PLN 37: The drift nobody warns you about

Time to Read: 5 mins 

I once worked with a leader we'll call "Rob."

Rob started with nothing but an idea and tons of grit. Over the decades, he grew his idea into a profitable and highly respected company. It was a place where talented people lined up to work, and competitors clamored for his trade secrets. By any outside measure, he was a success story.

But over the years, something drastically shifted.

The same self-leadership that built the company… his confidence, his drive, the certainty in his own vision… it all started to curdle, like milk in a baby’s bottle on a hot summer day (says this new grandma 🍼☀️).

Ego crept in where humility used to sit and decisions got shaped by being right instead of effective.

The end result was that people stopped offering him feedback. Because when it was offered, he wouldn’t take it, so what was the point?

The deterioration was slow at first. And then it happened all at once.

Departments turned on each other. Talented people left, one critical resignation at a time. And the culture turned toxic, morphing into something people endured instead of something they believed in.

The ending felt inevitable to everyone… except Rob. 🤦🏻‍♀️ And eventually, the company was sold to a competitor for pennies on the dollar.

This isn’t the ending Rob had envisioned all those years ago when he started the company. But it’s the ending his self-leadership drove it to.

Here's an important and harsh truth about self-leadership:

It isn't one and done. You don’t hire a coach, read a book, go through a course, and assume you’ll lead yourself and others well for life. It has to be tended to, continually cultivated, and perpetually checked, otherwise you drift without noticing.

Rob drifted. And nobody, including Rob, was watching closely enough to catch it or stop it.

And while you don’t find this on inspirational posters, the reality is…

The more you elevate who you are, the more responsibility you have for the impact you create.

But the direction of that impact is up to you and your self-leadership. A regular self-leadership practice can keep you aware of your direction and anchored to your best self (I know someone who can help you with that, if you’re interested 😉), but without it, drift can easily happen.

Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner has some interesting insight on why this occurs. He’s spent over two decades studying what power actually does to people, and he found that the more powerful a person feels, the worse they get at reading the room. They’re far less attuned to other people and much slower to notice when something's off, including in themselves.

That's drift, happening at a measurable, human level. But it doesn’t happen all at once.

For Rob, it showed up in hundreds of small decisions over time, each one nudging him further from where he'd started.

He stopped asking whether a decision was right and started looking for whether it made him look right. And the need to make him look right was a trend others hopped on too.

Team meetings turned into performances with everyone telling Rob what he wanted to hear instead of what he needed to know. And once his ego was hyper-inflated, it rendered him incapable of reading the room or seeing the signs.

I feel it’s important to highlight that Rob didn't just wake up one day and decide to stop tending his direction. It happened the way it always does — it began slowly, with one small unchecked decision at a time, until it suddenly felt like it happened all at once.

Unfortunately, Rob’s story is all too common.

While driving a successful company into the ground may not be the norm, drifting to a point where one’s inner leader brings about unwanted consequences is.

It happens at all levels when we fail to check in with ourselves and calibrate our self-leadership, our direction, and our values.

That’s why I include these three touchpoints in my coaching approach. That way clients stay tethered to where they’re headed and grounded in their why.

But it’s something you can do on your own as well. ⬇️

💡 Practionable Takeaway

Most leaders can tell you their values. But far fewer can tell you the last time they checked whether their day-to-day decisions were aligned with those values.

And that’s where the rubber meets the road.

So here’s my challenge to you…

📝 Make a list of the values that define you as a leader, the ones you'd list without hesitating. Now think back over your last month of decisions.

❓ Where did those values genuinely show up? And where did something else quietly take the wheel instead? Ambition. Ego. The need to win or be right.

Those two questions are more powerful than they appear. The first makes you see it; the second makes you deal with it.

And this is the essence of Inner Leader, Outer Impact.

🎥 Want to Go Deeper? 

Values can shift over time, especially as our roles and life phases change.

Redefining those values is some of the most important work you can do! (I could do an hour-long webinar on why, but I won’t here, so just take my word for it.)

If it’s been a while since you’ve revisited your values, you might find this exercise helpful. It's one that I use with my 1:1 clients, as well as in my course.

You can find it here → Values Exercise

Since words can mean different things to different people, it’s purpose-built to help you name and define your values in a way that is specific to you and your current life stage.

Give yourself twenty honest minutes with it — your future self will thank you.

To Your Success,

Laura 💜🧡