What if we're misdiagnosing the leadership challenge of our time?

Co-written by Ellen Sprenger (Spring Co-EO), Márcia Kodama (Coaching Lead) and Archana Deshpande (Co-CEO)

Originally published on LinkedIn

A month ago, our team of coaches at Spring held a 48-hour “Coaching-on-the-Go” event, offering 121 virtual coaching conversations with people working across philanthropy, human rights, climate justice, gender justice, community organizing, and many other fields. The conversations were offered in nine languages across 45 countries and every time zone.

People came with questions about funding, how to have difficult conversations, leading exhausted teams, artificial intelligence, organizational restructuring, shared leadership, career transitions, managing conflict and burnout.

At first glance, the conversations appeared to be about very different leadership challenges. But as we reflected on them afterwards, we started to see a pattern. Very few of these changemakers were asking, "What should I do?" They were asking, "Who do I need to be to meet this moment?"

We often hear that today’s biggest leadership challenge is “navigating complexity.” And with good reason. Leaders are facing shrinking civic space, political polarization, funding uncertainty, climate disruption, rapid technological change, and profound geopolitical shifts. The pace of change is relentless, and leaders are in a pressure cooker trying to handle it all.

But what if the defining leadership test of our era isn’t managing complexity itself, but developing the inner capacity required to navigate it well?

Here’s what we noticed after 48 hours of coaching changemakers around the world: the practical issues people brought into coaching quickly became conversations about personal growth—how they wanted to stretch themselves to meet the challenges they were facing:

• Funding volatility became a conversation about leading without certainty.
• Conflict became a conversation about remaining present in the face of discomfort.
• Delegation became a conversation about cultivating trust and leading with others.
• Burnout became a conversation about self-stewardship.
• Career transitions became a conversation about identity.
• Self-doubt became a conversation about trusting one’s own voice.

People weren't asking, "How do I solve this problem?" They were asking, "What do I need to cultivate in me to meet this challenge effectively?"

Traditionally, leadership development tends to focus on knowledge, skill building, and performance. Those things matter, and they always will. But we invest far less in creating the conditions that enable leaders to continue developing throughout their lives.

In our event’s end-of-session surveys, the most-cited impacts participants reported were feeling calmer, more confident, more connected to themselves, better able to regulate their emotions, and more able to see new possibilities.

One participant reflected, "Changing my internal dialogue changed my behaviour, my confidence, and the way I understand myself." Another observed that leadership development is often less about fixing immediate problems than preventing them: "It's more about what these reflection spaces might prevent in terms of conflict or friction." And one participant captured the important connection between self-awareness and leadership: "Instead of focusing on what I lacked, I began to focus on the qualities that already make me a strong leader. By leaning into those strengths, I naturally become a better leader."

Others spoke about the importance of slowing down to gain clarity, learning to lead without having all the answers, and recognizing that small shifts in how they relate to themselves and others can have a profound positive impact on their teams.

Over time, developmental shifts like these change not only how we lead, but also how others experience our leadership.

Leaders tend to be rewarded primarily for expertise, decisiveness, or authority. These are vital traits. But we experience the difference when leaders cultivate greater self-awareness of their patterns, fears, strengths, and emotions. Leaders who develop greater comfort with uncertainty respond to funding volatility with steadiness. Those who learn to work skillfully with tension and conflict are better equipped to help teams stay present through difficult moments, discover new possibilities, and uncover unexpected wisdom.

These capacities are not innate; they are developed over time. The world is asking us to become people who can remain deeply human while navigating extraordinary complexity.

If the defining challenge of leadership is developmental, then creating spaces where leaders can reflect, learn, and continue growing is not just “nice to have”. It is strategic infrastructure that enables people and organizations to remain adaptive and effective in pursuing their mission.

Coaching provides one of those rare spaces. It offers leaders the opportunity to pause, reflect, and develop greater self-awareness, enabling them to meet each moment with greater clarity, presence, and choice.

The quality of our leadership is inseparable from the quality of our own ongoing development. It doesn’t make the world less complex, but it changes how we meet it. And that makes all the difference.

Catch us doing a live version of “Coaching-on-the-go” at Mozilla Festival this October! For more information on Spring Coaching, including Coaching-on-the-Go events, please email us at coaching@springstrategies.org.