Many senior leaders know the feeling. Nothing is wrong with their results, yet the role has begun to feel smaller than what they could contribute. The usual conclusion is that it is time to move on. Sometimes it is. But that conclusion skips an important question: could the organisation grow too?
Stefan Peetroons explored this in a dialogue with Gert Cielen, CEO of Aurora, a long-established stationery manufacturer. This piece reflects on the ideas behind that conversation rather than reproducing it.
Three speeds of change
A person, a role and an organisation rarely evolve at the same pace. A leader develops through experience and reflection. A role, once defined, tends to stay fixed. An organisation moves according to its history, its structures and its habits.
When those speeds diverge, tension follows. The leader sees possibilities the role does not allow. The role was designed for a context that has moved on. The organisation may not yet see what its leader sees. None of this is anyone’s fault, but it does require attention.
A role should be able to grow with the person it was designed to hold.
Continue with The Leadership Mandate →Leadership as an identity in development
Leadership is better understood as something that develops than as a fixed set of attributes. People grow into a role, and through it they come to know themselves differently. The strongest leaders tend to make decisions that are congruent with who they are, not merely with what the job description asks.
That makes role, context and identity relational. A role that fits at one stage may constrain at the next. The question is not only whether the leader still fits the role, but whether the role still fits what the leader — and the business — now need.
Leaving can be the right answer. It is rarely the right first answer.
A senior executive on finding the next chapter →Leaving is not the first answer
When a leader feels they have grown beyond their context, the first move can be to understand before acting: to listen, to connect, and to ask what the situation asks of them rather than how to get out of it. That involves honest conversations with oneself, and then with colleagues, a chair or a board.
Leaving may still be the right outcome. But it is a different decision when it follows a genuine attempt to help the organisation evolve from within, than when it is the reflex response to discomfort.
Sometimes the question is not whether the leader has outgrown the role, but whether the role has kept pace with the business.
Explore the next question →Is the role large enough?
Organisational structures were largely designed to bring order and control in a slower, more predictable world. Today, the greater risk may lie less with leaders who grow and more with roles that do not.
This reframes conversations about retention and succession. Keeping capable leaders may require redesigning what they are asked to do — and that redesign can benefit the organisation as much as the individual.
What boards and leaders can ask
For a leader: what more could I contribute here, and what would need to change to make that possible? For a board or owner: which of our senior roles still reflect yesterday’s organisation, and who among our leaders is already seeing tomorrow’s?
These are not easy conversations. They require trust, and the courage to name a tension before it becomes a resignation. But they can turn a moment of friction into a shared step forward.
