Most leadership advice starts with the team. Fix communication, fix engagement, fix the process. What almost none of it starts with is the leader’s own leadership blind spots or the behaviors so familiar to us that we’ve stopped seeing them as behaviors at all.
We call them personality instead. “That’s just how I am.”
That distinction is critical between personality versus behavior. It is the whole hinge point.
Personality feels fixed, permanent, ingrained.
Behavior is a choice you’re making on repeat, usually without even noticing.
And the behavior that shows up most often in the leaders who eventually lose their best people isn’t laziness or bad strategy. It’s control and manipulation; the quiet kind, dressed up as “high standards” or “accountability.”
The Pattern That Precedes the Fall
But here’s how it plays out.
It usually starts well. The team is rocking through accomplishing goals. You are killing it when delivering results. Your boss is happy, and others applaud your achievements.
And then, almost without anyone naming it, results start to slip, deadlines are missed, and pressure begins to build.
Instead of evaluating what has changed from the earlier work, a leader’s immediate response is to tighten the grip. Ask people to stay fifteen minutes past their shift without pay, push harder on the same levers that were working beautifully before, and even blame the team for a shift that actually started at the top.
The employees didn’t change how they showed up and performed. The leader did.
But because the leader can’t see their own behavior clearly, or they decide to ignore it, they experience it as everyone else’s problem. They start to deflect and defend as if the team got lazy, the market got harder, the culture got soft. Meanwhile, turnover creeps up, trust erodes, and the numbers that once climbed start heading the other way.
Why Leaders Wait for “The Bottom”
Here’s the uncomfortable part: most people don’t interrupt a pattern like this voluntarily. They justify it, sometimes for years, until the consequences pile up enough that they have no choice.
They lose an account, a high performer turns in a resignation, or an improvement plan is presented. The leader never saw it coming, but everyone else did.
Finally “accountability” takes center stage and the leader is forced to see reality and address the issues.
The problem with this approach is that it’s the slowest and most expensive way to create change.
The alternative is building the habit of catching the pattern before it costs you anything at all.
The Ripple Reset: A Three-Step Way In
There’s a simple, three-step way to build the habit of proactive accountability — call it the Ripple Reset.
- NOTICE. At the end of the day or week, take a look back and make note of every way you showed up for your team, business and self. Brutally honest. Assess whether your performance was engaging, collaborative, and supportive, or if you were disconnected, demanding, and dismissive. Put a ★ next to each one that fit the latter – disconnected, demanding or dismissive. Most people who do this for the first time are shocked by what they learn.
- CATCH. Now, as you go into the next day or week, the moment you catch a controlling reaction, a manipulative reflex, or a negative thought forming, treat it the way you’d treat a typo — hit delete, and choose a different approach, word, or attitude that gets folks to lean in, not back away. It sounds almost too simple to work, right? It’s also exactly how thought becomes a different behavior instead of the same one, on repeat.
- RIPPLE. You don’t have to overhaul your whole self or your team to change your culture. Change your own pattern first. When your behavior shifts, especially if the person at the top, everyone around them starts to shift too.
What This Costs HR and Managers, Too
There’s a second, quieter problem buried in all of this: the pace of change. Real behavior change can move fast — but it isn’t instant, and it isn’t linear.
HR leaders and managers who expect a controlling or struggling executive to transform in a single quarter are often the ones who pull support too early, right before the pattern would have broken and replaced.
Patience isn’t the same thing as low expectations. It’s what actually lets the Ripple Reset finish rippling and create change.
Start Tonight, Not at the Bottom
You don’t need a diagnosis, a title, or a crisis to start noticing your own pattern.
You simply need intention and attention to how you are showing up each and every day, and that can start right now.
The leaders who change fastest aren’t the ones with the fewest problems, they’re the ones who stopped waiting for the bottom to force the issue.
Want a faster, more specific read on your own pattern and gaps? Take the free Leadership Gap Diagnostic and find your blind spot in under ten minutes – balloffirecoaching.com/opt-in.
This week on Shedding the Corporate Bitch, I had a conversation with Debbie Longo all about intentional leadership. Listen or watch the full episode to go deeper. https://balloffirecoaching.com/podcast.
Bernadette Boas is an executive leadership coach, speaker, and founder of Ball of Fire Coaching, with 25+ years of corporate leadership experience and 16+ years coaching 400+ executives across Fortune 500 and high-growth organizations.
