Posted on: 12/02/2026

Thought Leadership

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By Matthew Hotten, Senior Consultant Organisational Development, Leadership and Learning at West Midlands Employers

Modern Leadership Without the Script Series: Article 1 

Leadership has always been a contact sport. But lately, it’s starting to look suspiciously like a museum piece.

Not because leaders don’t care. Most do. Deeply.

But because many are quietly relying on something that feels solid and reassuring: experience. Experience is valuable.Hard-won. Often painful.

It gives pattern recognition, judgement, and a sense of proportion. It helps you stay calm when others panic.

But experience has a shadow.

The longer you’ve been around, the easier it is to assume you already know the answer. Or at least an answer.

One that worked before. One that feels familiar. One you can access quickly. Speed starts to matter. Not because it always helps—but because hesitation feels risky.

So here’s the provocation.

Go on then. Prove it.

What have you done lately to make sure your leadership is still fit for purpose? Not ten years ago. Not when you did that MBA. Not when you survived the big restructure or the crisis everyone still talks about.

Recently.

Leadership, like the world it operates in, has a shelf life. The uncomfortable truth is that the more senior and experienced we become, the less curious we often are. Curiosity takes effort. It slows you down. It invites uncertainty. And uncertainty isn’t always welcome when people expect confidence from you. There’s an unspoken deal at senior levels: you’re paid to know. To decide. To move fast. To have an answer. “I’ll come back to you” can sound like weakness. “I don’t know” can feel dangerous.

So leaders default to what they do know. They draw on precedent. They trust their instincts. They rely on experience. All reasonable. All understandable. All potentially outdated.

The world has shifted under our feet. Again.

Hybrid work. AI. Generational expectations. Systemic stress. Public scrutiny. Speed without clarity. Complexity without instruction manuals. The leadership behaviours that served us well five or ten years ago don’t automatically translate. Some still do. Many don’t.

Command-and-control feels heavy-handed. Certainty can sound arrogant. Speed can look like avoidance. And yet we keep moving fast, partly because slowing down would require admitting that our old answers might not quite fit the new questions.

This is where ego quietly enters the room.

Not the cartoon version of ego. Not chest-beating or self-importance. But the subtler kind. The one that whispers: People expect me to know this. The one that says: I’ve been doing this for years. Ego hates being exposed as out of date. Confidence, too, plays a part. Real confidence is comfortable with learning. But performative confidence, the kind that leadership roles sometimes reward, leans towards certainty and speed. It values decisiveness over reflection. Answers over inquiry.

The risk is obvious.

When leaders stop being curious, they stop noticing weak signals. They miss changes in language, mood, expectation. They solve yesterday’s problems very efficiently. And the organisation feels it. People notice when leaders no longer ask questions. When they interrupt too quickly. When they assume they already know what’s going on. Curiosity is contagious. So is its absence.

Keeping your leadership up to date isn’t about chasing the latest framework or fad. It’s not about reinventing yourself every six months. It’s about staying awake. It’s about deliberately placing yourself back into learning mode—even when it feels uncomfortable or inefficient.

That might mean exposing yourself to thinking that challenges your assumptions. Listening to voices that aren’t like yours. Spending time with people earlier in their careers and taking them seriously. Not as “future leaders”, but as leaders now, with different lenses.

It might mean slowing your responses. Asking one more question before offering an answer. Letting silence do some work.

It might mean admitting—out loud—that you don’t yet know.

That’s not a failure of leadership. That is leadership, in its modern form.

The leaders who thrive now aren’t the ones with the fastest answers. They’re the ones with the best questions. The ones who stay curious even as their authority grows. The ones who treat experience as a foundation, not a fortress.

So go on then. Prove it.

What have you read recently that unsettled you? What conversation changed your mind? What assumption did you let go of?

Leadership doesn’t stand still. Neither can we. Because the real risk isn’t that leaders don’t know enough. It’s that they stop noticing when what they know no longer fits the world they’re leading in.

And that’s when experience quietly turns from asset to anchor.

Join us next month for the second article in the Modern Leadership Without the Script series.