The Trap I Built for Myself

Here’s the uncomfortable part of Transformational Leadership that most of the literature glosses over, and that thirty years of doing this work has taught me the hard way: passion is not the same thing as being right.

I have watched — and, if I’m honest, occasionally been — a leader so certain of the vision, so relentlessly energetic about selling it, that the certainty itself became the risk. Transformational Leaders tend to see the big picture clearly but miss the operational details entirely, where the actual failure modes live. And the same energy that gets a team moving can, applied without pause, wear that same team down to nothing. I’ve seen passionate leaders walk their people straight over a cliff, fully convinced, right up until the moment it was obvious they weren’t.

There’s something else it doesn’t do: it doesn’t ask what happens to the people it transforms. The tacit promise of Transformational Leadership is that followers become more like the leader. But what if the goal isn’t to create more people like you? What if the goal is to leave people more fully, sustainably themselves — better resourced, better able to lead the next thing, whether or not you’re still in the room?

That’s the question that’s occupied me since I finished my research at York St John, and it’s the reason I don’t think Transformational Leadership is the ceiling anymore. I think there’s a stage past it — leadership that isn’t measured by how well you sold the vision, but by what remains standing, and who else can carry it, once you’ve moved on. I’ve started calling it Transcendent Leadership, and with AI now capable of doing most of what used to make a “visionary” leader look indispensable — the big-picture thinking, the pattern-spotting, even some of the storytelling — I think the leaders who matter next are the ones who can answer that harder question.