Leadership has no shortage of tools.

Frameworks. KPIs. Operating rhythms. Personality assessments. Books telling us how successful CEOs run meetings before most of us have had our first coffee.

But perhaps we are starting in the wrong place.

In my recent conversation with leadership coach and How Leaders Think host Kenny Lange, we kept returning to a deceptively simple idea: before we ask leaders what they are doing, we need to understand who they are becoming.

Kenny understands growth. He built and sold his own agency, then joined the acquiring business and helped it nearly double revenue while expanding its workforce across six US states and four countries.

Today, he coaches founders and leaders navigating many of the same challenges he once faced.

And despite all the discussion about AI, technology and the changing world of work, Kenny says the problems leaders bring to him remain overwhelmingly human.

How do I organise people? How do I stop being the "chief everything officer"? How do I develop other people while I'm still trying to develop myself? And how do I trust someone else with something I've spent years building?

For founders in particular, the business and the person can become almost inseparable. Delegation isn't simply handing over a task. It can feel like handing someone part of your identity.

Yet refusing to let go eventually becomes its own constraint.

The three questions leaders should ask

Kenny takes leaders through three questions:

Who are you becoming?

What are you building?

What must be surrendered?

I particularly like the third.

We tend to think growth requires addition. More capability. More people. More knowledge. More responsibility.

But leadership growth often requires subtraction.

The need to control every decision. The comfort of being the person with all the answers. Work we are good at but should no longer be doing. Sometimes even behaviours that helped us succeed at one stage but will hold us back at the next.

As Kenny puts it, becoming CEO should mean becoming Chief Executive Officer, not Chief Everything Officer.

The leader who built the organisation may not automatically be the leader capable of taking it where it needs to go next.

Self-awareness before strategy

Kenny's Lead to Scale methodology has an outer loop of lead, grow and scale, supported by an inner loop of aware, aligned and accountable.

His argument is that leaders frequently jump straight to tactics. Which framework should we implement? What system should we use? How should we structure meetings?

But without awareness, we are effectively choosing building materials before drawing the blueprint.

Because leadership isn't static. The way I led in 2019 is different from how I lead today. And how I need to lead five years from now will almost certainly be different again.

Experience changes us. Crisis changes us. Technology changes us. Our people change us.

Future-fit leadership therefore requires more than learning new skills. It requires enough self-awareness to recognise when an old version of ourselves has reached its expiry date.

Culture is what leaders demonstrate

We also spoke about a business Kenny coached through significant growth.

What interested me wasn't simply the revenue story. It was what happened inside the organisation.

The founders created greater discipline around meetings, decision-making, structure and accountability. But critically, their culture wasn't something written down and stuck on a wall.

They modelled it. They admitted when they were wrong. They had difficult conversations. They got into the trenches when things weren't going well. And they gave people respect, clarity and the confidence that their leaders had their backs.

Culture becomes credible when employees see leaders behaving consistently with the words the organisation uses to describe itself.

Otherwise, it's just very expensive wallpaper.

The part of leadership we don't discuss enough

Towards the end of our conversation, I asked Kenny what he believes is the hardest part of leadership that we don't talk about enough.

His answer was Isolation. As responsibility grows, the number of people a leader feels able to be completely open with can shrink. You don't want to appear uncertain to employees, incompetent to a board, or worried in front of the people who depend on you.

So leaders can gradually become more isolated precisely when they most need perspective and support.

It is an important reminder that leaders need people around them who aren't impressed by the title and aren't frightened of telling them the truth.

Leadership is ultimately about who we are

Kenny referenced research discussed in Tim Spiker's work describing leaders worth following as inwardly sound and others focused.

That distinction matters because so much leadership development concentrates on what leaders do.

Communicate better. Delegate. Set strategy. Manage performance.

All important.

But being inwardly sound speaks to who the leader is.

And Kenny's argument is that as leaders become more inwardly sound, they become more genuinely focused on others.

Perhaps that is where the conversation about future leadership needs to go.

Not another list of things leaders need to add to already crowded calendars.

But better questions about identity, purpose and what we are prepared to leave behind.

So as you think about the next stage of your organisation, your team or your career, perhaps start with Kenny's three questions: