The Secret to Building Great Leaders

Think about the great leaders you have worked with over the course of your career. How much did they inspire you to bring your A-game every day? Now think about other leaders—the average ones, the bad ones. How often did you bring your A-game while working with them? Multiply that difference in your own effort and performance by thousands or even tens of thousands of employees. That is the value in building great leaders.

Despite investing heavily in leadership, organizations often struggle to bring about lasting behavioral change. The challenge isn’t a lack of understanding—leaders generally know what good leadership looks like—but a lack of doing. Leaders must systematically train themselves to internalize and sustain effective habits of leadership. This is where traditional approaches—heavy on training rooms, lectures, and listening—fall short. When the program ends, old behaviors return.

The most successful companies develop their leaders every day. They make it a continuous, real-world practice rather than a theoretical, on-again, off-again exercise.

Leadership Is About Doing

A new leadership framework is not what’s needed. BCG’s head, heart, and hands model, for example, comprises a balance of strategic foresight, emotional intelligence, operational rigor, and teaming, but it and other frameworks are only as effective as the energy, dedication, and execution that leaders and their teams put into them in their daily work.

Most leadership programs focus on traditional learning with some skills building, simulations, and other projects on the side. But, as Kaye Foster, executive coach and former chief of HR at Johnson & Johnson, observes, “Most of the time, leaders revert to the behaviors that are reinforced, not the ones they learn in training.” Effective leadership development mirrors elite athletic or performance training—it’s not about theory but about practice and repetition. The most effective leaders refine their skills through structured feedback, hands-on application, and daily habits that build new muscle over time.

Reframe, Practice, Hardwire

Developing new habits is a great start. But to truly transform, leaders should work on three interconnected keys (as shown in the exhibit) to better leadership:

• Reframe beliefs.
• Practice deliberately, bridging the gap between intention and execution.
• Hardwire new behaviors through systems, structures, and rituals.

Reframe beliefs. Leadership isn’t just about actions; it’s also about beliefs. Beliefs comprise your convictions, values, and assumptions—the lens through which you interpret and judge the world. Dramatic changes in leadership behavior often occur when a leader or leadership team recognizes that past assumptions about success, sacrifice, and purpose are outdated. Along the way, they address their fear of change and recognize that change is their only option if they are to keep growing as leaders.

Successful leaders must become comfortable being uncomfortable. “We train people in what to do, but we don’t train them in how to challenge their own beliefs regarding what made them successful in the past that might get in the way going forward,” says Michael Kleeman, senior research fellow at the University of California, San Diego. Humans love the feeling of mastery. Each promotion reinforces their belief that they are doing everything right. This dynamic keeps leaders stuck in their comfort zones.

As a result, the reframing of beliefs rarely just happens. It takes deliberation and determination. Imagine, for example, a leader with strong capabilities in execution and attention to detail who receives feedback that he is micromanaging; this creates a crucial insight: he sees that he must learn to delegate and trust. It also often takes an emotional spark for leaders to break from routine and evolve.

“Leaders must intentionally disrupt their thinking to avoid plateauing,” says Francisco Crespo, a former top executive at Coca-Cola. “Effective leaders balance pride in past achievements with hunger for future growth to ensure evolution rather than stagnation.”

Take the example of a consumer company. The leadership team realized, during a major transformation, that their mindset and conservative, slow-moving, consensus driven culture were the biggest barriers to innovation. They had always believed that rigor equaled reams of documentation, and that flawless execution against forecasts defined success. Unsurprisingly, bold ideas rarely stood a chance.

In the course of this self-examination, the leadership team had a revelation. They began to see uncertainty as an essential part of innovation rather than a risk to be eliminated. They began to realize that consensus often diluted breakthrough thinking. Most important, they redefined success. Rather than obsessing about minor shortfalls in performance, they began to celebrate the learning opportunities and potential rewards of trying something new.

To embed this new mindset, the team rethought how they reviewed and supported innovative ideas. They changed how they collectively reviewed the development of innovative ideas and set new criteria for success, beyond immediate results. These structural shifts reinforced and sustained the new leadership behaviors. Innovation no longer felt frustrating or risky but welcomed and supported.

Today, the emergence of GenAI gives leaders a ready-made opportunity to do this work of reframing their beliefs by asking what leadership looks like in a world where humans and machines work in tandem.

Practice deliberately. Practicing deliberately means using every opportunity to learn and experiment with the new behaviors resulting from the reframing of beliefs. Leaders who repeat these behaviors intentionally and consistently, receive feedback, and revise their behavior accordingly improve the most.

How can leaders practice? Some might benefit from simply listening more intently, asking more questions, and offering fewer opinions and giving fewer directives. Others could benefit from spending more time at the frontline with customers and employees—and canceling some meetings with their direct reports at headquarters.

The trick to daily practice is customization. Traditional leadership programs take a standardized approach, but the best recognize that leadership is rooted in a specific executive’s strengths, weaknesses, and daily routines. Leaders can figure out what works for them and shape their own development by consistently asking questions such as the following:

• What behaviors do I need to change?
• What habits are holding me back?
• What do I need to do differently every day to build new behaviors, and what help do I need?

One of the obstacles to daily practice is that busy senior executives tend to be skeptical that working on leadership will help them meet the company’s overall priorities. But leaders can experiment with new behaviors while also working on critical business priorities. This practice comes at no “extra” cost in time, since they would be working on those projects and initiatives anyway.

Finally, leadership isn’t a solo pursuit, it’s a team sport. Ideally, everyone is helping one another to build their respective leadership capabilities—including through candid, in-the-moment feedback—and to develop the skills they all need to work together effectively. “Teams that build leadership learning into daily operations consistently outperform those that rely solely on individual leadership development," says Maureen Mitchell, executive coach and former president of global sales and marketing at GE Asset Management. While personal development is crucial, the most effective leaders build high-impact teams that grow together, challenge one another, and reinforce leadership behaviors across the organization. Leaders need people on their team who think differently and challenge them to grow.

Hardwire new behaviors. Preventing old leadership habits from returning means hardwiring new behaviors into the organization. “If you want a leader to change, you sometimes need to remove their ability to default to the old way,” says Amanda Sourry, executive coach and former president of Unilever North America. Leaders need to figure out what works for them and shape their own development by consistently working along three tracks:

• Design for change. Simplifying or eliminating processes reinforces leadership development in real time. For example, leaders can scale back approval processes, limit recurring meetings, and have a “one team” moment at the start of every meeting.
• Incentivize the right behaviors. What gets rewarded gets repeated. Organizations that recognize inclusivity, collaboration, and long-term thinking create a culture that standardizes effective leadership behaviors. One place to start: replace a long list of generic leader competencies with a short list of “stretch behaviors,” or move from individual to team goals.
• Reinforce with nudges. Consistency is key; this is where behavioral science comes in. Public commitments, peer accountability, goal tracking, consequences, and daily reminders help leaders stay on course. These tools turn leadership principles into daily habits rather than one-off initiatives. Leaders can receive phone alerts during meetings, for example, to remind them to recognize good leadership behavior in peers or subordinates.

One global humanitarian organization nurtures a growth mindset by embedding structured reflection into its crisis response model. After every major operation, leaders conduct a rigorous review, not to assign blame but to dissect decisions, analyze outcomes, and identify improvements for the future. The focus is on learning, adaptation, and refining leadership behaviors in real time.

Pulling It Together

Reframing, practicing, and hardwiring need to be done together, not sequentially. Hardwiring new behaviors should start as soon as possible—long before the 18 to 24 months it may take to implement a new incentive package. Likewise, leaders should be continually reframing their beliefs as the world around them changes. And the need to practice becoming a better leader never ends. (See “How Good Are You at Growing as a Leader?”)

“High-performing organizations thrive through experimentation,” says Remco van Zantem, executive coach and former chief commercial officer and chief people officer at Booking.com. “Leaders should approach their own development in the same way.”

The secret to building great leaders isn’t revealed in frameworks or theories—it’s hiding in plain sight in the work of leaders committed to evolving, experimenting, and embracing the discomfort that’s a necessary part of growth.