Episode 47 Why Leadership Repeats Itself, and How to Break the Pattern (Recursive Leadership Theory)
Welcome back to the People-Forward Leadership™ Podcast. Today it's just you and me, and I want to talk about something I've been building for over twenty years, even though I only gave it a name this past year.
Let me start with a pattern you've seen. A new leader arrives. Maybe promoted from within, maybe brought in from the outside. They announce a new day. New vision, new priorities, new energy. And within eighteen months, one of two things has happened. Either the organization has quietly absorbed them, and everything looks remarkably like it did before they arrived. Or they've pushed so hard against the organization that people have gone into resistance, apathy, or the exits. And sometimes that leader misreads the exodus as progress, because the people who disagreed are gone.
Why does this keep happening? Why do smart, capable, well-intentioned leaders keep running into the same wall? That question sent me back to something I first argued in graduate school more than twenty years ago, and it became the foundation of a theory I published this summer called Recursive Leadership Theory. Today I want to walk you through what it is, why I created it, how it connects to everything we do here around People-Forward Leadership™, and most importantly, what you can actually do with it.
Ok, so, let’s start with the theory and if you’re the type that geeks on theoretical concepts, you’ll enjoy this part. Most leadership theory treats leadership as an individual property. Traits, styles, competencies, behaviors. The leader acts, the organization responds. It's a straight line from the person at the top to the outcomes at the bottom.
Recursive Leadership Theory makes a different claim. Leadership is not a straight line. It's a loop.
Watch how it runs. Leaders shape the systems around them. The meeting structures, the decision rights, the unwritten rules about who speaks and who waits, what gets rewarded and what gets quietly punished. Over time those systems harden. They stop feeling like choices someone made and start feeling like "how we do things here." And then the loop closes, because those hardened systems start shaping the people inside them, including the next generation of leaders. People learn what the system teaches. They rise by mastering it. And when they finally get the corner office, they reproduce the very patterns that produced them.
That's the recursion. The pattern copies itself with nobody driving. Nobody decided that meetings would run this way forever, or that candor would be dangerous, or that development conversations would always lose to operational fires. The system decided, because a system left unattended will always reproduce itself.
And here's what that explains about our new leader from the cold open. When they tried to change the organization, they made two mistakes at once. They tried to change other people without first changing themselves, and they tried to change in a straight line, announcement to compliance, without any feedback loop. But you cannot beat a loop with a line. The system has been running its recursion for years, sometimes decades. It's stronger than any single announcement, any single reorg, any single town hall.
I saw this play out in an organization I worked with over three years, and I write about it in the paper as a field observation. What convinced me the loop is real wasn't watching a leader fail. It was watching the system respond to a leader who understood she was inside the loop, and who worked with the recursion instead of against it. We'll come back to her.
One more thing about the theory before I tell you where it came from. The loop is not deterministic. That matters to me enormously. This is not a theory that says culture is destiny, or that internally promoted leaders can only ever repeat the past. Any leader, raised inside the system or brought in from outside, can change the system if they're committed. The theory just tells you where change has to start, and it's probably not where you think.
Now with everything (as we’ve seen in the Marvel universe) there’s an origin story, and that’s no different from this theory I created this summer. It actually started with identity.
More than twenty years ago, in my master's work at Fielding Graduate University, I made an argument that most identity development theory had a singular flaw. Almost all of it was written in stages. Step one, step two, step three, arrive. And my premise was that identity doesn't develop in steps. It develops iteratively. You revisit earlier stages. Sometimes you revert to them, depending on your circumstances and context. Something new enters your life, and it forces you to reexamine positions you thought were settled, and you revise them into something more evolved. Development isn't a staircase. It's a spiral you keep traveling.
I believed in that idea enough to build a research proposal around it, and I had the extraordinary experience of taking a course with Dr. William Cross, Jr., the founder of Black identity theory, and sharing the idea with him. He agreed to join the grant proposal to test it. The proposal was rejected. And I did what a lot of young scholars do with a rejected idea. I let the study die, and I turned my attention to organizational systems.
But the idea never actually died. It found it’s way into my practice, when I built my executive coaching work, the engine of it was always that same iterative, self-reflexive process. Helping leaders overcome fear, gain confidence, master their emotions, step fully into leadership, all of it ran on the practice of examining yourself, encountering something new, and revising who you are into a more evolved version. That practice became the first pillar of the People-Forward Leadership™ framework. Leader Awareness. The Mirror.
The moment it all came together was a summer I spent at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, in ongoing conversations with faculty and other doctorate-prepared business owners. Those conversations pushed me to ask whether the thing I'd been practicing for two decades had a theoretical home. So I did what my training taught me to do. I went into the literature. And what the review revealed was that this iterative mechanism, the loop between leaders and systems and back again, was still essentially unexplored as a formal theory of leadership. I realized I was standing in the same place I'd stood twenty years earlier with identity theory, looking at a field organized around stages and lines, holding an argument about loops. Except this time, I didn't let it die. This summer I published Recursive Leadership Theory as a working paper on SSRN, with six formal propositions. It's the theoretical grounding underneath everything my firm does.
I'm sharing the origin story for a reason beyond the story itself. The theory was born from self-reflexivity, and self-reflexivity is also where the theory says all real change begins. The content and the origin match. That's not an accident.
So let’s get back to the change pathway and how it connects to my people-forward leadership™ framework, with some practical demonstrations. If the loop describes what happens when recursion runs unattended, what does it look like to take hold of the recursion on purpose? This is where the theory becomes practice, and where it connects directly to the three pillars of People-Forward Leadership™. Think of it as three expanding circles.
The first circle is you. Change starts with a self-reflexive process. Who am I as a leader, honestly? What patterns am I running, and where did I learn them? Who do I want to be instead? Notice this is diagnosis of yourself before it's ever a diagnosis of your organization, because the theory tells us you are not standing outside the system pointing at it. You are inside the loop. Some of what needs to change is running through you. In the framework, this is Leader Awareness. The Mirror.
When I think about this circle, I think about my conversation with Derik Calhoun, Chief Transportation Officer at BART, back in Episode 43. Derik told me about his daily mirror practice, literally beginning with the man in the mirror before he leads anyone else. And he said “that systems move organizations, but people move systems.” That's the recursion, spoken by a practitioner who's never read my paper. He instinctively knows the system won't move unless a person moves first, and that the first person is him.
The second circle is your team. Once you've begun shifting yourself, you don't announce it to five thousand people. You test it in the room closest to you. You reflect the change in your immediate team through an iterative learning loop. Try the new behavior, watch what happens, get honest feedback, adjust, try again. Small, repeated, visible. This is where the change either takes root or gets exposed as performance. In the framework, this is Empowered Ecosystems. The Multiplier.
Shakira Naraine, Chief People and Culture Officer at the TTC, gave me the best description of this circle I've heard. She defined psychological safety as how comfortable people feel telling the truth, and she said it gets built one small interaction at a time. One small interaction at a time. That is an iterative loop. Not a policy, not a poster, not a values rollout. A repeated pattern, run by a leader, until the team starts running it back. She even closes her days by catching people doing something right, every single day. That's a leader deliberately seeding a pattern and letting repetition do the work that announcements never do.
The third circle is the organization. As the new pattern holds in your team, you expand it outward in wider iterative loops, team by team, structure by structure, until the habits shift and new cultural norms are established. The behaviors stop being "what the boss is trying" and become "how we do things here." You're using the very mechanism that hardened the old system, recursion, to harden a better one. In the framework, this is Adaptive Continuous Learning. The Magnifier.
Yvonne Lopez-Diaz from HNTB captured the mindset this circle requires when she told me leaders have to see the system behind the system. Most leaders see the org chart and the strategy deck. Yvonne is pointing at the loop underneath, the one that's actually producing your outcomes and your future leaders. And her charge to build talent, not just hire it, is the third circle in action, because a leader who builds talent is deliberately shaping what the system will reproduce after they're gone.
I'll add two quick touches from this season, because once you see the loop, you see it everywhere. When Nikki Freeney described how MV Transportation introduces new technology by first telling the story of why, she was describing how a new pattern travels through the third circle. Narrative is one of the main vehicles recursion rides on. And when Tiffany Gunter said her standard at SMART is to fix it and fix it for good, that's the anchoring test. A fix that holds after you stop watching it means the loop has taken over the maintenance for you.
One clarification, because I want to be precise about how the pieces fit. The three-step loop I described earlier, leaders shape systems, systems harden, systems shape people, that's recursion unattended. It's diagnosis. The three circles are recursion taken hold of. That's intervention. They're two expressions of one claim, that leadership is recursive rather than individual. People-Forward Leadership™ is the practice built on that claim, and Recursive Leadership Theory is the theory that explains why the practice works.
And remember the leader I mentioned from my three-year field observation? She was a succession promotion, raised inside the very system she inherited. By the old assumptions, she should have been the most likely person to repeat the past. She wasn't, because she began with the first circle. She knew she wanted to lead differently, she started with herself, ran the work through her senior team, and let it expand. Succession isn't the problem. Skipping the circles is the problem.
Alright. You know I don't do information without application. Three moves. One today, one this week, one this month.
Today, run one loop trace on yourself. Take ten minutes, a notebook, one question. Name one pattern in your team that frustrates you, and then trace it honestly back to something you do, tolerate, or reward. Maybe your team doesn't bring you bad news early, and when you trace it, you find the last three times someone did, your face did the talking before your words caught up. You don't have to fix anything today. The move is simply to locate yourself inside the loop, because the leader who can't find themselves in the pattern has no leverage over the pattern. That's the first circle, and it costs you ten minutes and some humility.
This week, seed one pattern in your immediate team, out loud. Pick one behavior connected to what you found today, small and specific. Then tell your team what you're changing and ask them to hold you to it. Something like, I've realized I respond to problems in a way that's teaching you to bring them to me late, so this week I'm going to ask questions before I react, and I want you to tell me when I don't. Saying it out loud does two things. It converts your private intention into a team-level feedback loop, and it models the self-reflexive move for everyone watching. That's the second circle. One behavior, one team, one week of repetitions.
This month, redesign one hardened structure. Find one recurring structure you control, a standing meeting, a review process, a report, an agenda, that everyone runs on autopilot. Ask three questions of it. What behavior is this structure actually teaching people? Who decided it would work this way, and does anyone even remember? What would it look like if it taught the behavior we say we want? Then change it, tell people why, and hold the change for the full month, because a structure has to survive repetition before the system accepts it as the new normal. That's the third circle, and structures are where new patterns go to become culture.
Ten minutes today. One spoken commitment this week. One structure this month. That's the recursion, taken hold of, at a scale any leader can start at any level. You don't need permission, a budget, or a title change. You need to go first, because the whole theory comes down to that. The system will keep reproducing itself until somebody inside it decides to reproduce something better.
If you want to go deeper, the full working paper on Recursive Leadership Theory is published on SSRN, and I'll put the link in the show notes. If you're a researcher, a practitioner, or a leader who reads this and sees your own organization in it, I'd genuinely love to hear from you.
If this episode named something you've been living through, share it with a leader who's about to walk into a new role, before they announce a new day. And you can always reach me and my team at thriveaxisgroup.com or hello@thriveaxisgroup.com.
Until next time, keep leading people forward. See you soon.
