Amara learned to lead from a man who solved every problem like it was a fire. He was passionate and brilliant at it. Clients trusted him. His team always followed him and at times feared him. And for twelve years, Amara studied him the way a young musician studies a master: absorbing everything, imitating the intensity, believing that urgency and control were the highest forms of care.
She became very good at putting out fires.
When the organization brought in new leadership, Amara expected recognition. She had the deepest technical knowledge on the team. She had never missed a deadline or lost a client. And yet, colleagues outside her team had stopped collaborating with her. Her directness, which felt like honesty to her, landed as aggression to people who did not share her history. Amara’s new leader saw the gap immediately.
Within six months, Amara’s team was reassigned. She kept her title and her pay, but the people she had built relationships with were now reporting to someone else. It was the professional equivalent of having the furniture removed from your house while you were still living in it. She felt empty.
That’s when she came to me.
We explored what led to this. At one point, she told me about the leader who had trained her. She spoke about him with admiration. She described his work ethic, his relentless passion, his refusal to let a problem go unsolved. All of it was genuine.
I asked Amara: “Which parts of what he taught you still apply, and which do you need to leave behind?”
She went quiet for a long time.
We are shaped by the people who came before us. Parents, mentors, bosses, coaches. Even the best of them only got eighty percent right. The remaining twenty percent was rarely malicious. It was simply the limit of what they knew or did in the moment. Our job as adults, and as leaders, is to honor the eighty and release the twenty.
Honoring means acknowledging, genuinely and specifically, the value of what was given. Releasing means recognizing what no longer serves the person you are becoming, and setting it down. Not discarding it, not resenting it, just releasing your grip so your hands are free to build something new.
Amara did not need to become a different person. She needed to stop carrying the parts of her training that had outlived their usefulness. The fire-fighting intensity that made her indispensable at one level had become the very thing keeping her from the next.
She kept the passion and work ethic. She let go of the belief that caring meant controlling.
Honor what serves you. Release what limits you.
THE QUESTION
Who shaped your leadership, and which parts of their influence have you outgrown?
“What got you here won’t get you there.” – Marshall Goldsmith