Why leadership feels harder now – most leaders aren’t operating where they should be

Over the last year or so, we’ve noticed a consistent theme in conversations with experienced leaders.
They describe a sense that something has shifted. Not dramatically, but enough to make them pause and question what’s going on. Situations that used to feel relatively straightforward now feel more complex. Decisions take longer. Confidence doesn’t seem to land in quite the same way.
What’s striking is that this isn’t about capability. These are capable, experienced leaders who have been successful in what they do.
So the question becomes: what’s changed?

Leadership experience was built for a different environment

If we step back, many leaders developed their experience in environments that were more predictable than the ones they are operating in now.
There was enough stability for patterns to repeat, for cause and effect to be easier to read, and for experience to compound in a way that gave leaders confidence in how to respond. You could recognise a situation, draw on what had worked before, and move forward with a degree of certainty.
That hasn’t disappeared, but it has become less reliable.
Leaders are now encountering situations where the pattern isn’t clear, or where it looks familiar on the surface but behaves differently because the context has shifted. The consequence is that experience still matters, but it no longer provides the same level of guidance on its own.

Change is no longer something you go through

We often describe today’s environment as fast-moving, but the more significant shift is that change has become continuous.
Teams are no longer moving between periods of stability and transformation; they are operating within multiple layers of change at once. New priorities emerge while others are still in motion, expectations evolve, and ways of working continue to shift.
This is something we see very clearly when working with leadership teams. It is rarely a single change that needs to be navigated. More often, it is several happening at the same time, with limited opportunity to step back and make sense of how those things connect or conflict.
That creates a different kind of challenge, where leaders are interpreting what is happening in real time rather than applying what is already known.

The systems leaders are working in are more complex

Alongside this, the systems themselves have become more interconnected.
There are more stakeholders to consider, more dependencies between teams, and more unintended consequences to decisions. What looks like a straightforward decision in one part of the organisation can have effects elsewhere that are not immediately visible.
In our work, we often see leaders trying to simplify situations quickly, which is understandable given the pressure they are under. However, many of the challenges they are facing now are not linear in nature, and responding to them requires a different approach—one that involves holding multiple perspectives, exploring before resolving, and working with a level of uncertainty that cannot always be reduced.

The tension at the heart of the role

One of the most useful ways of understanding why leadership feels harder is to look at the tension between two parts of the role that both need attention.
Leaders need to work both in the system and on the system.
Working in the system is the operational side of leadership. It is the day-to-day activity of making decisions, solving problems and keeping things moving forward.
Working on the system is something different. It is about creating clarity, shaping how the team operates, building alignment and putting in place the conditions that enable performance to happen consistently.
Both are necessary. The challenge lies in maintaining the balance between them. And the more senior a leader becomes, the more they should be working on the system than in it.

What happens under pressure

When conditions are relatively stable, leaders usually have enough space to do both.
What we see much more now, particularly under sustained pressure and change, is how quickly that balance shifts. As pace increases, leaders are drawn back into the system. There is more to respond to, decisions need to be made quickly, and there is often a strong pull to step in directly because it feels like the fastest way to move things forward.
In many cases, it is the most experienced leader who steps in, which can feel both natural and responsible.
And in the short term, it often works.

Where the impact shows up

The difficulty is not that leaders step into the system, but that they often remain there for far too long, creating dependency in others.
As that happens, the work of being on the system inevitably reduces. We start to see leaders making more and more decisions themselves, teams working hard but without clear priorities, and leadership teams that are busy but not necessarily aligned and empowered.
Over time, the system becomes more dependent on the leader’s direct involvement, and less capable of sustaining performance without it. We call this “dropping down of leadership”. Once this happens, it becomes very hard for the leader to step back up to working on the system again.

And yet the organisation still needs something different

At the same time, organisational expectations have not decreased.
The organisation still needs leaders to create clarity, to build alignment, and to enable teams to operate effectively without constant intervention. Those are all aspects of working on the system.
This creates a tension at the centre of the role. The immediate demands of the environment pull leaders into operational activity, while the longer-term performance of the organisation depends on them maintaining enough distance to shape how the system works.
That tension is a large part of why leadership feels more difficult.

What we see work in practice

The leaders who are navigating this well are not necessarily those with the most experience, but those who are willing to adjust how they use that experience.
In practice, that often involves being more deliberate about when they step into the system and when they step back from it, creating enough clarity that the team can operate without constant input, and continuing to invest in how the system functions even when the pressure to focus purely on delivery is high.
This is where much of our work with leaders is focused—not on adding more, but on helping them rebalance where their effort has the greatest impact. It’s also about helping them create the connections across the organisation and the influencing skills to be able to shape the system when it matters most.

A final reflection

If leadership feels harder at the moment, it is worth pausing and asking leaders the following questions:
Where are you spending most of your time – in or on the system? And where would you add most value to the organisation?
Because once that becomes clear, the focus shifts from trying to do more of the same to leading in a way that better fits the reality leaders are now operating in.