What Makes Leaders Exceptional (Hint: It's Not Just Experience)
- Brainz Magazine
- Dec 1
- 7 min read
Updated: Dec 3
Jonathan Rozenblit is a Professional Certified Coach (ICF-PCC), author, and podcast host who specializes in helping corporate professionals discover and develop their unique practice of leadership. His focus is on the inner work of leadership, creating conditions for people to be, bring, and do their best.
Many leaders hold the belief that years of experience automatically enhance their ability to show up for others. They trust that time in role, challenges faced, and problems solved naturally evolve their presence and impact. But years of showing up in the same way might just be the same patterns repeated, the same blind spots maintained, and the same impact on others, unexamined. What actually makes leaders exceptional isn't their accumulated experiences of showing up, it's their commitment to a practice that most overlook, systematically refining how they show up through reflection that is both continual and cumulative.
Experience alone doesn't automatically improve how you show up as a leader.
That's an uncomfortable truth for those of us who've spent years navigating challenges, building teams, and solving problems. We assume each difficult conversation, each crisis managed, each success delivered naturally evolves how we show up. But here's what I've observed both in my own journey and in coaching dozens of leaders, only some people with experience have transformed how they show up, becoming more intentional, more aware, more effective at creating conditions for others to thrive. Others? They show up the same way they did in year one, and after, say, 10 years, just have more confidence in the patterns that may not even be serving them.
The difference isn't in what they've learned about leadership or the challenges they've faced. The difference is in whether they developed a systematic practice of reflecting on how they show up, a practice that is both continual and cumulative. Without this practice, years pass, but your presence remains unchanged. Your responses stay automatic. Your impact on others continues unexamined and unrefined.
Most leaders unconsciously hope their experience is improving how they show up. The exceptional leaders moved beyond hope to a systematic understanding of their growth.
The two dimensions of leadership growth
The first dimension: Continual reflection
You might already reflect on how you show up. Maybe you think about your presence after difficult conversations. Perhaps you consider your impact after team meetings. You might even have a coach who helps you process how you handled challenging situations.
But here's what I've noticed, if these reflections don't build on each other, if each insight stands alone, you're only working with one dimension. Leaders who only have continual reflection have the same realizations repeatedly. They notice they need to slow down their reactions, be more present when listening, or bring different energy to their team. They commit to showing up differently. And then twelve months later, they have the exact same realization again.
Their reflection is continual but not cumulative. They're noticing their patterns without evolving them.
The second dimension: Cumulative learning
Cumulative learning means each reflection builds on the last. You're not just collecting isolated insights, you're connecting them into a deeper understanding. You reference past reflections. You track patterns over time. You build wisdom rather than repeatedly discovering the same truths.
Without this cumulative dimension, even powerful insights like that exceptional feedback session that revealed your impact on others, that coaching conversation that shifted how you see your presence, that moment of clarity about how your energy affects your team, fade. These insights about how you show up disappear when you return to daily pressures because they're not connected to an ongoing practice of building understanding.
The power of both dimensions together
When you make your reflection both continual and cumulative, something different happens. Your regular practice (continual) creates the data points about how you show up. Your learning approach (cumulative) connects them into evolved presence.
You stop noticing the same things about your presence repeatedly and start seeing deeper layers. Each reflection adds to your growing understanding of your patterns. You create an upward spiral in refining how you show up, not a circle where you keep returning to the same patterns, but a spiral where even when you revisit familiar situations, you're showing up from a higher level of awareness and intentionality.
The exceptional leaders don't just reflect regularly. They build systematically on what they learn, creating compound growth in how they show up.
What this means for how you show up
How you show up as a leader isn't one thing, it's multiple dimensions working together. Your intention for a meeting. The mindset you bring to a conversation. Your beliefs about a situation. The emotional state you carry. The language you choose. The behaviors you exhibit. The presence and energy you radiate.
These dimensions flow from internal to external. What's happening inside you shapes what others experience. And these dimensions either cascade from one to the next or arise all at once, depending on who you are and the situation you're in.
Without systematic reflection on these dimensions, you might never see the patterns. You might notice you got frustrated in a meeting, but not connect it to the belief you held walking in. You might realize a conversation went poorly, but not see how your energy affected it from the start. You show up, things happen, you move on, but you never really understand the mechanics of your own presence.
With systematic reflection that's both continual and cumulative, everything changes. You start seeing how your intention shapes your mindset, how your emotional state influences your language, how your presence impacts others' ability to contribute. You begin to understand not just that you showed up a certain way, but why and, more importantly, how to intentionally evolve it.
The leaders who become exceptional don't just accumulate experiences of showing up. They systematically examine and refine each dimension of how they show up, building their awareness meeting by meeting, interaction by interaction, until showing up intentionally becomes their practiced default.
Why most leaders plateau
Treating development as an event
Most leaders, in my experience, approach their development of how they show up as a series of events. A workshop on executive presence. A book about authentic leadership. Feedback from a colleague about their impact. Each event might generate insight about how they show up, but without a system to connect these insights, they remain isolated moments of awareness rather than building blocks of transformation.
The result? Years later, they're still working on the same aspects of how they show up. Still getting the same feedback. Still surprising themselves with the same reactive patterns they thought they'd addressed.
Results blindness
Here's what I find particularly dangerous. When leaders get the results they want, they rarely examine how they showed up to get them. The project succeeded, the team delivered, the crisis was averted, so why reflect on presence, energy, or impact?
But what if those results came with hidden costs? Costs to team morale, to psychological safety, to future willingness to take risks or share concerns. These costs might not show up immediately. They accumulate quietly. A team member who stops speaking up, creativity that slowly diminishes, engagement that gradually erodes. By the time these costs become visible, you might not even connect them to how you showed up months or years earlier.
Without systematic reflection, you could be unknowingly trading short-term results for long-term potential.
The compound effect
Each time you show up without reflection, you reinforce whatever patterns you're carrying, helpful or not. Each uninspected interaction deepens the groove of your default presence. Years of this compound into what feels like "just who you are as a leader" when really, it's just who you've practiced being without conscious intent.
The leaders who never develop a systematic practice of reflection don't just miss opportunities to grow. They actively reinforce patterns that might be limiting their impact, their team's potential, and their own fulfillment in leadership.
Making the choice
Start with these questions
When did you last deliberately reflect on how you showed up in a difficult situation? Not just what happened or what you'll do differently next time, but how your presence, energy, and mindset affected the outcome?
What patterns do you notice in how you show up that you've never really examined? The way you enter a room when stressed? The energy you bring to Monday mornings? The presence you carry into difficult conversations?
How would you know if you're becoming better at how you show up, not just more experienced at getting things done?
If you can't answer these questions with specificity, you're likely hoping experience is making you exceptional rather than knowing it is.
The decision point
You can continue accumulating experiences, trusting that time will naturally evolve how you show up. You can keep showing up the way you always have, getting the results you've always gotten, never knowing what more might be possible.
Or you can choose to develop a systematic practice of reflection. One that's continual, regular enough to catch patterns before they calcify. And cumulative building of wisdom about your presence rather than repeatedly rediscovering the same insights.
You can remain unconscious about your impact, hoping you're creating the right conditions for others. Or you can become intentional about how you show up, knowing exactly how your presence enables or limits what's possible.
The leaders who become exceptional make this choice. They stop leaving their development to chance and start taking ownership of their evolution. They move from hoping to knowing. From repeating to refining. From plateau to continuous growth.
Which will you choose?
Want to continue this conversation?
If this article resonated with you and you'd like to explore how systematic reflection on how you show up could transform your leadership practice, consider subscribing to Leadership Practitioner on Substack.
There, I'll help you reflect on different aspects of your practice of leadership and offer you ways in which you can further develop it.
Read more from Jonathan Rozenblit
Jonathan Rozenblit, Professional Development Coach
Jonathan Rozenblit guides corporate professionals through their journey of discovering and developing their unique practice of leadership so that they can create conditions for themselves and others to be, bring, and do their best at work. Jonathan holds Professional Certified Coach credentials from the International Coaching Federation, is the co-creator of the Leadership Practitioner program, a program that equips individuals with practical tools to inspire trust and cultivate collaborative cultures where people can bring their best selves to work every day, co-host of the Leadership Practitioner podcast, and co-author of 'The Essential Leadership Practitioner: A Framework for Building a Meaningful Practice of Leadership'.
