The higher you climb, the more you pay for misalignment - in meetings that go nowhere, decisions that don’t land, and leaders who want airtime more than outcomes. If you’re responsible for results, you’re the one paying the difference.

At some point in your career, a strange kind of clarity arrives.

And it doesn’t feel like a productivity hack or a mindset shift so much as it feels like waking up inside your own life while everyone else keeps acting as if nothing has changed.

A client described it to me this week as an out-of-body experience, not because he was being dramatic, but because he could suddenly observe a familiar meeting as if he was watching it from above (as if having "zoomed out"), noticing not just what people were saying, but why they were saying it, what they were protecting, and what the conversation was truly optimising for.

Once that perception clicks, it doesn’t go away. You can’t unsee it. And that’s the upgrade.

The blessing is that you become cleaner, faster, more discerning, and far more effective at navigating complexity without losing your integrity or your energy; the cost is that you become less able to tolerate company politics, people-pleasing, or what you once brushed off as “just how things are.”

The shift no one warns you about

Most people are taught that seniority is simply a function of capability, confidence, and years in the game (and maybe a little luck), and while those things matter, the deeper truth is that the higher you climb, the more success becomes a question of values alignment rather than competence.

Because as responsibility increases, misalignment stops being a mild irritation and starts becoming a tax you pay every day - in the form of elongated meetings, circular debates, reactive decision-making, unnecessary conflict, and the quiet exhaustion of carrying standards in a room where standards aren’t cultural, they’re personal.

At some point, you realise that you can work around skill gaps, you can coach up capability, and you can build systems to support execution, but you cannot build sustainable momentum inside an environment that is structurally committed to protecting ego over producing impact.

Ego vs Impact: the divide you can’t unsee

There is a sentence that, once understood, becomes an internal compass for the rest of your career:

Some people speak to move work forward...

Other people speak to be seen.

Impact-led leaders tend to be anchored in service, outcomes, responsibility, and the lived understanding that clarity is kindness (no matter how "direct" the feedback is) because clarity allows work to move; ego-led leaders may be intelligent and charismatic and experienced, but their communication is often organised around reputation management, positional security, and the invisible need to prove something - usually to themselves.

When you’re early in your career, you often mistake ego for confidence and polish for leadership, because you don’t yet have enough pattern recognition to separate authority from performance - I know I didn't, fresh out of university with degrees in Law and International Business and a masters in people-pleasing and "please accept me")... 

But when you’re more seasoned, you begin to notice that real authority has a distinct texture - it is calm, curious, accountable, and unthreatened by challenge. In fact, it welcomes challenge, especially when it senses its own ambition being raised.

That’s when meetings start to look different.

Not because the meeting changed, but because you did.

Story 1: The high performer who got labelled “emotional”

A senior global leader in marketing - highly capable, deeply strategic, and genuinely ahead of the curve in how she uses modern tools to multiply output and empower her team - shared with me a dynamic that will feel familiar to anyone who has ever tried to do serious work inside an insecure environment.

She worked closely with a senior peer in revenue, as marketing and sales inevitably do, because together they form the acquisition engine of the business, and when that engine is mismanaged the organisation bleeds time, money, and trust; yet instead of collaboration, what began to surface was subtle undermining - small remarks in meetings, a tone, the kind of sideways commentary that functions as a test of dominance more than a contribution.

She didn’t react, because seasoned leaders understand that not every moment is the moment, and that discernment is not weakness; but eventually there came a point where she chose to hold her ground on an issue that belonged squarely within her remit, not as a power play, but as a boundary around standards.

The response was not disagreement.

It was a character attack that ended in assassination.

She was labelled “emotional,” “difficult,” “too much,” and then came the gaslighting and the attempts to triangulate others into the drama, as if the problem was her temperament rather than his threatened identity.

This is where the deeper pattern reveals itself: when someone is ego-led, competence can feel like an accusation, because it exposes what they fear they are not; when someone is impact-led, competence feels like relief, because it accelerates outcomes and reduces friction.

It wasn't really about marketing or sales. It was about values.

And what this leader said to me next is what many high performers think in private, especially after they’ve had more than one run-in with senior-level insecurity:

“Why is it like this? Am I set up to fail?”

But what caring, competent, classy leaders often don't realise (because they're out there doing their best and thinking that their peers are there to do the same), is that misalignment is common. In fact, it's the RULE.

Alignment is rare. It's the EXCEPTION.

And the person who keeps asking, “Is it me?” often isn’t the problem - they’re simply awake enough to notice the truth that others are still normalising.

Story 2: The “meta” moment - when you realise your boss is coaching you (and you like it)

A different client, in a commercial leadership role under intense growth pressure, said something that captured the essence of this entire article, because it wasn’t a complaint, it was an observation that only becomes possible once you’ve been coached into higher perception.

Halfway through our coaching program he realised that he could recognise coaching in real time, and he told me, with a kind of fascinated disbelief, that he had just noticed his COO - his direct boss - leading him the same way he was learning to lead his team.

He could hear the questions designed to expand thinking rather than control it, the kind of language that invites ownership instead of compliance, and the subtle way a coaching-led leader creates forward motion without needing to dominate the room. And how darn good it felt.

It was meta. 

And in that moment, he realised why their meetings felt different. And why he left those meetings so dialled in, re-energised, and clear on exactly what needed to be done.

Instead of starting at zero and crawling to shallow alignment, their conversations started mid-flight, because they were oriented around the same principles: clarity, responsibility, truth, and movement.

And then he named the contrast, which is where the out-of-body upgrade becomes painfully obvious: the leaders he felt most frustrated by - those who prolonged meetings, stirred problems to appear relevant, and created noise without progress - were also the leaders least invested in their own development, least interested in clean accountability, and most committed to protecting their position.

(Read that paragraph twice - let it land).

They weren’t incompetent. They were misaligned.

And misalignment in senior rooms doesn’t just slow down projects; it holds back companies at the exact moment the business needs to evolve, especially when targets multiply and complexity increases, because growth requires decisions, and decisions require leaders who are not terrified of being wrong.

Story 3: The “values hire” - when someone creates a role because they trust your fabric (not your threads)

A third story, from a younger leader in a high-stakes financial environment, underlined something that many people sense but don’t fully articulate until they’ve lived it: in certain rooms, you are not chosen primarily for your skill set, you are chosen for your character.

He moved to a new country with his young family and walked into a small team with an ugly dynamic - alliances, politics, subtle exclusion, "family business values" ahem, nepotism - the kind of environment that encourages survival strategies rather than collaboration. We spoke at length about it and decided on a very specific approach - instead of playing for approval or trying to win a social war, he would keep returning to something simpler and far more powerful...

Leading conversations with his values.

Not as a slogan, not as a performance, and not as oversharing - but as a steady signal of what he cares about to frame his professional approach - standards, outcomes, loyalty to clients, responsibility to his team, devotion to his family, commitment to his health, and the kind of integrity that makes people feel safe to tell the truth around you.

Through his network, he was headhunted into a role beyond what he believed he was ready for, after a long series of interviews that tested not just capability but trustworthiness through formal and informal values-based assessment.

And that’s the point: a great leader knows that skills can be developed, sharpened, and learned, but values cannot be installed in a person who doesn’t hold them, which is why values become the real hiring criterion in mature environments. 

He was offered the job that he believed was two or three "jumps" from where he was at the time.

You can teach a skill. You can’t teach a spine.

Here’s the part you might not want to hear

If you recognise yourself in these stories, you may already know the uncomfortable consequence of becoming awake inside the status quo, which is that your clarity will provoke people who depend on collective blindness to feel safe.

You will not always be celebrated for your standards.

You will sometimes be misunderstood.

You may be ridiculed, sidelined, gaslit, or labelled as “intense,” “difficult,” or “not a team player,” not because you are those things, but because when you refuse to participate in ego theatre, you disrupt a system that runs on performance rather than truth.

Most of us have experienced this in family dynamics, and if you look closely enough, companies are clans of their own.

This is not pessimism.

It’s pattern recognition.

And it’s why so many high performers end up quietly questioning themselves, even as they continue producing results, because when your values are higher than the culture around you, the culture will often try to make you the problem.

So what do you do with this upgrade?

This is the moment where most thought leadership turns into advice, and I’m not interested in doing that here, because the point of this piece is not to give you a checklist but to give you a mirror. And for me to turn my hand at writing, again 😊

What I want to name is simpler and, I suspect, more relieving: if you have had the out-of-body moment, it may not mean you are cynical, impatient, or hard to please; it may simply mean you have become literate in leadership dynamics, and now you can finally see the difference between environments that develop people and environments that consume them.

Your frustration is not random. It’s information. Data... Not drama (I love this, by the way).

And when you stop treating it like a personality flaw, you begin to understand it as a sign of maturation: the part of you that wants to lift all boats is no longer willing to pretend that ego is leadership. 

And, frankly, we need more of us.

The closing truth

There is a quiet grief that comes with this upgrade, because it ends a certain innocence you had earlier in your career, when you believed that professionalism meant everyone was aiming for the same thing, and that effort and excellence would naturally be rewarded with respect.

Sometimes they are. Often... They aren’t.

And yet, the out-of-body upgrade is not here to make you bitter - it is here to make you clean.

Because once you can see ego versus impact, telling versus coaching, posturing versus service, you stop bargaining with mediocrity as if it is inevitable, and you begin to orient your leadership around something sturdier: truth, alignment, and the kind of self-respect that refuses to confuse coping with success.

Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. 

Good. Use it.

-Tanya