The Leadership Mindset Shift: From Control to Collective Stewardship

According to Forbes, executive coach Muriel Wilkins is witnessing senior leaders privately battling pandemic-level anxiety, frustration, and “shrillness” – a phenomenon she hasn’t seen since 2020. Unlike the pandemic’s empathetic response of community and togetherness, current leadership reactions have swung toward control and restriction. Wilkins’ new book, “Leadership Unblocked: Break Through the Beliefs That Limit Your Potential,” identifies seven unconscious beliefs that block progress at senior levels, arguing that leaders cannot transform organizations beyond their own capacity for personal transformation. The book has been named a Next Big Idea Club “Must Read” for October and shortlisted for the 2025 Thinkers50 Coaching and Mentoring Award. This leadership crisis reveals that changing actions without changing underlying beliefs creates the same bottlenecks in different forms.

The Hidden Architecture of Leadership Limitations

What makes Wilkins’ framework particularly insightful is how it exposes the unconscious patterns that govern leadership behavior. Many senior executives reach their positions precisely because certain beliefs served them well earlier in their careers – the conviction that they must be involved in everything, the assumption that they know what’s right, or the drive for individual achievement. These become what Wilkins calls “adaptive beliefs” that transform from assets to liabilities as leadership scope expands. The critical insight here is that these aren’t character flaws but rather outdated operating systems that haven’t been upgraded for current leadership demands. When organizations promote technical experts or high-performers into senior leadership roles, they often fail to provide the psychological tools needed for mindset evolution.

Why Tactical Solutions Fail at Senior Levels

Most leadership development programs and organizational interventions focus on changing behaviors – implementing new meeting structures, communication protocols, or decision-making frameworks. Wilkins correctly identifies this as treating symptoms rather than causes. A leader who believes “I need to be involved” might stop attending every meeting but start requiring exhaustive reports, simply changing the form of control rather than addressing the underlying trust deficit. This explains why so many culture-change initiatives fail despite significant investment: they target visible behaviors while leaving the invisible belief systems untouched. The real work happens at the cognitive level, where leaders must examine what they think about what they’re doing, not just what they’re doing differently.

The Ripple Effect on Organizational Culture

When Wilkins asks “What is a culture but a collective set of beliefs?” she’s pointing to a fundamental truth about organizational dynamics. Culture isn’t created by posters in the breakroom or values statements on the website – it emerges from the aggregated beliefs of leaders as they make daily decisions about priorities, resources, and people. A leadership team that collectively believes “we’re in crisis mode” will create a reactive, high-stress environment regardless of what their official culture documents say. This explains why culture work must begin with leadership mindset work. As Harvard Business Review research has consistently shown, sustainable culture change requires examining and evolving the underlying assumptions that drive behavior.

The Shift From Achievement to Stewardship

Perhaps the most profound insight in Wilkins’ work is the redefinition of leadership success from individual achievement to collective stewardship. Many leaders reach senior positions excelling at delivering results but struggle with the broader responsibilities of creating environments where others can thrive. This transition requires expanding one’s definition of success to include personal wellbeing (ME), team experience (WE), and broader impact (WORLD). The resistance many leaders feel toward this inner work – “Why do I have to be the calm for myself?” – reveals how deeply embedded the achievement-oriented identity remains. Yet in an era of distributed teams, remote work, and complex global challenges, the ability to maintain psychological stability while navigating uncertainty has become a non-negotiable leadership competency.

Redesigning Leadership Development for Real Transformation

The implications for how organizations develop leaders are substantial. Traditional leadership training that focuses on skills, strategies, and systems must be complemented with practices that help leaders examine and expand their belief systems. This might include reflective practices, coaching that challenges underlying assumptions, and creating environments where vulnerability about limitations is safe. Organizations that succeed at this level of development will likely see benefits beyond individual leader effectiveness – they’ll create cultures capable of adapting to continuous change because the leaders themselves have developed what Wilkins calls “range over rigidity.” In an age of AI transformation, economic volatility, and social fragmentation, this adaptive capacity may be the most valuable organizational asset.

Why This Matters Beyond the Executive Suite

While Wilkins focuses on senior leaders, her insights about empathy, contribution, and collective experience apply throughout organizations. The question “in what ways do you want to contribute?” resonates whether you’re a CEO or an individual contributor. As work becomes more interconnected and complex, everyone benefits from examining the beliefs that might be limiting their effectiveness and fulfillment. The current leadership crisis Wilkins identifies isn’t just about executive stress – it’s about our collective need to develop more adaptive, human-centered approaches to work in an increasingly uncertain world. The organizations that thrive will be those whose leaders have done the inner work to lead from a place of expanded possibility rather than constricted control.