Some time ago, I worked with a leader who was told she had “no leadership potential.”

The verdict came after a leadership assessment centre where more than 100 leaders at a similar level were assessed for future leadership potential. Over the course of one day, participants completed activities such as presentations, group discussions and other observed exercises.

At the end, she was assessed as having little leadership potential.

The problem?

I had worked with her for two years.

During that time, I watched her in action as she became the person others turned to when competing priorities needed untangling. She coordinated more than 100 senior leaders involved in a large-scale transformation program. People sought her out because she was approachable, organised and trusted.

Somehow, she managed to align multiple stakeholders, influence without authority and keep complex work moving forward across three General Managers with different needs and expectations.

It was leadership in action, even if it did not always look like leadership in the traditional sense.

So when I heard the assessment result, I found myself wondering:

• How can someone’s leadership capability be assessed in a single day when leadership itself is demonstrated day after day, month after month, and year after year?
• What had the assessment seen?
• And what had it missed?

Whether it’s in leadership assessment centres or other talent identification processes, it’s time we stepped back to examine how leadership is recognised.

Many of the qualities we associate with leadership are highly visible. They show up quickly and are easy to observe.

Other leadership capabilities are less obvious. They emerge through relationships, influence, judgement, trust and the ability to navigate complexity.

And those capabilities can be surprisingly easy to overlook.

Confidence Is More Visible Than Capability

One of the challenges in identifying leadership potential is that many of the capabilities that matter most are not immediately apparent.

Judgement reveals itself over time. Trust is built through countless interactions. Strategic thinking may only become obvious when its consequences unfold. The ability to navigate competing interests or bring people together around a shared outcome rarely announces itself loudly.

Confidence, on the other hand, is immediately visible. It shows up as verbal fluency, decisiveness, outspokenness and what is often labelled as executive presence.

When we are assessing leadership potential, we naturally gravitate towards what is easiest to observe. The problem is that what is easiest to observe is not always what matters most.

Confidence is more visible than capability. And organisations can sometimes mistake visibility for potential.

Martin Gutmann’s book The Unseen Leader explores how highly effective leaders and valuable contributions often go unnoticed in organisations. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic has written extensively about our tendency to mistake confidence for competence.

A question worth asking when identifying talent is:

𝘼𝙧𝙚 𝙬𝙚 𝙧𝙚𝙘𝙤𝙜𝙣𝙞𝙨𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙥𝙚𝙤𝙥𝙡𝙚 𝙬𝙝𝙤 𝙘𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙩𝙚 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙢𝙤𝙨𝙩 𝙫𝙖𝙡𝙪𝙚, 𝙤𝙧 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙥𝙚𝙤𝙥𝙡𝙚 𝙬𝙝𝙤 𝙘𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙩𝙚 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙨𝙩𝙧𝙤𝙣𝙜𝙚𝙨𝙩 𝙞𝙢𝙥𝙧𝙚𝙨𝙨𝙞𝙤𝙣?

When We Mistake Leadership Display for Leadership

The leader in the assessment centre was not lacking leadership capability.

And the assessment process was not measuring the wrong things. Communication, confidence, presentation skills and other visible capabilities do matter.

The problem arises when these observable capabilities become the primary indicators of leadership potential, causing other less visible capabilities to be overlooked.

The leader I worked with was highly effective, but much of her effectiveness came from capabilities that were difficult to observe in a short assessment process. She built trust across stakeholder groups, aligned competing agendas, influenced without authority and delivered outcomes through relationships.

Leadership researchers such as Hogan Assessments distinguish between leadership emergence and leadership effectiveness.

• Leadership emergence is about who gets noticed and perceived as leadership material.
• Leadership effectiveness is about who actually leads well over time.

Unfortunately, the two are not always the same.

The leader dismissed by the assessment centre helped me understand why. The qualities that made her effective were not the qualities most likely to be visible and recognised as leadership.

And I suspect she is not alone.

Leading in Complexity

This matters because the context of leadership has changed.

Leadership has often been associated with expertise, authority and decisiveness. Those qualities still matter, but today’s leaders are increasingly asked to work in situations where nobody has all the answers.

AI is accelerating access to information. Technical expertise can increasingly be augmented. Information-based answers are more abundant and easily accessed.

What remains distinctly human are qualities such as judgement, discernment, wisdom, empathy, trust-building and the ability to bring people together around a shared direction.

These qualities are rarely the loudest behaviours in a meeting. They may not stand out in a leadership assessment centre. Yet they are increasingly critical leadership capabilities.

Amy Elizabeth Fox and Nicholas Janni make this argument in Leading in Chaos. They suggest that many organisations continue to rely on leadership models developed for a more predictable era, while leaders are now being asked to navigate uncertainty, complexity and emergence.

In uncertain environments, confidence and certainty can be comforting. Yet confidence and certainty are not always reliable indicators of good leadership.

Some of the strongest leaders I have worked with have been willing to admit they don’t know everything, invite others to think together, and learn and adapt. It signals maturity, discernment and the capacity to lead through complexity without defaulting to performative confidence.

The future of leadership may depend less on who has the answers and more on who can navigate uncertainty and complexity without collapsing into the illusion of certainty and simple answers.

The Cost of Overlooking Capability

When capable leaders are repeatedly overlooked, the consequences extend beyond individual careers.

Leadership capability gaps widen as the context changes. Diversity of thought and style are lost or remain under-utilised. Talented people disengage, stop aspiring to leadership altogether or, worse, leave feeling undervalued.

This is a cost to organisational capability.

As workplaces become more complex, interconnected and uncertain, organisations need to expand the definition of what good leadership looks like.

Not everyone who looks like a leader will be an effective leader.

Perhaps the question organisations should be asking is:

𝙒𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙡𝙚𝙖𝙙𝙚𝙧𝙨𝙝𝙞𝙥 𝙘𝙖𝙥𝙖𝙗𝙞𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙚𝙨 𝙢𝙞𝙜𝙝𝙩 𝙬𝙚 𝙗𝙚 𝙢𝙞𝙨𝙨𝙞𝙣𝙜?

Because some of the most capable future leaders may not be the ones who appear most leader-like in the room.

They may be the easiest to overlook.

And that should concern us all.

Written by Megumi Miki, with Anna Reeve and Leigh Gassner, co-founders of Leaders who Listen. We aim to develop leaders who create a listening environment of safety and space within their organisations to enable better decision making, drive growth and innovation, enhance collaboration and inclusion, and manage risk. If you’d like to understand how your leadership team can engage in productive disagreements, contact us about our Leaders who Listen assessment tools, presentations, masterclasses and development programs.