Leadership as an Evolving Identity

Senior appointments are usually justified by the past. A comparable scale, a relevant sector, a record of results. These are reassuring because they are visible. Yet the challenges an executive is appointed to meet lie in the future, often in a context unlike any the candidate has led before.

In an interview with House of Executives, Stefan Peetroons argued that leadership is better seen as an identity in development. This piece develops that idea for boards and owners facing a consequential appointment.

The comfort of a proven record

A track record answers an important question: has this person succeeded before? It answers a different question less well: will what made them succeed then be what this organisation needs now?

When the environment is stable, the two questions overlap. When it is changing structurally, selecting mainly on proven performance can quietly reproduce the past — repeating what worked in a context that no longer exists.

When optimisation meets an existential question

Consider an illustrative pattern. A leader with an excellent record is appointed to transform a business. Processes improve, margins rise, structure arrives. And yet the organisation stalls: people disengage, innovation slows, the culture changes only on the surface.

Nothing was wrong with the leader’s competence. The mismatch lay in the nature of the challenge. The business did not mainly need optimisation; it needed to answer more fundamental questions about who it was and what role it wanted to play. Many organisations face such questions today — in industries under pressure to change, in institutions whose legitimacy is challenged, in companies that have outgrown their original identity.

Potential is an incomplete sentence.

Explore Potential for What? →

Identity in relation to context

Leadership is not simply a set of competencies. It is how a person makes sense of complexity, what guides their choices when things are difficult, and how they affect the people around them. Those qualities do not exist in a vacuum; they express themselves in relation to a particular context.

That is why the same leader can be outstanding in one situation and struggle in another. Fit is not a property of the person alone. It is a relationship between the person, the role and what the organisation is trying to become.

From static profile to future contribution

A more useful starting point than the profile is the contribution. What must be realised here, in what context, under which pressures? What kind of thinking will that require — and what kind of judgement when there is no obvious answer?

From that question, candidate evaluation changes. Experience is still examined, but as evidence among other evidence. Equal attention goes to how a person reasons about complexity, what they value under pressure, and how they are likely to work with others in the context ahead.

A different selection conversation

A selection conversation can then become a mutual exploration rather than a test against a checklist: of what the organisation needs, what the candidate brings, and where the uncertainties lie. The aim is not to eliminate risk — that is not possible — but to make the reasoning behind the decision explicit enough to examine.

For a board that simply wants ‘a good CEO’, the shift can feel abstract at first. In practice, it is the most concrete question available: good for what, and under which conditions?