Leadership used to reward certainty. Increasingly, it rewards the confidence to admit what you do not know, change your mind and let people see you grow.

When I first became a manager in the 1990s, leadership looked very different.

Strength mattered. You worked hard, usually for a lot of hours. You led by example, did not suffer fools lightly and, once you had made a decision, you generally stuck to it. Flexibility could easily be interpreted as weakness.

Most importantly, you did not let your team see vulnerability.

That was not necessarily bad leadership for its time. It was simply the environment many of us were developed within. Mental health was barely discussed. Stress and burnout were often whispered about rather than openly acknowledged, and leaders were expected to appear strong even when things were going badly.

I absorbed plenty of that. If I was told to be firm, I could be firm. If the hierarchy had decided something, I was very good at executing it. Ambition was a powerful driver for me, so I learned how to operate successfully inside the system.

But even then, I often questioned it.

I Often Felt Like an Englishman in New York

I use the phrase “an Englishman in New York” because it describes how I sometimes felt during my earlier career. I could operate within the leadership culture around me, but internally I often saw situations differently.

As I became more experienced, competent and confident, I became increasingly willing to act on that instinct. I started creating the sort of environments I wanted to work within, and generally they were happier workplaces where the results followed.

That did not mean standards disappeared. I used to say that if somebody did not want to be on the bus, that was fine. I would support them getting off the bus. What I would not tolerate was somebody who did not want to be there ruining the culture for everybody else.

The bigger change for me came through transparency. I became far more open with teams about strategy, business performance, where we were struggling and even the bottom line. Vulnerability came later because that required another level of confidence and self-awareness.

Eventually, admitting mistakes became part of my leadership as well.

That would have felt almost alien to the younger version of me.

The Leadership Stage Has Become Much Bigger

The environment around leadership has also changed enormously.

Different generations have entered the workplace with different expectations. Technology has transformed who can communicate, how quickly information travels and the ease with which people can access alternative views.

In the 1990s, getting a leadership message into the public domain generally required a newspaper, magazine or broadcaster. Today, I can turn on a camera and talk directly about leadership on YouTube. Anybody else can do exactly the same.

Senior leaders therefore operate on a much bigger stage.

The Financial Times’ recently launched UK CEO performance ranking is an interesting illustration. It assesses leaders using traditional financial measures alongside factors including employee sentiment and media perception. Whether or not you agree with the methodology, it demonstrates how widely senior leadership can now be scrutinised.

The generational element matters too, but I do not think this should become another argument about whether Gen Z is better or worse than the generations before it. Forbes has reported that younger employees place considerable importance on transparency and regular feedback, while the Financial Times has examined how companies are adapting leadership development around learning agility, mentoring and different expectations of work.

There are outstanding and poor leaders in every generation. There are also things younger people need to learn from those with more experience.

The bigger point is that the environment has moved.

Some leaders have moved with it. Others, frankly, have missed it completely.

Learning in Public Does Not Mean Knowing Nothing

This is where I think the phrase “learning in public” can be misunderstood.

I am not advocating that a senior leader walks into a meeting and announces they have absolutely no idea what they are doing. I have heard versions of that in leadership, and it is not my style.

There is a huge difference between saying, “I don’t have the answer yet, but we have excellent people around this table and together we will find the best one,” and effectively saying, “I haven’t got a clue. Somebody else sort it out.”

Vulnerability works. In my experience, it can be one of the fastest ways of building trust. But vulnerability still requires judgement.

There are personal boundaries I would retain as well. I am an open person, but that does not mean the people I lead need every detail of difficult things happening within my family or private life. There may be moments when emotion comes out because we are human. Deliberately sharing everything is different.

Harvard Business Review has explored this tension. Humility includes being willing to admit mistakes and acknowledge when you do not know something, but taken too far it can also create perceptions of indecisiveness when people need leadership and direction.

Learning in public is not unlimited vulnerability.

It is disciplined openness.

“I Got That Wrong”

Several years ago, I worked for a very successful Dutch company where attitudes towards mistakes were noticeably different.

The CEO had a belief displayed on his office wall that, in essence, said if you were not making mistakes, you probably were not pushing hard enough.

Mistakes still mattered. Accountability still mattered. But making one did not automatically make you incompetent.

When that becomes culturally normal, the conversation changes. Instead of leadership energy being spent protecting the person who made the decision, it can be spent understanding and correcting the decision itself.

You can say: “I got that wrong. Let’s understand why and make it better.”

This is very different from what I had been conditioned to believe earlier in my career. In the 1990s, I was effectively trained to stand behind a decision because I had made it. Even when evidence subsequently suggested otherwise, changing your mind could feel like weakness.

I no longer believe that.

Harvard Business Review’s work on psychological safety argues that people need to feel able to speak candidly, particularly within senior teams. Without that environment, people hold back information and challenge, weakening the quality of decision-making.

A recent BMJ Leader article goes even further, describing the need for “epistemic humility”: accepting that our knowledge is incomplete and being willing to reopen conclusions when other people or new evidence tell us something different.

Nobody can be right all the time.

For me, being able to say “I was wrong” is not weakness.

It takes courage.

The Higher You Go, the More You Have to Lose

Unfortunately, seniority can make this harder rather than easier.

The higher you climb, the bigger the perceived fall. Status, reputation, income and identity can all become wrapped around the position. There is more to protect, and fear of failure can create increasingly defensive leadership.

I explored another side of this in The Quiet Risk of Unchallenged Leadership. The higher somebody rises, the easier it can become for people around them to stop contradicting them.

The Quiet Risk of Unchallenged Leadership

I have seen this at very senior levels. I once coached a CEO who had accumulated enormous influence over the board around them. Challenging NEDs could effectively find themselves on the outside.

That is an extreme example, and this is not an attack on CEOs. I have worked with and for some exceptional ones.

But power can protect leadership behaviour for longer than performance alone might justify. If nobody feels able to tell the most powerful person in the organisation that they are wrong, the organisation has a problem whether the CEO recognises it or not.

The Best People Have Options

There is another consequence when leaders cannot or will not adapt.

Their best people may simply leave.

I have always said that the best people have options. A highly talented employee does not necessarily have the energy or inclination to spend years fighting an immovable leader. Eventually, they can take their ability somewhere else.

Then comes a phrase I have heard far too many times:

“They were rubbish anyway.”

I wrote an entire article about that response because it can be an extraordinarily convenient way of protecting leadership ego.

“They Were Rubbish Anyway”: The Excuse That’s Killing Leadership

Perhaps the person genuinely was not capable enough. That happens.

But I have always worked from a different starting position: if my team is not performing, I look at my leadership first.

Did they understand what was expected? Did I develop them properly? Did they feel supported? Could they challenge me? Did I recognise what they were actually good at?

And if they genuinely were incapable of doing the job, why did I allow that situation to continue?

Learning in public sometimes means being willing to ask an uncomfortable question.

What if they were not the whole problem?

Forbes has reported similar findings around leadership accountability, including research suggesting that failure to admit mistakes or take responsibility can negatively affect organisational culture.

Belief Still Matters

When I think about a talented 25-year-old working for a 50-year-old leader today, there are plenty of things they would still expect that I expected at their age: guidance, development, mentoring and opportunities.

But one word comes back to me: belief.

My generation was often developed by finding what was wrong with us and trying to fix it. Weaknesses were identified and worked on. There was value in that, and I certainly do not believe we should remove challenge or standards from development.

But leadership can do something else.

Someone may not win the contract. They may not pass the exam. They may fail to close a particular deal. A good leader can acknowledge that while still saying, “I believe in you, and I can see what you are exceptionally good at.”

Learning cultures need room for people to get things wrong without being permanently defined by the mistake.

Entrepreneur has made a similar argument around leadership vulnerability: when leaders pretend to be perfect and expect perfection around them, people can become frightened to admit errors or take the risks required for creativity and innovation.

That is not lowering standards.

It is creating an environment where people can improve.

I Am Still Learning in Public at 50

This applies to me as much as anybody else.

I am approaching 80 YouTube videos as I write this. I still do not enjoy being in front of the camera. It is not really a confidence issue; I simply find it awkward.

My equipment is hardly a television studio either. My sophisticated setup essentially involves putting the camera (my phone!) on a box.

It is not polished, and it shows.

But every week I turn up and do it because video allows me to introduce the ideas I am writing about and, hopefully, help somebody.

I am also still learning how to build a coaching business. The coaching itself feels natural to me. I have coached people internally for decades and now work with senior professionals every week.

Selling yourself is different.

I spent nearly 30 years commercially selling products, services, strategies and businesses. Building something where a substantial part of the proposition is me personally has required another level of learning.

I also spent virtually all my adult working life with infrastructure around me. Salary, pension, National Insurance, healthcare, car, laptop and organisational support were simply there.

Then I stepped away from corporate life and they weren’t.

That connects directly with something I explored in When Growth Turns Into Protection. In 2024, my own coaching helped me get beneath all the sensible explanations I was giving myself for not going all-in on this next stage of my career.

When Growth Turns Into Protection

Underneath much of it was fear of failure.

My coach helped me question what failure actually meant.

Today, I think about it very differently.

Failure is another word for learning.

The Leader I Hope This Reaches

Some of the people reading this will already be doing much of it.

They invite challenge. They admit mistakes. They question themselves. They know they are still developing regardless of the title on the door.

They probably do not need this article.

The leader I would really like to reach is the person who cannot quite identify what is wrong but knows something is not right.

Their team is not performing as it should. Good people are disengaging or leaving. Nobody challenges them anymore. Leadership does not seem to be producing the response it once did.

I hear versions of that on discovery calls.

Often, somebody does not arrive knowing exactly what is holding them back. If they already had complete clarity on the problem and the solution, they probably would not need me.

That is where executive coaching can be incredibly powerful. It creates somewhere confidential to look into the leadership mirror, question assumptions and explore what might be sitting underneath the behaviour: confidence, identity, ego, fear of failure or simply a leadership model that worked brilliantly 20 years ago but needs adapting today.

The starting point does not require somebody to admit they are a bad leader.

Usually, they are anything but. It requires enough self-awareness to say:

“Something isn’t quite right, and I am willing to find out whether I am part of the problem.”

The senior leader’s new job is not to know everything. It is to keep learning while other people are watching.

That requires enough confidence to admit mistakes, enough humility to hear better answers, enough courage to change direction and enough judgement to know what should remain private.

Leadership has moved on.

The question is whether we are prepared to move with it.

References and Further Reading

1. Harvard Business Review (2025), “4 Mistakes Leaders Make About Psychological Safety.”
   https://hbr.org/2025/06/4-mistakes-leaders-make-about-psychological-safety
2. Harvard Business Review (2024), “3 Ways Humility Can Undermine Your Leadership.”
   https://hbr.org/2024/03/3-ways-humility-can-undermine-your-leadership
3. Financial Times (2026), “Who Is Britain’s Best CEO? You Decide.”
   https://www.ft.com/content/410ee6b6-177b-46fb-9e9c-d388322725c5
4. Financial Times (2025), “How to Turn Gen Z Into Management Material.”
   https://www.ft.com/content/5182606c-558f-4d6f-af5b-3e9e57aef326
5. Forbes (2026), “4 Things Managers Keep Getting Wrong About Gen Z Workplace Preferences.”
   https://www.forbes.com/sites/markmurphy/2026/06/30/4-things-managers-keep-getting-wrong-about-gen-z-workplace-preferences/
6. BMJ Leader (2026), “Beyond Compassion: Why Healthcare Leaders Need Epistemic Humility.”
   https://blogs.bmj.com/bmjleader/2026/07/27/beyond-compassion-why-healthcare-leaders-need-epistemic-humility-by-maiedha-raza/
7. Entrepreneur (2022), “Why Vulnerability Is a Leader’s Greatest Strength, Not Weakness.”
   https://www.entrepreneur.com/leadership/why-vulnerability-is-a-leaders-greatest-strength-not/431643

I’m Laurence Loxam – I’ve pushed limits in business, on mountains, and at the finish line.

Now I help elite professionals do the same, pushing past the point most people stop.

I coach CEOs, doctors, lawyers, and founders who’ve hit success, but still feel there’s more.

Together, we unlock clarity, sharpen confidence, and lead with conviction.

Ready for your next leadership breakthrough? Let’s connect.