop. It happens through challenge, reflection, and a relationship with someone who can hold the mirror up steady enough that the leader can see themselves without flinching. That is what coaching, at this level, is actually for. It is not a rescue. It is the developmental container the research has been telling us about for forty years.

The One Leadership Question To Ask Your Strongest Person This Week

If you have read this far, I want to ask you one thing.

This week, notice the leader on your team, or the leader inside yourself, who is the most capable, the most relied upon, the most quietly carrying. Ask them how they are. Not how the project is. How they are. Listen for the sentence I heard this month.

“I am becoming someone I do not like.” “I do not recognize this version of me.” “I am fine, I just have not slept properly in weeks.”

Those are not weakness. They are signals. The developmental container asking to be built before the fall, not after.

The question worth holding this week, for yourself, and for the strongest person you are responsible for,  is this:

That is the question that stops the fall before it starts.

If you are sitting with one of those signals right now, yours, or someone else’s, I would love to have a conversation with you.

Thirty minutes. No framework. No pitch. Just the two of us looking at what is actually happening in your leadership, and whether I am the right person to help you shift it. sage-summit.com/book

May the force, and the harder, quieter work of growing up inside your leadership, be with you.

— Marderé