Leadership is often treated as something that comes with a title. You get promoted, take responsibility for a team, move into the C-suite, or accept a formal leadership position, and suddenly you are considered a leader.
A title can give someone authority, but it cannot guarantee leadership.
Leadership is a choice we make in how we show up, how we influence others, and what we actually do in the moments that matter. It crosses industries, demographics, roles, and even the line between our professional and personal lives. It can happen in a boardroom, a team meeting, a classroom, a volunteer organization, a group of friends, or around the dinner table.
That changes the question from “Am I a leader?” to “Am I choosing leadership in this situation?”
And when we begin to think about leadership that way, development becomes much more practical. Instead of focusing primarily on titles, personality types, or broad leadership principles, we can focus on the behaviors that help people and situations get better.
Leadership Shows Up in What You Do
There can be a significant gap between being recognized as a leader and actually behaving like one.
Organizations frequently promote people because they are excellent performers. They know the work. They deliver results. They have built expertise and proven they can execute. But individual performance does not automatically translate into the ability to lead other people.
Leadership comes with an incredible amount of influence. The way a leader communicates, reacts, listens, gives feedback, makes decisions, or handles pressure affects the people around them. That influence can be positive, but it can also be deeply negative. And its impact does not necessarily stop when someone leaves work. Leadership experiences can affect the energy people bring home, their relationships, and how they show up in other areas of their lives.
That is why self-awareness matters, but awareness alone isn’t enough.
A leader can know all the right things. They can read the latest leadership book, attend a conference, understand their organization’s values, and say all the right things about culture. None of it matters very much if their behavior tells a different story.
Leadership is what you actually choose to do when you show up.
Self-Efficacy Connects the Future to Today’s Behavior
One way to understand that connection between intention and action is through self-efficacy.
Self-efficacy is the ability to envision a clear, compelling future and develop enough intrinsic motivation around that future to change what you do in the present. It asks us to consider where we want to go, who we want to become, and what behaviors need to start, stop, increase, or decrease to move us in that direction.
The farther into the future we can think when making decisions today, the more opportunity we have to act proactively rather than simply responding to our immediate mood or emotions.
That matters for leadership because becoming a better leader is ultimately behavioral. A compelling vision of the leader you want to become means very little unless it changes something about the way you lead today.
Even relatively small improvements in self-efficacy can lead people to make very different choices about how they behave, what they learn, and how they grow. And leaders can extend that same idea beyond themselves. When they help a team see a compelling future and believe their actions can contribute to it, they can create a sense of efficacy across the entire group.
The result is leadership that relies less on rewards, consequences, or authority to motivate people and more on creating the kind of intrinsic motivation that makes people want to move forward together.
The Leaders We Admire Create Both Results and Followership
Think about the leaders you have admired most.
Chances are, your admiration was not based exclusively on their ability to hit a performance target. It probably wasn’t based solely on how enjoyable they were to be around, either.
The leaders people genuinely admire tend to do both. They drive performance and create followership.
There are leaders who consistently produce outstanding results but leave high-tension relationships in their wake. There are also leaders everyone loves being around who struggle to deliver against expectations. Both may have strengths, and both may be promoted because of those strengths.
But admired leadership exists in the intersection.
An admired leader helps people reach a higher level while also moving the work forward. Their presence brings energy into the room. People want to work with them, learn from them, and maintain relationships with them because those relationships make them better.
That kind of leadership does not happen simply because someone has the right personality. It is built through behaviors.
Small Behavioral Changes Can Create a Big Leadership Impact
Leadership development often operates at the level of principles:
- Build trust.
- Strengthen relationships.
- Give better feedback.
- Hold people accountable.
- Elevate performance.
- Motivate your team.
Those principles are valuable. The problem comes when leaders understand what they should do but leave without knowing how to do it.
Consider the difference between telling a tennis player to “hit the ball harder” and showing them how to adjust their hand and elbow so they can actually hit the ball harder. The goal is the same, but one approach provides an actionable behavior the player can immediately practice.
Leadership development can work the same way. Instead of simply telling someone to become better at building trust, motivating others, or creating accountability, we can identify the specific behaviors that produce those outcomes. Those small, incremental adjustments can have an outsized effect on both performance and followership.
For leaders who genuinely want to improve, that specificity matters. It gives them something they can practice today rather than an abstract ideal they hope to embody eventually.
Personality Assessments Create Awareness. Behavior Creates Change.
Personality assessments and psychometric tools can be incredibly useful. They can increase self-awareness, help us better understand the people around us, and give teams language for discussing how different people tend to work.
The danger comes when awareness becomes an excuse. It is easy to move from “This helps me understand myself” to “This is simply who I am.”
Someone may decide spreadsheets aren’t their thing because of their personality type. Another person may excuse being overly directive because that’s simply their style. Team members may even decide they are unlikely to work well together because their assessment results suggest they are opposites.
At that point, the assessment has stopped being a tool for awareness and started becoming a reason not to grow.
Your Personality Does Not Have to Define Your Leadership Range
Behavior gives leaders another option.
Rather than asking people to change their entire personality, a behavioral approach asks them to expand their range. What behavior could help you collaborate more effectively with someone whose style differs from yours? What habit could improve the way you communicate? What could you practice that would make the person on the receiving end of your leadership experience you differently?
This doesn’t make psychometrics, leadership books, or principle-based development irrelevant. They can all be valuable pieces of leadership development. However, awareness needs to be paired with action.
If a leadership tool teaches you something about yourself but nothing changes about the way you interact with people six months or a year later, the question becomes: What did that awareness actually change?
Leadership gets better when knowledge becomes practice.
Great Leadership Isn’t About Being the Expert
One of the most important behavioral shifts leaders can make is recognizing that leadership does not require being the smartest or most knowledgeable person in every room.
Imagine a senior leader who built a successful career in accounting and financial services. They know the work deeply, their team respects them, and they have become the person others turn to for answers.mThen they are asked to lead an IT cybersecurity team.
The instinct may be to repeat what worked before: become the expert. Learn every technical detail. Know enough to answer the team’s questions, but that can quickly become a barrier.
The leader’s job in that situation isn’t necessarily to know more about cybersecurity than the cybersecurity professionals. Their job is to understand what is standing in the team’s way. That creates a very different leadership behavior.
Instead of trying to provide every answer, the leader begins asking questions. What barriers are you facing? What do you need? What is preventing you from doing your best work? Where can I help?
That small reframe can transform the relationship between a leader and a team because it shifts the leader’s focus from proving expertise to enabling other people’s expertise.
And that is the power of behavioral leadership development: identifying what is happening right now, understanding the tension point, and finding a specific behavior that can make the situation better.
Better Leadership Is Built in the Next Moment
Leadership development does not have to begin with an enormous transformation.
Sometimes it begins with one question asked differently. One habit changed. One conversation approached with more intention. One moment when a leader chooses to remove a barrier instead of supplying an answer.
The goal isn’t to reach some point where leadership development is complete. There is always another situation, relationship, or challenge asking us to expand the way we lead.
And that’s why leadership as a choice is such a powerful idea. You don’t need to wait for a promotion to practice it. You don’t need a particular personality profile. You don’t need to become someone entirely different.
You can look at the situation in front of you and ask: What can I do differently right now that will make the people and the situation around me better?
Ultimately, leadership isn’t the title on your business card, what an assessment says about you, or the leadership principles you can recite. Leadership is what you do.
And every time you show up, you get another opportunity to choose it.
Listen to the episode: Gut + Science | 330: Leadership Is a Choice: Building Self-Efficacy Through a Behavioral Approach with Wesley Bender
Key Takeaways:
- Leadership is a daily behavioral choice, not a title.
- Self-efficacy drives lasting leadership impact and growth.
- Admired leaders combine results with genuine followership.
- Behavioral leadership builds better habits than assessments alone.
- Real leadership shows up through consistent, intentional action.
Things to listen for:
- [00:03:00] Why leadership should be viewed as a choice rather than a position or title.
- [00:07:00] The influence leaders carry and why leadership requires self-awareness about what others experience from us.
- [00:10:00] A practical definition of self-efficacy and how it connects future vision with present-day behavior.
- [00:13:00] How leaders can create intrinsic motivation and efficacy across an entire team.
- [00:17:00] The difference between leaders who drive results, leaders who create followership, and leaders who do both.
- [00:19:00] Why small behavioral adjustments can create significant improvements in leadership.
- [00:23:00] The value of personality assessments, and the danger of allowing them to become an excuse not to grow.
- [00:25:00] Why a behavioral approach can make leadership development more immediately practical and actionable.
- [00:29:00] How leaders can expand their behavioral range to work more effectively with people who are different from them.
- [00:33:00] Why a leader’s job isn’t always to become the expert, and how focusing on removing barriers can transform a team’s relationship with its leader.