The myth of the “natural leader"

“We promote high performers into leadership roles, then act surprised when they’re not instantly culture-shaping, feedback-giving, trust-building leaders”

This is a topic that comes up in almost every transformation or leadership engagement I support. It reveals a persistent and damaging assumption: that leadership is innate. That someone who excels at their job will intuitively know how to lead people, shape team dynamics, identify and foster rockstars, build psychological safety, and drive culture forward.

But leadership, especially in times of complexity and change, is not a default setting in each person. It’s not downloaded with a new job title. It’s a set of skills and mindsets that must be developed, practiced, and supported. And yet we keep skipping this part.

We ask leaders to lead culture, manage ambiguity, and unlock performance, but often fail to support them in building the self-awareness and skills required to do this well.

The result? Leaders who are trying their best, but operating on instinct, lacking the skills and tools to become an effective leader. Senior teams who can talk about values and vision, but struggle to model the culture they want to create. And a widening gap between strategic ambition and everyday leadership behaviour.

Why training alone doesn’t stick

It’s not that organisations don’t invest in leadership. Many do: I`ve seen one day trainings, workshops, toolkits (who hasn`t seen at least one deck on how to give feedback?) and great change frameworks, in theory. But most of that sits in the knowing zone, not the doing zone.

In a recent article, I wrote about this disconnect: how teams adopt rituals like stand-ups, retros, or Kanban boards, but fail to shift their actual ways of working. They move the furniture, but not the mindset. Culture change stalls not because people don’t understand the tools, but because they don’t know how to live them under pressure.

The same applies to leadership. Knowing how to give feedback or creating psychological in theory is very different from doing it in the moment, when time is short, emotions are high, or stakes are unclear. That’s where coaching becomes critical. It creates the space to reflect, test new behaviours, and shift real-life patterns, not in the abstract, but in context.

Leadership coaching as culture infrastructure

Coaching is still widely misunderstood, often seen as a reward for senior executives or a remedy for struggling performers. But in reality, coaching is culture infrastructure.Because it works at the precise level where culture lives:

• In how leaders think

• In how they respond under stress

• In how they make decisions, run meetings, and navigate conflict

• In how they treat others, and themselves, when things go off-script

Good coaching supports leaders in aligning their intention with their impact. It helps them surface unhelpful patterns, like avoidance, perfectionism, or over-control, before they become systemic. It builds the muscles that culture work demands: reflection, curiosity, and courageous listening. It is a skill that needs to be worked on and reflected upon. New leaders need to identify what leadership style suits them as person.

In short: if strategy is what we plan, culture is how we behave, and coaching is what helps leaders bridge the gap between the two.

Ways of working + coaching = culture in motion

In my previous article, I explored how teams can define their “ways of working” ,shared agreements around how they collaborate, communicate, and make decisions. These rituals and team norms are powerful, but they rely on leadership behaviour to stick.

You can write a beautiful team charter or stick values on every wall. But if leaders don’t model them, especially in high-stakes moments, they mean absolutely nothing.

Want a culture of psychological safety? Then leaders need to show what it looks like to own mistakes and share them. To ask uncomfortable questions. To give and receive feedback without defensiveness.

Coaching enables this. It helps leaders move from knowing what good looks like to practicing it, consistently, visibly, and in ways that invite others to do the same. That’s when “ways of working” stop being a document and start becoming a culture.

Start small: what you can do now

You don’t need to roll out a full-scale coaching programme tomorrow. But you can start embedding a coaching mindset today.

Here are three simple ways to begin:

• Start your next leadership offsite with this question:“What might I be doing, even unintentionally, that holds this team back?” That one question can shift the tone from performance to reflection.

• Pilot a small coaching engagement for a leadership cohort. Focus not just on performance metrics, but on cultural behaviour shifts: safety, clarity, ownership, challenge.

• Invite a coach to shadow your leadership meetings. Ask them to reflect not on the content, but on the tone, behaviours, and signals being sent. It’s one of the fastest ways to build awareness.

Final thought

You don’t need more frameworks. You need deeper leadership habits. And those don’t come from more theory. They come from reflection, repetition, and support.

Culture doesn’t shift because we say the right words in a town hall. It shifts because leaders show up differently, in meetings, in pressure moments, in how they handle discomfort and complexity.

Coaching isn’t a luxury. It is the connective tissue between your culture strategy and the behaviours that bring it to life. If we want leaders to lead culture, let’s give them what they actually need: space, support, and a safe place to practice.

Because the culture you want? It lives in what your leaders do, not just what they believe.