We are all on a quest. The job role we fulfill or the projects we sell are just the costumes and exterior wrapping. It turns out that the real destination of leadership journeys isn’t the product we are selling — it’s the finely tuned inner wisdom we achieve. And it’s usually pretty humbling. As T.S.Eliot wisely wrote in his poem Little Gidding, “We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.”
In the end, it’s less about the product, service or experience that we developed and much more about what we learned in the process. And that’s whether you’re launching a project as a manager, completing a raise as an entrepreneur, standing up a division in a corporation or selling your startup.
In 2017, Beri Meric watched the company he’d built double in size four years running — and then nearly collapse. He told me it felt like a near-death experience for the organization he’d poured himself into. In the middle of that unraveling, his YPO forum said something that he has never forgotten: he wasn’t the small thing straining to carry a big, fragile company. He was the big thing. The company was something he’d made and, therefore, could make again.
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That reframe is an example of what I call “Inside Out Leadership.” We tend to treat leadership as a performance staged for an external audience: hit all your numbers, consistently grow sales and all the while make it look effortless. But composure built on top of an unexamined interior will crack eventually, usually at the worst possible moment. Inside Out Leadership starts from the premise that how a leader relates to their interior self is the alchemy for how they will relate to everyone else. Get that wrong, and no amount of strategic polish fixes it.
How to do it
Here are three takeaways that Meric shared with me about his Inside Out Leadership crossroads.
1. Self-inquiry isn’t indulgent — it’s structural. Meric, founder of the leadership community IVY, has spent sixteen years building cohorts, peer groups, and rituals designed to force leaders into ongoing self-reflection, rather than assuming that they magically start out with heightened self-awareness. His own inflection point came from a shattering eureka moment that changed how he led. The lesson for the rest of us is that self-knowledge needs scaffolding. That scaffolding can be in the form of a recurring practice or community that interrupts the autopilot of external performance long enough for something honest to surface.
2. Lead with outcomes, then arrive at the inner work. Meric told me that when he’s talking to business leaders, starting with “get yourself right first” rarely lands. What works is starting with the result they want for their clients or for their team and then tracing your steps back from there until you arrive at the question of who you need to be internally to deliver it. Inside Out Leadership doesn’t require leaders to denounce their ambition but it does ask them to trace their ambition back to its source.
3. Treat the confusing middle as data, not shame. Meric’s most consistent finding, after asking hundreds of leaders what experience made them who they are, is that the answer is almost never a win. I can certainly relate to that. Instead, the pivotal moment that crystallizes most of our identity is the interaction or failure that could have broken them but instead became the material for constructing who they are as a person. Harvard Business School professor, Amy Edmondson, calls these intelligent failures ‘an undesired result in new territory”. It’s not carelessness, but the essential residue that comes from taking real risks. Organizations that punish the mess risk missing the growth hiding deep inside.
As AI absorbs more of the analytical and execution work leaders used to own, Meric expects the premium on this kind of interior, human-to-human work to rise, not fall – kind of in the way live concerts have only grown more valuable in an age of infinite streaming. The instruments may be getting cheaper but people will pay for presence.
The next time your company or team hits its own version of Meric’s 2017 remember what Meric’s forum told him: you are not the small thing carrying the big thing. You are the big thing, so, lead from there.
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