Future of Leadership Starts With Self-Leadership

This manifesto sets out how I see the future of leadership: how I understand leadership and how I work. It is based on my experience, not on a model.

At a glance

Transformation rarely fails because of technology. It usually fails because of leadership, incentives and strategy.
Leadership starts with leading yourself.
Goals and metrics should give direction. They must not punish collaboration.
Blame and enemy images prevent solutions.
Independence, mentoring and self-organization need trust and clear responsibility.
AI makes human judgment more important, not obsolete.

We change our technology faster than our thinking

AI is changing how we work. Knowledge is available everywhere, and much that was unthinkable a few years ago is now routine. So one question occupies me: Are we, as people and organizations, developing at the same pace as our technologies?

I have seen many change programs in my career. They almost always promised the same things: more efficiency, faster decisions, better collaboration, more innovation.

They rarely failed or stalled because of technology. What stood in the way was leadership culture, lack of trust, power interests, unclear responsibility, rigid target systems and entrenched ways of thinking.

The patterns repeat:

A company introduces new technology and leaves the organization as it is.
It demands agility, but every decision still has to pass through several levels.
It invokes collaboration and pays bonuses for individual performance.

This has become my conviction:

Transformation does not begin with a new strategy, technology or structure. It begins when people are ready to change their own thinking and behavior.

Self-leadership comes first

We talk a lot about how leaders motivate others, develop teams and steer organizations. We less often ask whether they understand themselves.

Anyone who wants to lead others must know their own beliefs, fears and patterns. A few questions help me with this, including with myself:

How do I react when someone questions my decision?
Can I take responsibility without looking for someone to blame?
Can I say: I was wrong about that?
Can I share power without fearing that I will lose influence?

Self-leadership does not mean always being composed or never making mistakes. It means noticing your own behavior and standing behind it.

That is why I see it not as an add-on skill in management, but as the precondition for credible leadership.

For further reading: Joachim Bauer, "Selbststeuerung: Die Wiederentdeckung des freien Willens".

Attitude matters more than hierarchy

A leadership position gives you formal responsibility. It does not automatically give you trust and respect. Those grow from daily behavior.

I have seen managers who impressed with their expertise and still reached nobody. And I have seen people without a leadership role who achieved a lot through attitude, integrity and clarity.

Management organizes tasks and resources. Leadership gives direction, builds trust and makes development possible. You need both, but we should not confuse them.

Good leadership does not have an answer to everything. It asks the right questions, listens, makes decisions that others can follow and trusts others to take responsibility. This takes clarity and consistency. Empathy is not a license for arbitrariness, and trust and commitment belong together.

When I trust someone

I once asked a friend who runs a large company when he trusts a person. His answer was simple, and it has stayed with me: if someone has decided nine times the way I would have, and the tenth time differently, without my having known better, then I trust that person.

I find this honest and dangerous at the same time. If you tie trust to agreement, you end up rewarding people who are similar to you.

What I find interesting is the tenth case: here, trust is no longer in my way of deciding, but in the other person's judgment.

How many decisions that differ from mine can I accept before I start to distrust?

Goals, metrics and incentives: when the system rewards the wrong thing

Goals that miss reality

Goals are necessary. They give direction and make progress visible. They become a problem when they turn into fixed commitments even though the situation changed long ago.

Markets, technologies and new competitors can call a whole business model into question within a few months. Even so, people are often measured against goals that were set under very different conditions. Someone can reach every agreed goal and still work past the company's actual needs.

It gets harder still when managers hold on to a goal because changing it is seen as weakness or poor planning. I see it the other way round: changing a goal because you have learned something is a sign of good leadership.

Agility does not mean working without goals. It means keeping the direction and being ready to change the path, and sometimes the specific goal as well.

A goal culture that I consider sustainable:

a long-term direction that gives meaning
shorter goals that are reviewed regularly
open decisions about which goals still apply
the courage to deliberately let go of what is outdated
an assessment that also counts learning, collaboration and real benefit

Incentives that turn colleagues into competitors

Many companies stress teamwork and shared responsibility across departments, and at the same time reward individual goal achievement. If you are measured on your own metrics, it is understandable that you pay attention to them first.

Information is held back, resources are defended, and decisions favor one's own area. The departments get better, and the company as a whole gets weaker.

Silo thinking is therefore often not a lack of willingness to cooperate. It is a sensible reaction to a badly built incentive system, especially when bonuses are tied directly to individual financial targets and collaboration hardly counts.

That is why this question is worth asking: what behavior do our goal and pay systems really reward?

Collaboration or individual optimization?
Long-term value or short-term numbers?
The success of the whole or of one unit?

In the long run, an organization gets the behavior it rewards and tolerates, not the behavior it demands.

For further reading: Hans-Peter Dürr, „Warum es ums Ganze geht: Neues Denken für eine Welt im Umbruch“.

When the strategy is wrong

When business is going badly, the answer is often: get faster, cut costs, raise sales targets, more reporting, more pressure. In individual cases this can be right. It becomes a problem as a standard reaction, because then we are treating symptoms.

A product the market does not want does not become more attractive through higher sales targets.
An unclear strategy does not become clearer through additional KPIs.
A badly set up project does not succeed because we measure it more often.

The uncomfortable question is therefore: perhaps the problem is not the performance of the employees at all, but the strategy?

Metrics show what is happening. They do not explain why it is happening, and they certainly do not replace a good strategy.

The illusion of control through metrics

Metrics give a feeling of control. What is green on the dashboard looks like progress. But much of what decides success is hard to measure: trust, innovation, customer relationships, experience, culture.

When only the short term counts, these are exactly the things that drop out of sight. Then people optimize reports instead of solving problems, and meet targets on paper without delivering any benefit. People learn which numbers they have to deliver, instead of asking how to create value.

What short-term pressure costs

Pressure for short-term results has a price. Costs are cut, investment in innovation and training is postponed, experienced people leave, and the rest take on more and work at their limit.

What looks like efficiency in the short term costs knowledge, motivation, quality and competitiveness later. The consequences usually only become visible long after the decision was made, so they rarely hit the people who made it.

Not every cost cut is an efficiency gain. Sometimes it only shifts costs and risks into the future.

People cannot be scaled at will

Almost every mission statement calls employees the most important asset. How serious that is shows under pressure. For a while, people can achieve extraordinary things, but permanent overload is not a business model.

Resilience and self-leadership are important, but they must not be used to dump structural problems on the individual.

We cannot train people to be resilient and at the same time leave the causes of their overload in place.

There is also a second side, which I do not want to leave out. I was lying in the treatment chair of my much-valued dentist and heard him talking to his assistant. Pressure, he said, is an idea in our heads.

If a patient makes a fuss in the waiting room, only the dentist decides what he does with that pressure. He calmly explains that he is dealing with a difficult case right now and offers a new appointment. He does not let himself be rushed.

"We are good because we are slow," he said. Anyone who hurries makes mistakes that then have to be corrected.

I believe both are true. Pressure created by structure is real, and denying it would be cynical. But part of it only arises from the way we react to it. The dentist can do this because he has the freedom to do so. Managers help decide whether others have that freedom.

The courage to check your own direction

This takes courage from leaders: to check their own direction before they raise the pressure.

Are our assumptions still correct?
Do we understand the market and our customers?
Is our offer convincing?
Are we putting resources on the right priorities?
Do we measure the benefit we create, or only whether we meet internal targets?

Reviewing a strategy often means taking a critical look at your own earlier decisions. Anyone who draws credibility from always being right will find this hard. This is where the circle closes with self-leadership.

My principle here: for me, business success, performance orientation and humanity are not opposites. Metrics should help us understand reality, not hide the weaknesses of a strategy.

Good leadership does not always drive people faster in a given direction. It first makes sure the direction is right.

Looking for someone to blame, building enemy images

In change processes I see the same pattern again and again. Departments assign each other roles: one is seen as the cause of all problems, one sees itself as the victim of bad decisions, one steps in as the rescuer.

Psychology knows this as the drama triangle, developed by Stephen Karpman: victim, perpetrator, rescuer. The model helps us understand patterns of conflict and communication. It is not a tool for putting people into boxes. Such labels are exactly part of the problem.

In a company, it sounds like this:

IT does not understand the business.
Management does not know the reality.
The departments block everything.
The external service provider is to blame.

Complex situations turn into simple stories of blame. They secure one's own position and lower the willingness to take responsibility for the whole.

I also notice that outrage attracts attention, on social media often more than a balanced argument. I see something similar in organizations: problems are personalized, groups are declared obstacles, and issues are reduced to opposites.

In the short term this brings approval. In the long term it costs trust. Through their language, leaders shape whether a conflict gets resolved or escalates.

It must be possible to name responsibility, and mistakes must not be played down. That is something different from permanent enemy images. For me, self-leadership also means recognizing your own reactions and not turning every outrage into action right away.

Not every provocation needs an answer, and not every conflict needs a winner. A dear colleague says in such a situation: "God gave us the ability to listen selectively." In our relationships, overhearing is often very helpful.

In my consulting work, I therefore often ask this question:

What do we ourselves contribute to the situation that we criticize in others?

It is uncomfortable. But it opens up room to act.

Leadership is what people see

Strategy papers, mission statements and value catalogs are full of trust, innovation and collaboration. But employees do not judge a culture by these. They judge it by what they experience with their leaders:

What happens when a project fails?
How is criticism handled?
Are uncomfortable truths spoken?
Do leaders stick to the values they expect from others?

I wish for CEOs and managing directors who embody their strategy. Not a perfectly staged brand, but visible consistency between words and actions: being present, listening, explaining decisions, facing critical questions. This often has more effect than a hundred pages of communication.

Visibility alone is not enough. What matters is not how often someone communicates, but whether statements and decisions fit together.

Young people ask about impact

In mentoring with younger employees, I hear the same question again and again: "What impact can I have here?" Three questions sit behind it:

Why am I here?
What difference does my work make?
Where can I take responsibility?

To me, this is not impatience or an unrealistic expectation. It is the wish to make a meaningful contribution. Of course, this is not true only for younger people. Everyone needs meaning, recognition and a sense of self-efficacy. But people who are new look for orientation early on.

A workplace, a job description and a career path are not enough for this. We also need to be able to explain why the work matters.

This does not require big projects. Often it is enough to have the chance to help shape something, to bring in your own idea and to see what it achieves.

People do not stay only because of their tasks, but because they feel that their contribution matters.

Food for thought: Gerald Hüther, "Etwas mehr Hirn, bitte: Eine Einladung zur Wiederentdeckung der Freude am eigenen Denken und der Lust am gemeinsamen Gestalten".

The invisible organisation and why mentoring helps

Alongside the formal organisation with its org chart and processes, there is almost always an informal one: personal networks, long-standing relationships, unwritten rules and people who help decide without a title.

It is not bad in itself. It can spread knowledge and speed up decisions. It becomes a problem when it stays opaque, contradicts the official responsibilities or shuts out newcomers.

New employees know their tasks, but not how decisions are actually made. They know whom they report to, but not who has real influence in practice. This creates uncertainty and frustration.

This is where I see the value of mentoring. An experienced mentor helps people read the organisation, build relationships and make sense of the unwritten rules. The point is not to learn political games or to accept opaque power, but to become able to act.

Mentoring should therefore not be an offer for a few selected talents. It should be a deliberately used tool of HR and organisational development.

Good mentoring does more than shorten onboarding. It opens the door to the real organisation.

AI makes human leadership more important

AI can now support or partly take over much of what once required expert knowledge, analysis and experience. This changes the role of leaders.

When information is quickly available and analyses are produced automatically, an information advantage alone loses value. What matters more is putting things in context, taking responsibility for decisions and guiding people through uncertainty.

AI can show options, organize information and spot patterns. It cannot take on organizational or moral responsibility.

That is why we need more self-reflection, critical thinking and judgment. And when we introduce AI, we should not stop at the question of tools. We should talk about how tasks, responsibility, skills and collaboration change.

The future does not automatically belong to those who use the most AI, but to those who combine technology with judgment and responsible leadership.

For further reading: Matthias Strolz, "Homo Universus".

Independence instead of dependence

One of the biggest tasks for leaders is to let go of control.

If you decide everything yourself, you become a bottleneck.
If you dictate every solution, you take away others' chance to learn problem solving.
If you use information as a tool of power, you make collaboration harder.

What stepping in costs

A friend who is a CIO told me how he reflects on this with his CFO. He is not happy with his team's decision. But if he reverses the result, he questions the team he put together deliberately himself, and with it his own decision.

There is also what happens during implementation: with every problem, the team reminds him that it had proposed something else, but he insisted on his own solution.

What I like about this example is that it does not offer a recipe but makes the costs visible. If you step in, you own the result. If you want to let go, you must first have trusted the team and your own choice of people.

Leadership that does not make itself indispensable

Good leadership does not make itself indispensable. It creates conditions in which others act independently and responsibly:

with clear goals, roles and room for decisions
with trust
with tolerance for other ways of doing things
with the ability to learn from mistakes without giving up responsibility

You can also recognize a good leader by how well people work without their constant intervention.

Self-organization needs self-leadership: what I learn from Holacracy

There are many demands: flatten hierarchies, delegate responsibility, give employees more freedom. I saw what this looks like in practice at a company that has successfully introduced a holacratic model.

It works by the principles of Holacracy, largely developed by Brian Robertson, with rules set out in the Holacracy Constitution. Instead of a pure management hierarchy, there are clearly defined roles, responsibilities, decision-making powers and self-organized circles.

The idea behind it: decisions are made where responsibility and knowledge sit.

Freedom does not come from abolishing rules

Self-organization is often confused with giving up leadership and structure. In my example, the opposite was closer to the truth: the roles and the rules for changing them are described in great detail.

As a result, the structure does not depend solely on the authority of individual managers. The goal is not less responsibility, but a clearer distribution of it. This can speed up decisions and reduce dependencies.

Self-leadership becomes a daily requirement

In traditional hierarchies, a lot can be passed upward: escalate decisions, have conflicts resolved, have priorities set for you. In a self-organized structure, this works only to a limited degree.

You have to understand your own role, decide, share the consequences, handle feedback and work through conflicts yourself. It is harder to hide behind hierarchy or unclear responsibilities.

This is where I see the link to self-leadership: self-organization does not make it unnecessary, it makes it essential in everyday work.

A culture that sorts itself is not automatically a good culture

In this company, I see a self-regulating effect. People who like to work independently, take responsibility and collaborate openly find good conditions.

People who expect clear instructions, prefer to pass responsibility upward or struggle with transparent feedback sometimes reorient their careers on their own.

I find this interesting, but I do not want to gloss over it: problematic organizations also lead people to leave voluntarily. What matters is why someone leaves.

Does their way of working not fit self-directed collaboration?
Or does someone feel overwhelmed, excluded or unsupported?

Only in the first case is self-selection the expression of a culture that is lived consciously. Good self-organization still needs fair conditions, psychological safety, transparent conflict resolution and the willingness to question your own culture.

Less hierarchy does not automatically mean less power

Self-organized companies also have personal interests, conflicts and informal power. Experience, expertise, networks and communication skills still influence who gets heard.

A constitution makes decision-making powers more transparent, but it does not prevent informal power from emerging. Rules and personal maturity belong together: a good structure can support desired behavior, but it does not replace self-reflection and a sense of responsibility.

What I take from this

Leadership does not have to be organized through hierarchy and control. You can design organizations so that responsibility lies with those who decide and who directly experience the consequences.

Leadership then means less making decisions for others, and more giving direction, enabling collaboration and creating conditions.

Mentoring becomes more important here, because self-responsibility does not arise just because it is written in a constitution. People have to learn to deal with freedom to decide, conflict and uncertainty. This applies especially to new employees, who also have to understand the culture and the rules of the game.

I do not see Holacracy as the best model for everyone. Not every company, industry or type of work is equally suited to it. But the example shows what becomes possible when structure, responsibilities and lived culture fit together.

A good organization does not make people dependent on leadership. It creates the conditions for people to take responsibility, become effective together and strengthen each other's development.

My seven principles

Lead yourself before you lead others. Anyone who wants to lead others should first know themselves: what drives them and how they react when things get tight. This shapes a leadership style more than any method.
Understand before you change. Clarify the causes first: structures, informal relationships, incentives, culture.
Responsibility instead of blame. Raise problems openly, but do not build lasting enemy images.
Orientation instead of blind faith in goals. Goals help you decide. They must not stop you from reacting to something new.
Credibility instead of staging. Leadership comes from values that are lived, not from mission statements and presentations.
Impact instead of busyness. People should understand what contribution they make.
Development instead of dependence. I want to enable people to reflect, decide and take responsibility themselves.

My six development fields

The fields are not separate methods. They work together.

Field	What it is about
Self-Leadership (leading yourself)	Self-reflection, values, ability to decide, dealing with emotions and uncertainty
Human Leadership (leading people)	Trust, empathy, communication, credibility, encouraging independence
Organizational Leadership (understanding organizations)	Culture, informal power, incentives, silos, self-organization, decision processes
Future Leadership (shaping the future)	AI, digital transformation, adaptability, lifelong learning
Purpose & Impact (meaning and effect)	Orientation, motivation, a visible contribution
Sustainable Performance (staying productive over time)	healthy working conditions, sensible priorities, realistic demands

My vision: a working world in which people can grow

I want organizations

in which people succeed with each other, not against each other
in which goals give direction without blocking change
in which leaders do not just name their values but live them
in which conflicts are raised openly without turning into enemy images
in which young people learn early what their contribution is, and experienced people pass on knowledge and keep learning themselves
in which strategies can be questioned without it being seen as weakness
in which success is not paid for with constant overload
in which technology extends human abilities instead of reducing people to productivity

I do not believe that another management model, a new organization chart or new software can achieve this on its own. It takes a different understanding of leadership:

less ego, more responsibility
less blame, more self-reflection
less control, more trust
less staging, more credibility

The most important transformation is not about our technologies, but about how we treat ourselves and each other.

A look ahead: a Monday in 2035

I am often described as a visionary. So I do not want to only say what goes wrong today, but also show where I am looking.

Imagine a company with 800 employees on an ordinary Monday. The quarterly goal still stands, but the team that accepted it three months ago openly swapped it for a better one on Friday, because the market had turned. Nobody had to justify themselves for it, and nobody loses a bonus because of it.

Over the weekend, an AI analyzed the figures and prepared three options. The managing director reads them, asks the people affected and decides. She explains her decision in two sentences and says what she does not know.

A new colleague is sitting with her mentor in her second week. She has never needed an organization chart to know whom to call. When bonuses are awarded, what counts is whether departments made each other better, not only who reached their own number.

In this company, overload is a warning sign for the strategy and not a sign of commitment. And when something goes wrong, the first question is not "Who did this?" but "What made this possible?".

This is not a utopia. I have seen every single element of it work somewhere, for example responsibility close to the decision-makers in the company I described above. What is missing is getting them together, and that starts with leaders who begin with themselves.

What this means for my work

In consulting, mentoring and coaching, my focus is on how people, leaders and organisations become more effective.

In mentoring, I share experience and help people understand complex connections.
In coaching, the focus is on clarity, on recognising your own patterns and on decisions you make yourself.

I do not offer ready-made recipes for success, because everyone brings their own story, strengths and goals.

Sometimes the problem does not lie with the individual but in the organisation: conflicting goals, unclear responsibility, a missing strategy, a culture that blocks change. Then it is part of my work to address that too.

The person does not always have to adapt to the organisation. Sometimes the organisation has to learn to change.

I do not promise simple answers to complex questions. I rely on honest reflection, critical debate and practical experience.

My guiding principle

Leadership starts with myself.

Those who understand themselves make more conscious decisions.
Those who take responsibility have less need to look for someone to blame.
Those who trust make development possible.
Those who review their own strategy can change course in time.

This is where I see the future of leadership and the core of my work. This is my manifesto.

Literature and further food for thought

The following works look at self-leadership, human development, responsibility, social change and the future of our working world from different perspectives. They offer valuable food for thought for my personal leadership philosophy.

Bauer, Joachim (2015): Selbststeuerung: Die Wiederentdeckung des freien Willens. Karl Blessing Verlag, München. ISBN: 978-3-89667-539-2.
Dürr, Hans-Peter (2009): Warum es ums Ganze geht: Neues Denken für eine Welt im Umbruch. Herausgegeben von Dietlind Klemm und Frauke Liesenborghs. oekom verlag, München. ISBN: 978-3-86581-173-8.
Hüther, Gerald (2015): Etwas mehr Hirn, bitte: Eine Einladung zur Wiederentdeckung der Freude am eigenen Denken und der Lust am gemeinsamen Gestalten. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen. ISBN: 978-3-525-40464-5.
Strolz, Matthias (2026): Homo Universus: Unser Menschsein neu entdecken und leben. Edition Platin. ISBN: 978-3-903538-41-2.
Mahlodji, Ali (2026): (Null) Bock auf Arbeit: Wie du wirst, was morgen zählt. GABAL Verlag, Offenbach. ISBN: 978-3-96739-269-2.

For me, these books are starting points for thought. The principles and beliefs described in my leadership manifesto are based on my own professional experience, observations and conclusions.

The Future of Leadership Starts With Ourselves