When everyone is a CEO

But very few are ready to actually lead

One of the most uncomfortable lessons in leadership is discovering that the person you see in the mirror is not always the person others experience when they follow you.

In a time when titles like CEO, founder, and entrepreneur are increasingly common, that gap between identity and behaviour is becoming harder to ignore.

Leadership is defined by how others experience our decisions, our discipline, and our reliability when the stakes are real. Not by what we call ourselves.

One can claim a title, and still leave the seat vacant.

Scroll through any social platform today and you’ll see an impressive number of titles.

Founder.
CEO.
Entrepreneur.
Managing Director.

In a world where building something of your own has become more accessible than ever, titles have expanded accordingly. It is no longer unusual to meet someone in their twenties introducing themselves as the CEO of a startup or the founder MD of a company still taking shape.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this. Entrepreneurship is, after all, the courage to test an idea in the real world. Young founders often carry an energy and boldness that more seasoned professionals sometimes lose.

Ideas thrive in youthful environments, yes, but leadership is not the same thing as innovation. And that distinction is becoming increasingly important because while many people today carry leadership titles, far fewer exhibit the behavioural discipline that leadership actually requires.

The biological timeline we don’t talk about

There is a reason societies historically treated leadership as something that emerged with time rather than ambition.

The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for executive function—planning, impulse control, decision-making, and long-term judgement—does not fully develop until a person’s mid twenties.

This matters.

Because leadership, at its core, is the practice of executive function under pressure.

It requires the ability to:

• weigh competing priorities
• regulate emotion in high-stakes situations
• anticipate consequences
• maintain long-term direction while navigating short-term chaos

In other words, the very cognitive capacities that leadership depends on are still stabilising in a persons twenties.

That does not mean young people cannot lead. Don’t get me wrong.

But it does mean that holding responsibility for an entire ship navigating uncharted waters demands more than enthusiasm or ideas.

It demands the maturity of judgement.

The danger of unconscious leadership

What concerns me is not young leadership itself. It is unconscious leadership.

• Leadership without self-awareness.
• Leadership without discipline.
• Leadership without the habits that make others feel safe following you.

When those foundations are missing, the team often ends up absorbing the consequences. And those consequences, while they usually look mundane on the surface, are corrosive over time.

Things like:

• poor timekeeping
• slow or inconsistent responses
• ghosting behaviour carried into professional settings
• disorganised planning
• last-minute direction that forces teams into constant urgency

There is also a deeper pattern that appears.

• Leaders who struggle to make decisions.
• Leaders who offer feedback that sounds thoughtful but moves nothing forward.
• Leaders who cannot work independently and rely on their teams to compensate for their own lack of structure.

In these environments, the team spends more time stabilising the leader than executing the work. The ship still moves, but rarely with clear direction or anchoring point.

My own early lessons

I say this with humility because I too was once a young manager. And in hindsight, I can recognise that I had much to learn.

Where I struggled most was emotional regulation. I had not yet developed the maturity required to manage difficult situations without taking them personally.

But there were a few non-negotiables that shaped how my supervisors saw my potential;

• I always kept time. If you’re on time, you are late.
• I delivered what I said I would, when I said I would.
• I prepared before asking others to act.

These behaviours suggested that I was reliable, and reliability creates trust (inspite of how imperfect the person is). Trust is what allows more experienced leaders to give younger ones room to grow because they feel safe investing in them.

These same non-negotiable are the standards I hold myself to now in my freelance work. They are also the standards my clients experience when they work with me.

With age, motherhood, and decades of navigating complex environments, my executive functions—and emotional intelligence—are far more developed than they were in my twenties.

Which is precisely why I am selective about the work I accept.

Respect for time, clarity, and preparation is not negotiable in leadership and when those signs are absent, it usually reflects something deeper about how responsibility is perceived.

And leadership without responsibility is simply false branding.

The leaders we need

One of the hardest lessons in leadership is learning that how we see ourselves and how others experience us are rarely identical.

We tend to measure our intentions while others measure our impact.

We remember the effort we put in. Others remember whether the outcome was dependable.

This gap between mirror and perception is where leadership development truly begins.

Self-worth tells us we deserve the seat at the table.

Self-awareness asks whether we are actually serving the people sitting with us.

Both matter, but only one keeps the ship steady.

The future does not belong to the loudest founders or most decorated titles but to true leaders who combine;

• clarity with humility
• ambition with discipline
• and vision with reliability.

Young leaders with ideas should absolutely be encouraged, but ideas alone do not captain ships. Character does, and character takes time to develop.

Before asking whether we deserve to lead others, perhaps the better question is this:

Can the people around us trust us to be steady enough to guide them toward their own potential?

Titles answer quickly, true leadership considers their answer carefully.