Dr Alwin Tan, GAICD, MBBS, FRACS, EMBA (Melbourne Business School)

Senior Surgeon | Governance Leader | HealthTech Co-founder | Founder of the Institute for Systems Integrity (ISI) |Harvard Medical School — AI in Healthcare | University of Oxford — Sustainable Enterprise | Bastas Academy for Healthcare Leadership – Triple Scholar

INSTITUTE FOR SYSTEMS INTEGRITY

The Leadership Replication Trap: When Developing Leaders Quietly Becomes Reproducing Them

Every leader copies somebody.

The manager who taught them how to hold a difficult conversation.

The executive whose calm they admired.

The mentor who showed them how to command a room.

The clinician who remained composed in a crisis.

The entrepreneur who could turn uncertainty into conviction.

The chair who knew exactly when to speak.

And when not to.

There is nothing wrong with that.

In fact, there may be something deeply human about it.

We observe.

We imitate.

We experiment.

We adapt.

That is how people learn.

🔥 THE PROBLEM IS NOT THAT LEADERS COPY.

🔥 THE PROBLEM BEGINS WHEN THEY FORGET TO STOP COPYING.

Because there is a difference between learning from somebody's leadership and slowly becoming an imitation of their leadership.

And organisations may be encouraging that difference without even realising it.

WE TELL PEOPLE TO FIND THEIR LEADERSHIP STYLE.

THEN WE SHOW THEM EXACTLY WHICH STYLE GETS PROMOTED.

Most organisations claim to want leaders who are:

authentic,

independent,

courageous,

different,

curious,

challenging,

and capable of thinking for themselves.

But watch what happens when promotion decisions are actually made.

Who gets described as:

“executive material”?

Who is seen as:

“ready”?

Who is considered:

“a safe pair of hands”?

Who is told they have:

“leadership presence”?

And who is quietly told:

“not yet”?

Often, organisations are not just evaluating capability.

They may also be evaluating familiarity.

Does this person communicate like the leaders already here?

Do they think like them?

Do they present like them?

Do they know when to challenge?

And perhaps more importantly:

do they know when not to?

🔥 AN ORGANISATION DOES NOT HAVE TO ORDER PEOPLE TO CONFORM.

🔥 IT ONLY HAS TO KEEP REWARDING THE PEOPLE WHO DO.

IMITATION IS NOT THE ENEMY

Leadership research gives us an important warning against making this argument too simple.

People learn by observing other people.

Social learning is fundamental to human development, and leadership is no exception.

Brown, Treviño and Harrison (2005), for example, describe leadership influence partly through modelling, observational learning and identification.

Herminia Ibarra's work on professional identity development goes further.

People entering unfamiliar or more senior roles frequently experiment with what she described as provisional selves—trying behaviours, identities and approaches before deciding what fits

A first-time executive may borrow the communication style of an admired CEO.

A young surgeon may imitate the composure of a senior consultant.

A new manager may consciously reproduce the way a former boss structured difficult conversations.

Initially, those behaviours may feel unnatural.

That does not necessarily make them fake.

It may mean they are learning.

🔥 SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO TRY SOMEBODY ELSE'S LEADERSHIP BEFORE YOU DISCOVER YOUR OWN.

That is development.

The problem comes later.

THE QUESTION IS WHAT HAPPENS AFTER THE IMITATION

Healthy development should move through something like this:

OBSERVE

↓

BORROW

↓

EXPERIMENT

↓

REFLECT

↓

ADAPT

↓

INTEGRATE

↓

OWN

The emerging leader asks:

What worked?

Why did it work?

Was it the behaviour?

The context?

The authority?

The experience behind it?

Does it fit my values?

Does it fit my strengths?

Does it fit this situation?

And eventually:

Can I make this genuinely mine?

That is fundamentally different from:

“He is successful. I should become more like him.”

Or:

“She became CEO behaving that way. That must be what leadership looks like.”

One creates development.

The other creates replication.

🚨 COPY THE PRINCIPLE.

NOT THE PERSON.

Perhaps the greatest mistake in leadership development is copying what is visible while failing to understand what made it effective.

You see decisiveness.

You do not see the twenty years of judgment underneath it.

You see confidence.

You do not see the preparation underneath it.

You see brevity.

You do not see the depth of understanding that allowed brevity.

You see a leader challenge the room.

You do not see the trust they spent years building before they did it.

You see charisma.

You do not see whether the decision was actually good.

So the behaviour gets copied.

The judgment does not.

That is what we might call:

Leadership Theatre™

The reproduction of visible leadership behaviour without the underlying judgment, experience or context that originally made that behaviour effective.

And leadership theatre can look extraordinarily convincing.

Until the situation changes.

WHAT WORKED FOR THEM MAY NOT WORK FOR YOU

Leadership does not happen in a vacuum.

Context matters.

A founder leading 15 employees cannot simply be copied by the incoming CEO of a multinational organisation.

A military commander cannot be transplanted wholesale into a hospital.

A surgeon cannot automatically lead a boardroom exactly as they lead an operating theatre.

A turnaround leader may be exactly what an organisation needs during crisis and exactly what it does not need five years later.

Yet leadership development often turns context-specific behaviours into universal prescriptions.

Be more decisive.

Be more visible.

Be more vulnerable.

Tell more stories.

Speak less.

Speak more.

Delegate.

Take control.

Listen.

Act.

Every prescription can be excellent.

And every prescription can be wrong.

🔥 COPYING LEADERSHIP WITHOUT COPYING CONTEXT MAY MEAN COPYING THE WRONG THING ENTIRELY.

AUTHENTICITY IS NOT THE SAME AS STAYING THE SAME

There is another trap.

The response to copycat leadership cannot simply be:

“Just be yourself.”

That sounds appealing.

It is also inadequate.

Because sometimes the leader you are today is not yet capable of leading what comes next.

Leadership development requires change.

Ibarra (2015) describes the authenticity paradox: people can become trapped by an overly rigid idea of who they already are.

“I don't network.”

“I am not naturally political.”

“I am not a public speaker.”

“I am an introvert.”

“I don't lead that way.”

Sometimes those statements describe identity.

Sometimes they protect limitation.

Leadership requires experimentation.

Growth often feels uncomfortable before it feels authentic.

🔥 GENUINE LEADERSHIP IS NOT REFUSING TO CHANGE.

🔥 IT IS CHANGING WITHOUT DISAPPEARING INTO SOMEBODY ELSE.

AND AUTHENTICITY IS NOT A MORAL DEFENCE

This matters too.

“I am just being myself” does not automatically make someone's behaviour good leadership.

A leader can be genuinely arrogant.

Genuinely insensitive.

Genuinely reckless.

Genuinely intolerant.

Genuinely incompetent.

Rosenthal and Pittinsky's (2006) work on narcissistic leadership illustrates precisely why personality authenticity and leadership quality cannot be treated as synonymous.

Authenticity itself has also faced substantial scholarly criticism.

Alvesson and Einola (2019) caution against excessively positive and theoretically simplistic interpretations of authentic leadership.

So the answer is not:

Be authentic at all costs.

The better question is:

ARE YOU DEVELOPING CAPABILITY WHILE REMAINING GROUNDED IN VALUES, JUDGMENT AND SELF-AWARENESS?

That is much harder.

And much more useful.

THE BIGGER RISK IS NOT INDIVIDUAL. IT IS ORGANISATIONAL.

This is where leadership imitation becomes a systems-integrity issue.

Imagine an organisation where the people who repeatedly reach senior leadership:

talk similarly,

think similarly,

present similarly,

interpret risk similarly,

respond to challenge similarly,

and share similar assumptions about what “good leadership” looks like.

Individually, every promotion may appear reasonable.

Collectively, something different may be happening.

The organisation may be reproducing itself.

THE LEADERSHIP REPLICATION TRAP™

We define the Leadership Replication Trap™ as:

The progressive replacement of leadership development with the reproduction of behaviours, assumptions and leadership characteristics already associated with organisational success.

It may unfold like this:

1. EXISTING LEADERS DEFINE THE PROTOTYPE

Their behaviour becomes the visible model of success.

↓

2. ASPIRING LEADERS OBSERVE

They learn which characteristics appear to be rewarded.

↓

3. THEY IMITATE

Not necessarily consciously.

They adapt language, presentation, behaviour and decision-making.

↓

4. FAMILIARITY BECOMES RECOGNITION

Those who resemble current leadership begin to “look ready”.

↓

5. SIMILAR PEOPLE ADVANCE

The leadership prototype becomes reinforced.

↓

6. DIFFERENCE BECOMES RISKIER

Unfamiliar leadership styles increasingly appear unconventional.

↓

7. ORGANISATIONAL HOMOGENEITY INCREASES

The range of naturally occurring perspectives narrows.

↓

8. THE SYSTEM LOSES CHALLENGE

Assumptions travel further without friction.

And then the cycle starts again.

🚨 IF EVERY LEADER YOU DEVELOP ENDS UP LOOKING LIKE YOU, YOU MAY NOT BE DEVELOPING LEADERS. YOU MAY BE MAKING COPIES.

That is not merely a talent-development issue.

It becomes a governance issue.

Because senior teams do more than execute strategy.

They determine:

what information matters,

what risks deserve attention,

which voices are credible,

what uncertainty means,

what behaviour gets rewarded,

and which uncomfortable signals survive long enough to reach decision-makers.

Upper-echelons research has long argued that organisational outcomes are partly shaped by the characteristics and cognitive frames of senior leadership teams (Carpenter, Geletkanycz and Sanders, 2004).

This does not mean that homogeneity is automatically harmful.

Nor does diversity automatically improve performance.

Recent reviews emphasise that top-team diversity produces complex and highly contextual outcomes (Roberson, Gerkin and Hill, 2024; Sieweke et al., 2025).

But there is a simpler systems question:

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN TOO FEW PEOPLE AROUND THE TABLE NATURALLY SEE THE PROBLEM DIFFERENTLY?

THE DANGER OF A ROOM THAT AGREES TOO EASILY

Organisations often value alignment.

They should.

No organisation can function if every decision becomes ideological combat.

Shared standards matter.

Common values matter.

Coordination matters.

But alignment can quietly mutate into conformity.

Jetten and Hornsey (2014) show how groups can treat dissent and deviation as threats to cohesion while dissent can also serve important corrective functions.

That creates a governance paradox.

The person creating discomfort may sometimes be creating exactly the friction the system needs.

🔥 A LEADERSHIP TEAM THAT NEVER DISAGREES MAY BE EXCEPTIONALLY ALIGNED.

🔥 OR IT MAY HAVE BECOME EXCEPTIONALLY GOOD AT SELECTING PEOPLE WHO THINK THE SAME WAY.

Those are not the same achievement.

THE MENTORSHIP TEST

This applies equally to mentorship.

A mentor inevitably influences the person they mentor.

That is part of the point.

But mentorship goes wrong when success is measured by resemblance.

A poor mentor asks:

“How can I make this person lead more like me?”

A better mentor asks:

“What does this person need in order to become the strongest version of their own leadership?”

That requires something harder than replication.

It requires the mentor to allow the emerging leader to eventually disagree with them.

Outgrow them.

Reject some of their methods.

And potentially become better than them.

🔥 THE TEST OF GREAT MENTORSHIP IS NOT WHETHER THEY LEAD LIKE YOU.

🔥 IT IS WHETHER THEY CAN EVENTUALLY LEAD WITHOUT YOU.

THE SUCCESSION TEST

The same applies to succession.

The successor's job is not to become the predecessor.

It is not to preserve their tone.

Their personality.

Their rituals.

Their phrases.

Or every decision they made.

The successor must distinguish between:

what made the organisation strong

and

what merely belonged to the previous leader.

Those things are easily confused.

The organisation may say:

“We need continuity.”

Sometimes it means:

“We want the future to look reassuringly like the past.”

But leadership succession exists precisely because time moves.

Markets change.

Technology changes.

Workforces change.

Risk changes.

Society changes.

The organisation changes.

🔥 THE SUCCESSOR'S JOB IS NOT TO PRESERVE THE PREDECESSOR.

🔥 IT IS TO PRESERVE WHAT MATTERS WHILE LEADING WHAT COMES NEXT.

SO WHAT SHOULD ORGANISATIONS ACTUALLY REPLICATE?

This is where the distinction becomes essential.

High-integrity organisations should reproduce some things.

They should replicate:

ethical standards,

respect,

psychological safety,

evidence-based decision-making,

accountability,

learning from error,

transparent escalation,

care for people,

and disciplined challenge.

What they should not replicate is one acceptable leadership personality.

The aim should therefore be:

STANDARDISE PRINCIPLES.
NOT PERSONALITIES.

That may be one of the most important distinctions in leadership development.

THE LEADERSHIP INTEGRATION PATHWAY™

Instead of teaching emerging leaders to reproduce successful people, organisations could teach them to consciously integrate learning.

OBSERVE

What can this person teach me?

↓

BORROW

Which behaviour or method might be useful?

↓

EXPERIMENT

What happens when I try it?

↓

REFLECT

Why did it work—or fail?

↓

ADAPT

What needs to change for my context?

↓

INTEGRATE

How does this fit my values, strengths and judgment?

↓

OWN

Can I now use it without pretending to be somebody else?

↓

EVOLVE

What does the next situation require?

That is leadership development.

Not cloning.

THE QUESTION FOR LEADERS

Look at the people you have mentored.

Promoted.

Sponsored.

Selected.

Developed.

Now ask:

Do they increasingly look like stronger versions of themselves?

Or increasingly like smaller versions of us?

And look around the executive table.

Do you see leaders who arrived there through genuinely different paths?

Different ways of thinking?

Different styles of challenge?

Different experiences?

Different interpretations of risk?

Or have we unconsciously trained everybody to pass the same leadership audition?

🔥 THE ORGANISATION THAT ONLY RECOGNISES LEADERSHIP WHEN IT LOOKS FAMILIAR WILL EVENTUALLY MAKE DIFFERENCE LOOK LIKE INCOMPETENCE.

That should concern every board.

THE QUESTION FOR BOARDS

Boards should not ask only:

“Do we have a leadership pipeline?”

They should ask:

“WHAT KIND OF LEADERS IS OUR PIPELINE PRODUCING?”

Are we developing:

judgment?

independence?

adaptability?

ethical courage?

capacity for disagreement?

self-awareness?

Or merely people who have learned how to look successful inside the existing system?

Because those are very different outcomes.

And eventually the distinction becomes visible.

Usually when the environment changes.

THE FINAL PARADOX

Every mature leader is built partly from other people.

A teacher.

A parent.

A mentor.

A colleague.

A boss.

Sometimes even an adversary.

We carry pieces of them with us.

That is not weakness.

It is inheritance.

The task is not to reject what we inherit.

It is to transform it.

To take what others taught us.

Test it.

Question it.

Adapt it.

And eventually make it ours.

Because:

🔥 GOOD LEADERS LEARN THROUGH IMITATION.

🔥 MATURE LEADERSHIP BEGINS WHEN IMITATION BECOMES INTEGRATION.

And perhaps the simplest rule is this:

LEARN FROM THEM.

BORROW FROM THEM.

GROW THROUGH THEM.

BUT DON'T DISAPPEAR INTO THEM.

References

Alvesson, M. and Einola, K. (2019) ‘Warning for excessive positivity: Authentic leadership and other traps in leadership studies’, The Leadership Quarterly, 30(4), pp. 383–395. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2019.04.001.

Avolio, B.J. and Gardner, W.L. (2005) ‘Authentic leadership development: Getting to the root of positive forms of leadership’, The Leadership Quarterly, 16(3), pp. 315–338. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2005.03.001.

Brown, M.E., Treviño, L.K. and Harrison, D.A. (2005) ‘Ethical leadership: A social learning perspective for construct development and testing’, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 97(2), pp. 117–134. doi:10.1016/j.obhdp.2005.03.002.

Carpenter, M.A., Geletkanycz, M.A. and Sanders, W.G. (2004) ‘Upper echelons research revisited: Antecedents, elements, and consequences of top management team composition’, Journal of Management, 30(6), pp. 749–778.

Gardner, W.L., Avolio, B.J., Luthans, F., May, D.R. and Walumbwa, F. (2005) ‘“Can you see the real me?” A self-based model of authentic leader and follower development’, The Leadership Quarterly, 16(3), pp. 343–372. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2005.03.003.

George, B., Sims, P., McLean, A.N. and Mayer, D. (2007) ‘Discovering your authentic leadership’, Harvard Business Review, 85(2), pp. 129–138.

Goffee, R. and Jones, G. (2000) ‘Why should anyone be led by you?’, Harvard Business Review, 78(5), pp. 62–70.

Ibarra, H. (1999) ‘Provisional selves: Experimenting with image and identity in professional adaptation’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(4), pp. 764–791. doi:10.2307/2667055.

Ibarra, H. (2015) ‘The authenticity paradox’, Harvard Business Review, 93(1/2), pp. 53–59.

Jetten, J. and Hornsey, M.J. (2014) ‘Deviance and dissent in groups’, Annual Review of Psychology, 65, pp. 461–485. doi:10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115151.

Roberson, Q., Gerkin, E. and Hill, A. (2024) ‘Diversity in top management teams and upper echelons of firms’, Current Opinion in Psychology, 60, 101901.

Rosenthal, S.A. and Pittinsky, T.L. (2006) ‘Narcissistic leadership’, The Leadership Quarterly, 17(6), pp. 617–633. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2006.10.005.

Sieweke, J., Hentschel, T., Gazdag, B.A. and Henningsen, L. (2025) ‘The business case for demographic diversity in strategic leadership teams: A systematic and critical review of the causal evidence’, The Leadership Quarterly, 36(1), 101843.

Walumbwa, F.O., Avolio, B.J., Gardner, W.L., Wernsing, T.S. and Peterson, S.J. (2008) ‘Authentic leadership: Development and validation of a theory-based measure’, Journal of Management, 34(1), pp. 89–126. doi:10.1177/0149206307308913.