Upgrade Your Leadership Mindset (Festive Special 3 of 5)

Last week’s issue: Teach them to Fish

Join 7500+ leaders

Looking to start a newsletter? Use Beehiiv (it’s what we use)

Every leader faces the same challenge: getting people to actually absorb what you're saying - in a world of overflowing inboxes, half-read Slacks, and meetings about meetings.

Smart Brevity is the methodology Axios HQ built to solve this. It's a system for communicating with clarity, respect, and precision — whether you're writing to your board, your team, or your entire organization.

Join our free 60-minute Open House to learn how it works and see it in action.

Runs monthly - grab a spot that works for you.

Save your seat

Dear Team,

Here's a truth I wish someone had told me earlier: the mindsets that got you into leadership are often the exact ones that limit you once you're there.

I learned this the hard way. For years, I prided myself on being the person with answers. I could solve problems faster than most, spot issues before they became crises, and jump in to fix things when teams struggled. It worked brilliantly, until I became responsible for leading other leaders. Suddenly, my superpower became my constraint. I was creating dependency instead of capability, solving problems that others needed to learn from, and exhausting myself in the process.

The skills hadn't stopped working. But the mindset underneath them, "my value comes from having the right answer", was now actively getting in my way.

Most leadership development focuses on what to do: give better feedback, delegate more effectively, communicate vision clearly. All important. But the deeper work is examining the invisible beliefs driving those actions. Because you can learn every leadership framework in the world, but if your underlying mindset hasn't shifted, you'll keep defaulting to the same patterns.

Let me share three mindset upgrades that changed my leadership. Not because I'm special, but because I've watched these same shifts unlock something in dozens of leaders I've worked with.

The old mindset: Good leaders have answers. If I don't know something, I'm failing. My job is to reduce uncertainty for my team.

The upgraded mindset: Good leaders create the conditions for collective discovery. My job is to help us figure things out together, even when I don't know the answer.

This one's hard because we're promoted based on expertise. We got here by knowing things, by being right, by reducing risk. But at a certain level, the problems get too complex for any one person to solve. The leaders who keep trying to be the smartest person in the room create bottlenecks. The leaders who can say "I don't know—what do you think?" create ownership.

What changed for me: I started treating strategy meetings differently. Instead of arriving with the plan, I'd arrive with the question: "Here's what I'm wrestling with. What am I not seeing?" The first few times felt vulnerable, like I was admitting incompetence. But the solutions we discovered together were consistently better than anything I would've designed alone. And my team started bringing me harder problems because they knew we'd solve them together, not that I'd solve them for them.

AI will eliminate 300 million jobs in the next 5 years.

Yours doesn't have to be one of them.

Here's how to future-proof your career:

Start learning AI now

The old mindset: I need to treat everyone the same to be fair. Consistent standards, consistent approaches, consistent expectations.

The upgraded mindset: Fairness isn't sameness—it's giving each person what they need to succeed. My job is to calibrate my leadership to the situation and the person.

Early in my leadership journey, I managed everyone the same way. Weekly one-on-ones, same level of oversight, same communication style. I thought this was equity. It wasn't—it was laziness disguised as principle.

Some people needed more structure. Others needed space to run. Some wanted direct feedback immediately. Others needed time to process. Treating them all identically wasn't fair—it was ignoring their actual needs in service of a rule I'd made up.

What this looks like now:

Is it more work? Yes. Is it more effective? Absolutely.

The old mindset: I should have this figured out by now. Other leaders seem more confident, more capable, more clear. I'm behind.

The upgraded mindset: Leadership is a craft that deepens over decades, not a finish line I'm supposed to cross. My job is to keep learning, not to have already learned.

This might be the most liberating shift of all. We live in a culture that celebrates the young genius, the rapid rise, the leader who has it all figured out at 35. But the leaders I most admire, the ones with real wisdom, not just polish, all say some version of the same thing: "I'm still learning. I'm still making mistakes. I'm still discovering what I don't know."

A CEO I respect told me once: "I used to think the goal was to reach a place where leadership felt easy. Now I realise the goal is to get comfortable with it always being hard, and to keep growing anyway."

What this means practically:

Notice what these three upgrades have in common? They all require letting go of something that once served you: being the expert, being consistent, being "done" learning.

That's the pattern. The mindsets that make you a strong individual contributor often emphasise control, certainty, and self-sufficiency. Leadership mindsets emphasise collaboration, exploration, and interdependence. Moving from one to the other isn't about adding skills, it's about evolving your identity.

Here's what I'd invite you to try: pick one of these three mindset shifts and notice it this week. Not to change it yet, just to observe it.

When do you feel the pull to have all the answers? When do you default to treating everyone the same instead of right-sizing your response? When do you beat yourself up for not being further along?

Just notice. That awareness is the first step toward choosing something different.

Because here's the thing about mindset work: you can't force it, but you can create the conditions for it to shift. And sometimes, just seeing the pattern clearly is enough to start loosening its grip.

That's the work. And it matters more than any framework or technique you'll ever learn.

Thank you

P.S. — What mindset shift has had the biggest impact on your leadership? Hit reply and let me know. I read every response, and your insights often shape what I write about next.