Six Ways to Spot and Disrupt Cultural Leadership Dimmers
“I can feel my skills atrophying.”
I said it—out loud—less than a year into a new role.
And I meant it.
I was leading fervently–
but the culture didn’t know how to hold leadership like mine.
Sadly, this wasn’t new.
I’d coached others through the same quicksand:
where initiative gets questioned, clarity is dismissed,
and people survive by shrinking.
Most organizations misdiagnose this as a “leadership gap”—
as if the failure is personal.
But in most cases, it’s cultural.
A misalignment between what decision-makers say they want...
and how they respond when their prayers are answered.
Last month, Fast Company asked:
“Is your organization creating bad leaders?”
Not inheriting them.
Creating them.
Because strong leadership isn't missing.
It’s being misread, quieted, reassigned—incrementally.
Small calibrations pull people closer to safety
and further from instinct.
Language softens.
Judgment wanes.
People still show up...but they stop leading.
They dim—to stay in the room.
Sometimes, that so-called "gap" is just erosion:
a slow reshaping, reprimanding, and rewriting of leadership
until it disappears.
💡 So the better diagnostic question is:
What are this culture’s dimmers—
the subtle signals telling leaders to quietly comply?
👇🏾 I mapped six of those dimming signals—
and how to disrupt them—below.
Because:
Leadership isn't missing.
It's surviving.
And survival doesn't scale.
Framework
Originally appeared on LinkedIN.
If parts of this felt familiar, let’s rebuild the conditions where leadership thrives.
