Why Good Leaders Aren't Born - They're Built
Author: Andrea Law
I had a conversation recently with a senior leader that has inspired me to write.
We were talking about something that comes up a lot in my work - why some leaders struggle so much with the human side of leadership. Not the strategy, nor the commercial decisions, nor the technical stuff, but the people stuff. The communication, the empathy, the ability to make someone feel valued, informed and motivated to do their best work.
It’s a perennial problem.
We all arrive as a product of our experiences
Every single person who steps into a leadership role brings their whole life with them. Their upbringing, their family, their experience of education - whether that felt like a place where they thrived or somewhere they just about survived. How they watched their parents approach work, particularly if they were self-employed or ran their own business, because that shapes your understanding of what leadership looks like from a very early age.
Then there are the leaders they've had themselves. We absorb leadership styles like a sponge, often without realising it. If you've been lucky enough to work for brilliant people who communicated openly, showed genuine interest in you and handled difficult conversations with care, you have a blueprint to draw from. If you haven't - if the leadership you've been exposed to has been closed, dismissive or just absent - then you're largely making it up as you go along, defaulting to the only models you've ever seen.
Add to that everything happening outside of work. Stress, relationships, family pressures, health, finances. None of that disappears when someone sits down at their desk. It comes with them, every single day, and it affects how they show up for the people around them.
And then there's how our brains work. Neurodiversity means that for some leaders, the environment itself is the challenge - offices, meetings, social dynamics and unwritten rules that were all designed around a neurotypical norm. Emotional intelligence - which some people have developed naturally, some have built through difficult experiences, and some have simply never had cause to develop because nobody ever told them it mattered. Imposter syndrome is far more common in leadership than anyone likes to admit, and it can cause even the most senior person to become defensive, controlling or emotionally unavailable - not out of malice, but out of quiet fear of being found out.
For those who've had a positive experience across all of these things - great family, great education, brilliant role models, manageable stress, high emotional intelligence - they are privileged in a way that makes the human side of leadership feel more straightforward. For most people, that simply isn't the reality.
The accidental manager problem
In most organisations, the path to leadership looks something like this: you are brilliant at your job, so you get promoted. And then, almost overnight, your job is no longer to do the thing you were brilliant at. Your job is to lead, develop and communicate with the people who now do that thing.
Nobody prepared you for that. Nobody sat you down eighteen months earlier and said "we think you've got real potential as a leader - let's start working on that now." Nobody invested in identifying you as a future leader and building those skills before you needed them. You were just handed the responsibility and expected to get on with it.
And then we wonder why so many leaders struggle.
This isn't a personal failing. It is a systemic one. Organisations promote people into leadership roles without ever stopping to ask whether they are ready - or, more importantly, without taking the time to help them get ready.
Leadership is a skill. Treat it like one.
This is the part I feel most strongly about, and it's something I said in that conversation: too many organisations - and too many people - expect leaders to be naturals. To just instinctively know how to communicate well, how to have difficult conversations, how to read a room, how to bring people with them through change.
That expectation is unfair and, frankly, unhelpful.
Communication is a skill. Empathy is a skill. The ability to make someone feel heard is a skill. Like any skill, it can be learned, developed and improved - at any stage of a career and at any level of seniority.
The leaders who struggle haven't had the right support yet. And the organisations that invest in developing their leaders - their human capabilities, not just their technical ones - see the difference everywhere. In team morale, in retention, in how change lands, in how much of their internal comms strategy reaches people the way it was intended to.
So what can you do?
Start by letting go of the idea that great leadership communication is something people either have or they don't. It's something you can work on - and something worth working on, because the impact on the people around you is profound.
At Enthuse, our Communication Bootcamp [add link] was designed precisely for this. It's practical, hands-on work on the skills that make the biggest difference to how a leader communicates - and how their team feels and performs as a result.
If this resonates with you, or if you're thinking about the leaders in your own organisation, we'd love to have a conversation.