The myth of the natural leader

There is this idea that some people are simply born with the talent to lead. Meanwhile, I’ll say that being a leader is a muscle you need to train.

During the first year of the pandemic, nearly 40 percent of managers reported feeling unprepared to lead remote teams, according to a study by Harvard Business Review. The sudden shift to distributed work didn’t care who had the most polished CV. A new set of leaders had to be born.

I was lucky to be promoted to a managing role in the third year of my career in tech. But I was even luckier that the CEO of the company invested in his people. My colleagues and I got trained to be leaders: we took workshops and strategic sessions, were sent to business school courses, learned how to motivate teams, and even how to manage our own time on your own terms, not only work projects.

Nobody was born a great leader. Still, I’m not saying that you cannot teach yourself to be a great leader without the company sponsoring you if you want to be one. And frankly, everyone should.

So, what would I put into the playbook of great leadership? Probably, the following rules.

1. Define the playing field

One of the most persistent myths in management is that talented people will simply figure it out. In a survey by Gallup, only about half of employees said they knew what was expected of them at work. Misaligned expectations slow teams down, cause resentment, anxiety, and unnecessary turnover.

Effective leaders preempt this drift by defining the playing field early and revisiting it often. This doesn’t mean micromanagement! It means agreeing on transparent success criteria, clarifying decision-making rights, and communicating what “done” actually looks like. One approach I’ve used repeatedly is establishing a simple success framework: objectives (the big goals), key results (the measurable indicators), and boundaries (what’s out of scope).

Equally important is creating a culture where asking questions is encouraged and isn’t seen as a sign of weakness. I sometimes sat in the rooms where people nodded along, only to confess later that they weren’t sure what we were really solving for. Confusion rarely announces itself, it masquerades as consensus. The simplest thing a leader can do is to assure their team that there are no dumb questions.

2. Listen first, then plan

People are rarely motivated by company objectives alone. They always bring their own ambitions, insecurities, and definitions of success.

Instead of asking, “What can you do for the company?” ask, “Where do you want to go, and how can we align that with where we’re headed?”

According to a LinkedIn study, 94 percent of employees say they would stay longer at a company that invested in their career development. Yet in most workplaces, career conversations happen once a year — if at all — and usually in the form of the obligatory performance review.

Part of leadership is helping people articulate what matters to them. One “tool” I’ve used is called Moving Motivators, a deceptively simple exercise that asks team members to rank personal drivers like curiosity, status, freedom, power, order, and others. It’s astonishing what an amazing 121 trust-building exercise this is. It helped me understand what my team members were driven by and what I, as a manager, could prioritize for them.

3. Push with care

There’s a fine line between setting ambitious expectations and creating an environment where people feel constantly on the brink of failure. The difference comes down to whether your team believes you have their back.

When I started managing teams, I struggled to delegate as efficiently as possible. Over time, I realized that effective delegation is about trusting people with responsibilities that feel slightly out of their comfort zone, then providing the scaffolding to help them succeed.

Give someone a problem that requires them to level up, a complex negotiation, a new product launch, a high-stakes presentation, and then pair it with frequent, constructive feedback. Make it clear that the stakes are high, but failure is not fatal.

Delegation can feel counterintuitive, especially if you built your reputation as a high-performing individual contributor. The key is accepting that your ultimate responsibility is not to execute every detail personally but to create the conditions where others can.

4. Build collaborative cultures

If you want your team to grow faster than the market, you need to build systems where knowledge flows horizontally. Yet, too often, information remains siloed, locked in individual inboxes, private Slack threads, or the heads of overbooked managers.

The easiest way to tear down silos is to make peer learning part of the everyday rhythm. Sometimes, that looks like carving out space for bi-weekly show-and-tells, quick weekly retros, or lightning talks where people can lay out what they tried, what landed, and what flopped. Other times, it’s about shining a light on small wins.

Cross-functional collaboration is another powerful catalyst. Some of the best campaigns I’ve been part of were born when marketers, product managers, and salespeople were thrown into a room and asked to design something together. The diversity of perspectives and insights made the work richer and the sense of ownership much stronger.

As a Marketing leader, I practiced a get-together, where my team of 7-8 people would sit down in a quiet room with a big screen, with a prepared agenda, where everyone gets a chance to present and share something they have done, or an idea they have. We would also dedicate an hour or two to listening to Sales or Product team members. For example, we once did a Q&A with the Sales Director, for the team to directly access someone whose time is valuable and ask whatever they want to learn about.

5. Make feedback a two-way habit

Teams talk a big game about “continuous improvement,” but treat feedback like a formality.

Research published in the Harvard Business Review found that 72 percent of employees believe their performance would improve if their managers provided corrective feedback. I ditto that. I saw leaders keeping silent for months, skipping the necessary quarterly pulse check meetings, being busy with their workload, only to come back later, commenting on something they expected to see almost a year ago. Nobody reads your thoughts. Communicate, and communicate right on time.

I think I am lucky, as a Ukrainian, to come from a culture of direct feedback. However, many other cultures never give feedback directly. When managing cross-cultural teams, you need to remember that. The famous book by Erin Meyer, “The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business”, should be a Bible for anyone striving to be a good manager of international teams.

Another framework I’ve found invaluable when it comes to sharing feedback is the SBI method: Situation – Behavior – Impact. It sounds simple because it is. Instead of saying, “You’re not being proactive,”  say, “In yesterday’s client meeting (Situation), you waited until the end to share your recommendations (Behavior), which made it harder for the client to see your expertise (Impact).” This approach anchors feedback in observable facts, reducing defensiveness and making improvement feel actionable.

Finally, I follow one non-negotiable principle: praise in public, improve in private. Recognition is a powerful motivator when shared openly. But constructive feedback deserves discretion. No one does their best work when they feel exposed or humiliated.

6. Lead with empathy and accountability

There is a common misconception that empathetic leadership means permissive leadership, that if you care deeply about your team, you can’t also hold high standards. In my experience, the opposite is true.

I remember coaching a team member through a family crisis that was draining them a lot mentally. It would have been easy to assume that the person just doesn’t care about getting work done on time anymore. But because they opened up to me about being unable to meet the deadlines and the mental toll their personal situation is taking, I rebalanced workloads and created a temporary support plan that allowed them to focus on what mattered most. When they returned, they came back more committed because they knew their well-being wasn’t an afterthought.

Empathy, however, doesn’t mean excusing chronically poor performance or lowering the bar for excellence. It means understanding the “why” behind someone’s struggles and then responding thoughtfully. Sometimes, that response is patience and coaching. Sometimes, it’s reclarifying expectations. And rarely (totally not as often as you think), when all else fails, it’s acknowledging that a role is no longer a fit; however, you so often can repurpose the valuable individual in the company, rather than let them go.

Final thoughts

Leadership is a living practice, a set of choices you make every day. It means showing up with clarity when others feel lost. It means balancing empathy with accountability, even when it would be easier to pick just one. And it means accepting that you will never have all the answers, only the commitment to keep asking better questions. Because in the end, your greatest legacy isn’t what you delivered personally, it’s the culture you left behind.


#LeadershipDevelopment #TeamManagement #WorkplaceCulture #EmpatheticLeadership #CareerGrowth