YOU TRAINED THE LEADER. WHY DO THEY KEEP BREAKING?

Discover why leaders with all the competencies still fail — and what no training program wants to admit about the true development of leadership. – By Marcello de Souza

Think about the last leader you saw fail. Not the unprepared one, the naive one, the newcomer. I’m talking about the other one—the one who accumulated courses, certifications, methodologies, structured feedback, 360° assessments, expensive executive coaching. The one who had, as they say in organizations, “all the right credentials.” The one who walked the hallways with the posture of someone who knows what they’re doing.
Now think: how did they collapse?
It probably wasn’t due to a lack of technique. It wasn’t because they were unaware of management tools or because they had never read about emotional intelligence. It was because of something no competency spreadsheet can capture, no assessment can rank, and no two-day training session at a resort hotel can resolve. It was because, at the moment when the world around them became genuinely complex—when the right answers ceased to exist, when pressure came from multiple directions simultaneously, and when the map they knew by heart simply no longer matched the territory—the internal structure of how they think, feel, and interpret reality was not up to the challenge.
This is not a failure of the resume. It is a failure of maturation.
And this is the data organizations avoid facing: the United States alone spends over 160 billion dollars a year on leadership development—and when you include the full spectrum of management and managerial development programs worldwide, that number exceeds 360 billion. Three-quarters of these programs are rated by the participants themselves as ineffective. Sixty percent of new managers fail within their first two years. Thirty percent of CEOs of large corporations don’t make it to their third year in the role. And the reasons almost never have to do with technical deficiency—they have to do with arrogance, cognitive rigidity, an inability to integrate conflicting perspectives, and the absence of an internal structure robust enough to navigate genuine ambiguity.
The problem isn’t the leader who hasn’t learned. It’s the leader who has learned too many of the wrong things—and hasn’t matured enough to transcend them.

The Glass Ceiling No One Sees
There is a ceiling that doesn’t appear on organizational charts. It’s not in succession plans or talent maps. But it’s there, firm, invisible, and silent, limiting the reach of practically all existing leadership development programs.
This ceiling is the belief—never stated, but deeply rooted—that developing a leader means teaching them more things. More frameworks. More tools. More skills. More content. As if the human mind were a warehouse that, once filled with the right items, automatically produces wisdom, judgment, and the ability to deal with the unpredictable.
It does not.
What this model ignores—and this is the central fracture in almost everything done in leadership development today—is that there are two radically different types of human development, and they are not interchangeable.
The first is horizontal. It expands what you know within the structure of how you think. It is learning that adds: more knowledge, more technique, more repertoire. It is absolutely necessary—without it, there is no foundation upon which vertical development can operate. A surgeon needs to master the technique before they can develop the judgment that technique alone doesn’t teach. A manager needs to know the analytical tools before they can transcend them. The problem isn’t horizontal development itself. The problem is mistaking it for sufficient development—believing that accumulating content is equivalent to maturing.
The second is vertical. And this is what almost no one develops—because it is the most difficult, the slowest, the most uncomfortable, and the only one that truly transforms what a human being is capable of doing in the face of what has no answer.
Vertical development does not add content to the mind. It transforms the structure through which the mind processes everything. It’s not installing a new application. It’s rewriting the operating system.

What It Really Means to Mature
This is where the conversation needs to stop being about leadership and start being about the human who leads.
There is a disconcerting fact about adult development that organizations rarely want to hear: most adults stop maturing much earlier than they imagine. Biologically, we age. Cognitively, we accumulate information. But structurally—in the sense of how we organize reality, how we integrate contradictions, how we construct meaning—most people stabilize at a developmental stage in late adolescence or early adulthood and remain there for the rest of their lives, no matter how many courses they take or how many experiences they accumulate.
Research in adult developmental psychology—conducted over decades with different instruments for assessing maturity—converges on a disconcerting estimate: between five and ten percent of executives operate from a stage of maturation that truly corresponds to the complexity of the functions they perform. The numbers vary depending on the methodology, but the direction is consistent. The vast majority lead from mental structures that were formed in much simpler contexts than those they face today.
What distinguishes this eight percent is not their IQ, not their track record of success, and not the number of certifications on their wall. It is the capacity to observe their own mind in operation—not just from within it, trapped in their own patterns, but from outside, as an observer who can question their own certainties without disintegrating in the process.
This has a name that goes far beyond the buzzword “self-awareness” that has become a PowerPoint cliché. It’s called the capacity to make object what was once subject. It means: everything that you were as a child that controlled you without you realizing it—the fears, the beliefs, the narratives about who you are and what the world means—you learned, as you grew, to observe from the outside. They ceased to be the invisible lens through which you saw everything and became something you can examine, question, and transform.
Vertical development is precisely this process, applied to the deepest structures of the adult who leads. And it never happens in a classroom. It happens in the real friction with the world.

Why Discomfort Is Not the Enemy
Think of a manager you’ve known—maybe it’s you—who, faced with a real crisis, became paralyzed not by the absence of technique, but by the collapse of their certainties. The moment when the map stopped working and, instead of exploring the territory with curiosity, the response was a tightness in the chest, cognitive rigidity, and an urgent need to control the uncontrollable.
This paralysis is not weakness. It is a sign that the challenge exceeded the available internal structure. And it is precisely at this point—not before, not after—that vertical development can occur.
There is something profoundly counterintuitive here that organizations need to accept: stress, ambiguity, and confrontation with perspectives radically different from one’s own are not obstacles to leadership development. They are catalysts—provided they are processed with adequate support.
This caveat is fundamental and rarely appears in the literature on the subject: discomfort alone does not develop anyone. Some organizational environments simply hurt. Chronic pressure without space for elaboration does not produce more mature leaders—it produces more rigid, more defensive, more anxious leaders craving control. Organizational trauma is not pedagogical. It consolidates survival patterns, not growth structures.
What produces vertical development is something more specific: the genuine encounter with what you cannot solve using what you already know, accompanied by a structured space to process that experience. Not a coach who validates, not a mentor who prescribes—but a relationship that confronts without destroying, that keeps the tension alive long enough for something to reorganize internally.
In practice, this can take different forms. A structured coaching process that doesn’t deliver answers, but insists on the questions the leader would rather avoid. A peer group with radically different cultures and perspectives, where the leader needs to hold points of view that contradict their own without the security of being right. A genuinely new leadership situation—not just more complex, but of a different nature—that requires operating from resources that have not yet been developed. What these contexts have in common is not the difficulty. It is the presence of conscious elaboration after the difficulty.
This explains why some leaders emerge from crises more complex, more integrated, more capable. And others emerge repeating the same patterns, only with more accumulated anxiety.

The Trap of the Expert Leader
There is a very common developmental stage in organizations that, paradoxically, is one of the most dangerous from the perspective of vertical growth. It is the expert stage.
The expert leader has built their identity around technical mastery. They know more than others in their area. They solve complex problems with elegance. They are respected for the depth of their knowledge. And, precisely because of this, they have developed an unconscious loyalty to what they already know—because questioning what they know means, for them, questioning who they are.
When this leader faces a problem that doesn’t fit their repertoire, the almost invariable response is to try to make it fit. To reframe the question until it fits into a solution they already know. To distrust what others bring when it contradicts their expertise. To privilege the consistency of their vision over the complexity of what lies before them.
This is not arrogance in the banal sense. It is a structural developmental limitation. And it affects brilliant, experienced leaders genuinely committed to the quality of their work.
The clearest sign that a leader is stuck in this stage is not incompetence—it is the inability to be surprised. To genuinely not know the answer and to sustain that not-knowing with curiosity, without anxiety. To hear a perspective that contradicts their own without the immediate need to correct it.
The passage to more mature stages of leadership requires exactly this: the capacity to tolerate uncertainty without needing to eliminate it. To lead from questions, not just answers. To construct meaning from the tension between opposing perspectives, without artificially resolving that tension by choosing a side.

When Your Differentiator Becomes a Cage
There is a consequence of this trap that is rarely named—and that operates silently in organizations with disturbing efficiency.
Your differentiators are real. The technical depth, the accumulated experience, the ability to solve what others can’t—all of this is genuine and earned. The problem isn’t having differentiators. The problem is when they stop being a dimension of who you are and become the complete definition of who you are—first in your own perception, then in the perception of everyone around you.
Because the world around you crystallizes images. Quickly. Without ceremony.
The leader who masterfully solved financial crises for years starts being summoned only for financial crises—even when the real problem is cultural. The executive who built high-performance teams in structured environments becomes seen as the solution for environments that need structure—even when what the organization really needs is someone capable of dissolving structures that no longer serve. The specialist who transformed processes with analytical intelligence becomes, in the collective narrative, “the process person”—and this narrative arrives before she does in any room she enters.
This isn’t injustice. It’s the natural functioning of human perception in contexts of high complexity and little time: people reduce the other to what they can easily grasp. And what they can easily grasp is always the most visible, most repeated, most historically confirmed differentiator.
The risk isn’t being recognized. The risk is being only that.
When a leader does not strategically and consciously work on their own narrative—not in the sense of empty personal marketing, but in the sense of actively broadening others’ perception of their capacity to operate in dimensions different from the already known ones—they hand over to circumstances the power to define them. And circumstances, invariably, define them by the past.
The label doesn’t need to be negative to be a prison. It can be a label of excellence. It can be a label of reference. It can be a label built with years of genuine work and deserved recognition. And it still functions as a limit—because any label, no matter how accurate, always captures less than a person truly is.
Vertical development solves part of this problem from the inside: as the leader matures structurally, they naturally begin to operate in dimensions that the previous label does not contemplate. But this is not enough. Internal maturation needs to be accompanied by conscious management of how this expansion is communicated, perceived, and anchored in the relationships that matter.
A leader who grows vertically but remains invisible in that growth will continue to be summoned for the same old situations—not because they are incapable of more, but because no one around them has been invited to update the image they have of them.
This places an uncomfortable responsibility on the leader themselves: not just to grow, but to make that growth legible to the environment. Not out of vanity. Out of strategy. Because the impact you are capable of generating depends, in part, on the situations for which you are considered—and you are only considered for what people can imagine you are capable of doing.
And what people imagine, when not provoked to imagine differently, is always a slightly outdated version of you.

When the Shock is the Teacher
Imagine an operations director at a large company, with twenty years of experience, recognized in the market, an excellent manager by conventional standards. She takes on a complex cultural transformation in a company that has just gone through a merger. Two teams with radically different cultures, histories of conflict, different loyalties. She applies what has always worked: clear processes, well-defined metrics, structured communication, meetings with agendas and minutes.
Three months later, the tension is higher than when she arrived.
The problem isn’t that she did it wrong. It’s that she did it too right within a model that didn’t correspond to the reality of that context. What that situation demanded wasn’t more structure—it was the capacity to sit with the ambiguity of the conflict without needing to resolve it prematurely. It was to listen to contradictory narratives without the urgency of synthesizing them into a common denominator. It was to lead from the tension, not despite it.
This is the kind of challenge that cannot be solved with horizontal competence. It demands that the leader be capable of simultaneously occupying perspectives that contradict each other, of sustaining complexity without collapsing into simplification, of acting from a place that is genuinely beyond what she knew until then.
If she has the courage—and the support—to remain in this friction without fleeing to what she already knows, something can reorganize internally. Not just her strategy for that project. Her structure of how she understands conflict, difference, and change. This is the vertical movement.
If she doesn’t have that support—if the organization pressures her for quick results without giving space for elaboration—she will likely consolidate the belief that that context was wrong, not her. And she will continue unchanged.

What Organizations Need to Stop Doing
There is a cruel irony at the heart of how most large organizations treat leadership development. They invest significant sums to bring intelligent people in for two or three days of intense content, produce sophisticated materials, hire experienced facilitators—and then return these leaders to the exact same environment that created the patterns that needed to be transformed.
It’s not that the content is bad. It’s that the context cancels the content.
Research in adult development shows that most adults do not develop automatically—unlike children, who mature through biological force. The adult matures through effort, through genuine confrontation with what exceeds their current structure, and through the conscious elaboration of these experiences. Without these conditions, they do not grow. They only accumulate.
What vertical development demands from organizations is something more uncomfortable than a training budget: it demands creating real conditions for discomfort to be sustained without being eliminated. It demands that vulnerability is not punished. It demands that leaders have permission not to know, to make intelligent mistakes, to confront perspectives that challenge their convictions without this being interpreted as weakness.
It demands, ultimately, that the organization itself matures.
Because a culture that rewards the appearance of certainty does not produce leaders capable of navigating real complexity. It produces very skilled actors pretending to know.

The Difference That Makes All the Difference
There is a distinction that should be at the center of any serious conversation about leadership, and it rarely appears: the difference between a leader who acts from what they know and a leader who acts from what they are.
The first depends on the context to function. In stable environments, where technical repertoire and accumulated experience are sufficient, they perform excellently. But in genuinely complex environments—and most relevant organizational environments today are genuinely complex—they oscillate between rigidity and collapse.
The second carries a capacity that is not a function of context. They may not have all the answers—often they don’t, and they know it. But their internal structure is robust enough to sustain uncertainty without fragmenting, to integrate contradictory perspectives without artificially choosing one, to make decisions in highly ambiguous environments without the paralysis of someone who needs certainty before acting.
This robustness does not come from technique. It comes from maturation. From the slow, non-linear, deeply personal process of expanding not just what you know, but what you are capable of being.
And this process—this genuinely vertical development—is what is still almost completely absent from conventional models of leader formation.
Not because it’s impossible to promote. But because it’s impossible to package into an easy-to-consume product.
It demands time. It demands real confrontation. It demands relationships that provoke without destroying. It demands a type of accompaniment that goes far beyond competency coaching and falls far short of what most organizations are willing to sustain.
When it happens—when a leader truly moves to a more complex stage of development—what emerges is not just a more efficient professional. It is a person with a radically different structure for being present, for thinking under pressure, and for making decisions without needing certainty as a prerequisite. Not the one with more tools. The one who has matured enough to know when no tool solves it—and can act anyway.

One Last Question—But Not the One You Expect
There is a question that almost every leadership development program asks at the end: what are you going to do differently from now on?
I’m not going to ask that question.
It presupposes that the problem is behavioral—that it’s enough to adjust a conduct, adopt a new practice, create a reflection ritual. That can be useful. But it’s not what this text intended to say.
The question that matters is another, more uncomfortable and more revealing:
What is the version of yourself that people around you still can’t see—because you yourself haven’t yet made that version visible?
I’m not talking about image. I’m talking about something more essential: how much of what you have already matured internally is still invisible to the world that decides which challenges you’re called for, which conversations you’re included in, which futures you’re considered relevant for.
Vertical development without strategic management of your own narrative is like having built new architecture inside an old facade—and continuing to receive visitors who come to see the facade.
Growing is not enough. It is necessary, but not sufficient. The leader who matures structurally and remains trapped in the label the world has consolidated about them will continue to be used below their real capacity—and often without even realizing it, because the label is comfortable, familiar, and, after all, built on genuine competencies.
The question isn’t whether you have differentiators. It’s whether you know what to do with them before they do something to you—like reduce you to what they’ve already proven you are, instead of opening space for what you are still capable of becoming.
Does this bother you? Good. It is precisely this discomfort that signals where there is still room to grow—and where the next vertical movement is waiting to begin.

If this text provoked something in you—a restlessness, a silent revision, a question that didn’t exist before you started reading—I invite you to continue this journey. On my blog, you will find hundreds of publications that delve into the deepest layers of human and organizational cognitive-behavioral development, healthy relationships, and what it truly means to lead with awareness and integrity. Visit: marcellodesouza.com.br

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