How Leaders Become Who They Are

How Leaders Become Who They Are: Values, Power, and Moral Formation

Leadership failures are rarely spontaneous. Nor are moments of principled courage. When leaders disappoint, or when they surprise us with restraint, clarity, or moral resolve, we often speak as if something new has emerged. In reality, very little in leadership is invented at the moment of decision. Most of what we later praise or condemn was already there, waiting.

Leaders do not arrive at positions of authority as blank slates. By the time power is conferred, values have already been formed, reinforced, tested, or quietly compromised. What authority does is not to create values, but to expose them.

This raises a foundational question that is too often overlooked in leadership discourse: how do leaders become who they are?

Values are formed long before power is exercised

Much of contemporary leadership commentary focuses on behavior at the point of crisis, what a leader did or failed to do when it mattered most. While such analysis is understandable, it is incomplete. Decisions made under pressure are rarely the product of fresh moral reasoning. They are far more often the expression of deeply internalized patterns of judgment.

Values are shaped incrementally, through a convergence of early experiences, institutional environments, cultural norms, and formative moments of consequence. Childhood socialization, educational settings, professional mentorship, and early career incentives all leave their mark. Over time, these influences settle into a moral posture, sometimes examined, often unexamined, that guides how leaders interpret responsibility, authority, and obligation.

This is why leadership values tend to appear stable, even stubborn, over time. Leaders may adapt strategies, rhetoric, or alliances, but their core instincts, what they prioritize, what they tolerate, what they justify, are remarkably consistent.

Education and institutions as value-forming environments

Institutions play a particularly powerful role in shaping leadership values, not because of what they explicitly teach, but because of what they reward. Every organization communicates values through its incentives, its silences, and its consequences.

Educational institutions, for example, do not merely transmit knowledge; they socialize future leaders into particular understandings of success, legitimacy, and authority. Similarly, early professional environments often teach aspiring leaders what is negotiable and what is not, whether integrity is prized or merely proclaimed, whether dissent is encouraged or punished, and whether outcomes matter more than processes.

Over time, leaders internalize these signals. What begins as adaptation can harden into conviction. What begins as survival can become rationalization.

By the time individuals ascend to senior leadership roles, much of their moral orientation has already been rehearsed.

The myth of values as situational choices

There is a persistent belief, particularly in popular leadership literature, that values are something leaders choose in the moment. This view suggests that ethical leadership is primarily a matter of resolve: that when the moment comes, good leaders simply decide to do the right thing.

As comforting as it may sound, this narrative is misleading.

In practice, values operate less like switches and more like lenses. They influence how leaders perceive options, risks, and responsibilities before conscious deliberation begins. Under pressure, leaders do not rise to the level of their aspirations; they revert to the level of their formation.

This helps explain why crises so often reveal, rather than transform, leadership character. Stress does not usually produce new values. It exposes existing ones.

Formation versus performance

Modern leadership culture places heavy emphasis on performance, on visibility, confidence, and decisiveness. Yet performance can obscure formation. Leaders may perform competence while quietly lacking moral clarity; they may project conviction while internally operating on borrowed values.

This distinction matters because performance can be learned quickly, while formation takes time. Organizations that focus exclusively on leadership skills, without attending to values formation, risk elevating individuals who are technically capable but morally underprepared.

Conversely, leaders whose values are well-formed but whose performance is imperfect often grow into authority with credibility and trust. Over time, followers are remarkably adept at distinguishing between rehearsed leadership and grounded leadership.

What Is at Stake

Across public, private, and civic institutions, trust in leadership is under strain. Scandals, reversals, and ethical failures are frequently attributed to individual misconduct or situational pressures. But such explanations rarely address the deeper issue: the long arc of values formation that preceded the moment of failure.

If leadership development is to be taken seriously, it must move upstream. It must concern itself not only with what leaders do, but with how they become the kind of people who make certain actions feel acceptable, or unthinkable.

This is not a call for moral perfection, nor a denial of complexity. It is an argument for realism. Leaders are shaped long before they lead. Institutions participate in that shaping, whether intentionally or not.

Looking ahead

This column will return repeatedly to the question of values formation, not as an abstract ethical exercise, but as a practical inquiry into leadership, responsibility, and trust. Future reflections will examine what happens to values when leaders acquire power, how institutions reinforce or erode moral clarity, and why accountability mechanisms often fail to correct value drift.

For now, it is enough to begin with this recognition: leadership outcomes are rarely accidental. They are the visible result of invisible formation.

To understand leadership, we must first understand how leaders become who they are.

This essay first appeared in my LinkedIn weekly newsletter, Leadership & Values.

Babatunde Oladele is a doctoral researcher in Leadership focused on values-based leadership, institutional trust, and moral authority in public and organizational life. His work examines how leaders form values over time and how those values influence decision-making, legitimacy, and accountability under pressure. He writes Leadership & Values, a weekly column on leadership across political, civic, educational, and organizational contexts.