Many professionals unconsciously believe that leadership gets easier the higher you climb. More authority. More experience. More control. Surely, once you reach a senior role, director, executive, CEO, the chaos settles, decisions become clearer, and the hard work can finally be delegated.
It’s an understandable assumption.
And it’s completely.
In reality, as leaders develop their capacity and step into more senior roles, leadership doesn’t simplify, it intensifies. The complexity increases, the stakes rise, and the demands become more subtle, more systemic, and more personal. Yes, more personal, too, because with greater exposure everything is amplified. The work is learning to stay grounded while taking on more complex challenges without losing your footing.
More Senior Doesn’t Mean Less Pressure
As your leadership scope expands, so does your accountability. You are no longer responsible for a single function or a small team, but for outcomes that can span departments, geographies, cultures, and competing priorities.
You take on:
More complex and ambiguous problems
Larger and more distributed teams
Decisions with broader consequences and fewer clear answers
Increased exposure and your choices ripple further and faster
Experience helps, but it doesn’t eliminate challenges. In fact, experience often reveals just how little control leaders actually have. Each level brings you to a new ceiling, asking more of your judgment, presence, and inner capacity than the one before.
Leadership is not a ladder to comfort. It’s a progression into greater responsibility for complexity.
Authentic Leadership Is Not Comfortable
One of the biggest myths in leadership development is that authenticity is soft, natural, or easy once you “find yourself.” In truth, developing into authentic leadership is profoundly uncomfortable regardless of where you find yourself on the career ladder.
Why?
Because authenticity requires confronting where you are not authentic.
As leaders mature, they develop fine tuned awareness of their motives, fears, blind spots, and patterns. They start to see where they perform, appease, avoid, or posture instead of speaking truthfully or acting decisively. And that is also making them effective in their results as a leader.
That awareness is confronting. It dismantles the internal stories that once kept things manageable:
“I’m being nice.”
“I don’t want to upset anyone.”
“It’s not worth the conflict.”
Authenticity demands that leaders stop hiding behind these narratives and take responsibility for the impact they are actually having and the influence they wish to further develop.
When You Become More Authentic, Tolerance Drops
There’s a lesser-spoken consequence of authentic leadership: as leaders become more aligned and grounded, their tolerance for inauthentic behaviour in others decreases.
This isn’t about judgment or superiority. It’s about clarity. It’s about owning one’s part in the results.
Victim mentality, avoidance of responsibility, denial, political manoeuvring, and passive resistance become harder to ignore. What once slipped by as “personality” or “team dynamics” becomes visible for what it is: a drain on trust, culture and performance.
And now the leader faces another uncomfortable truth: they have to deal with it.
Authentic leadership doesn’t allow leaders to look away. It calls them to:
Name what others are avoiding
Address patterns that undermine accountability
Confront behaviours that erode trust or momentum
This is rarely pleasant. But it is necessary. If you ever wondered where to start to become more effective, more influential and more fulfilled as a leader, start there. There are no secrets to it, no strategies, just the willingness to not tolerate inauthentic behaviour in yourself and others anymore. See what happens. The world will shift around you. You will create more impactful results and you will also notice that holding yourself and others accountable becomes more of a natural flow. It doesn’t necessarily come with the resistance that was initially there.
Conflict Doesn’t Disappear at the Top
There’s a persistent fantasy that senior leaders live above the fray. That conflict dissolves once you reach the executive floor, where others handle the mess while you focus on “strategy.”
In reality, conflict simply changes form.
At senior levels:
The conflicts are more political, systemic, and value-driven
The costs of ignoring issues are significantly higher
Decisions involve trade-offs with no clean wins
Delegation still requires oversight, judgment, and sensing
You can delegate tasks. You cannot delegate responsibility for the health of the system.
Senior leaders must stay sufficiently close to what’s happening, to sense emerging risks, notice misalignment, and intervene before issues become crises. This requires presence, discernment, and ongoing engagement, not distance.
What Actually Gets Easier
Here’s the paradox: while leadership doesn’t get easier, certain things become clearer. And as soon as you gain clarity around an issue or topic the capacity to take appropriate decisions and actions become more intentional and easier.
Leaders who are willing to sit in discomfort, confront reality, and act authentically often experience:
Fewer recurring issues (because they’re addressed, not avoided)
More reliable teams (because expectations are clear)
Faster course correction (because denial is reduced)
Greater trust (because people know where they stand)
The emotional charge lessens, not because leadership is lighter, but because leaders stop fighting what leadership actually requires. And if you are asking yourself what keeps you where you are and why things may not be moving as planned, the answer could be in investigating what you are avoiding, resisting and pretending. Once that’s resolved, things will start moving again or moving to your desired speed.
Stop hoping conflict and challenges will disappear all by themself.
The Real Maturity of Leadership
Mature, aware and authentic leadership is not about eliminating challenges. It’s about increasing the capacity to hold complexity, face discomfort, and act with integrity even when it’s inconvenient.
Those who expect leadership to smooth out with seniority are often unprepared for its true nature. Those who accept that leadership will continue to stretch them internally and externally, develop the resilience, clarity, and effectiveness that real leadership demands.
The climb doesn’t make things easier.
It makes you more accountable.