The Real Reason Leaders Don’t Change
Title: The Real Reason Leaders Don’t Change
A senior executive receives clear 360 feedback: delegate more, stop rewriting the team’s work, develop your people instead of doing their jobs. She agrees with every word. She is smart, motivated, and genuinely wants to change. She commits publicly. Her manager supports her. Six months later, she is still rewriting the team’s work.
The standard explanations are lack of willpower, lack of skill, or lack of sincerity. In twenty years of coaching senior leaders, I have found all three explanations to be wrong far more often than they are right.
The better explanation comes from Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey’s research at Harvard, captured in a framework called Immunity to Change. Their finding, put simply: most leaders who fail to change are not failing at all. They are succeeding, brilliantly, at a goal they cannot see.
One foot on the gas, one foot on the brake
The Immunity to Change model maps a hidden dynamic. On the surface, the leader has a genuine improvement goal: delegate more. But underneath, she is also doing things that work directly against that goal: reviewing everything, keeping the hardest projects for herself, jumping in at the first sign of a wobble.
Those counter-behaviors are not random failures of discipline. They are in service of a hidden commitment, something the leader is even more dedicated to than the improvement goal. For this executive, it turned out to be a commitment to never being the person whose name is on flawed work. Delegating genuinely threatened that commitment. So her system, quietly and efficiently, protected it.
One foot on the gas. One foot on the brake. From the outside it looks like inconsistency. From the inside it is a perfectly balanced immune system, defending her against a danger she has never examined.
The big assumption
Underneath the hidden commitment sits what Kegan and Lahey call a big assumption: a belief about the world, held as fact, that makes the hidden commitment feel necessary. If work with my name on it is flawed, my credibility is finished. If I am not the most prepared person in the room, I will be exposed. If I let people see me uncertain, they will stop following me.
Big assumptions are almost always old, formed early in a career or earlier, and almost never tested. They operate like laws of physics: not beliefs you have, but a lens you see through. That is what makes them powerful, and it is also the opening. Because an assumption, once you can see it, can be tested.
Why insight alone does not work
Here is the frustrating part for high achievers. Understanding your immunity does not dissolve it. I have watched brilliant leaders map their hidden commitment with total clarity and then walk back into the old behavior that afternoon. The immune system does not care that you have diagnosed it. It was built to protect you, and it will keep doing its job until it receives new evidence that the protection is no longer needed.
That evidence comes from small, deliberate experiments. Not “delegate everything starting Monday,” which the immune system will veto within days, but one safe-enough test: hand one meaningful piece of work to one capable person, do not review it, and watch closely what actually happens. Usually what happens is nothing like the catastrophe the big assumption predicted. Run enough of these experiments and the assumption starts to loosen, not because someone argued you out of it, but because reality did.
What this means if you are stuck
If there is a change you have sincerely committed to more than once and failed to sustain, consider retiring the willpower explanation. Ask instead:
What am I doing, or not doing, that works against this goal?
If I imagine doing the opposite of those behaviors, what is the most uncomfortable feeling that comes up?
What would I be risking? What am I protecting?
The answers to those questions are the actual work. Everything before them is rearranging furniture.
The leaders I have seen change in lasting ways are not the ones with the most discipline. They are the ones willing to get curious about their own brake pedal.
Michael Langer is an executive coach based in Brooklyn. He uses the Immunity to Change methodology with senior leaders at technology companies, investment firms, and global organizations.