25 May Exceptional and Exhausted #3: Why Leadership Development Rarely Moves the People-Pleasing Pattern and the Questions Most Senior Leaders Rarely Reach
Exceptional and Exhausted · Part 3
Leadership development rarely moves the people-pleasing pattern in senior leaders — not because the programmes are poor, but because they address behaviour and competency while the pattern itself lives somewhere older and more foundational underneath. Most Directors who come to work with me have already done the development. The leadership programmes, the executive coaching, the feedback cycles, the frameworks for having difficult conversations. They arrived at those programmes serious and they engaged with them properly.
And the pattern persisted anyway.
The programmes were not poor, but they were addressing something at a level above where the problem actually lives.
Why Leadership Development Rarely Moves People-Pleasing Directors
Leadership development, in the conventional sense, works at the level of behaviour and competency. It asks how you communicate more clearly, manage stakeholders more strategically, build executive presence, delegate more effectively. These are not wrong areas, but for the people-pleasing Director, they miss the currents underneath.
The yes that forms before the calculation is finished is not a communication problem. The calendar that belongs to everyone else is not a time management problem, and the no that becomes a yes somewhere between the thought and the conversation is not a stakeholder management problem. These are expressions of something running at a depth below where competency frameworks reach.
The people-pleasing pattern does not live at the level of skill. It lives at the level of identity, in the part of a person that learned, a long time ago, that their value was contingent on what they produced and how few people they disappointed. And identity does not change through instruction. By the time a framework activates, the behaviour has already been decided. The tool arrives after the fact, applied to a consequence rather than a cause.
This is why Directors who are genuinely exceptional, who apply every tool they are given with full seriousness and intelligence, can find themselves in the same place three years later. Not because they failed to implement, but because the implementation was happening at the surface while something older and more foundational continued, unchanged and largely unexamined, underneath it.
What the Deeper Work Actually Requires
Much of the depth work I do with clients draws on Jungian psychology and the writing of Marie-Louise von Franz, a Swiss analyst who worked closely with Jung for nearly three decades and whose thinking on the unconscious patterns that shape human behaviour I return to constantly. In one of her reflections, von Franz wrote that what people really seek, even when they project it onto outer objects, is the feeling of being alive. Reading that, I saw how directly it applies to the Directors I work with, because what most of them describe, underneath the promotion and the calendar and the exhaustion, is precisely this: a growing distance from themselves, from the feeling of being present in their own life rather than merely administering it.
What actually moves things is rarely a better technique. It is the willingness to ask a different order of question.
What am I carrying?
What has carrying it cost me?
Who would I be if I were no longer organising my professional life around managing other people’s disappointment?
These questions do not belong to leadership development as it is typically understood. They belong to the kind of inner work that treats the pattern not as a flaw to be corrected but as a structure that once served a purpose, and that now asks, with some urgency, to be understood. This is the level at which changing people-pleasing patterns actually becomes possible — not through better frameworks but through work that reaches the level where the pattern lives.
The development conversation that remains at the level of leadership as a concept will help. It will not shift the pattern. Because the pattern was never a leadership problem to begin with.
Which pattern is running underneath your leadership right now? A short quiz names it precisely. Five questions, two minutes: Take the quiz
Becoming the leader your next level is already waiting for.
Danguole Litvinskaite, The Leadership Coach Exceptional & Exhausted Senior Leaders Eventually Find
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does leadership development not fix the people-pleasing pattern?
Most leadership development works at the level of behaviour and competency. It teaches clearer communication, better delegation, stronger executive presence. These are useful, but for people-pleasing Directors the pattern lives at the level of identity, not skill. By the time a framework activates, the behaviour has already been decided. The tool arrives after the fact, not before it.
What does identity have to do with people-pleasing at work?
The people-pleasing pattern typically forms long before someone reaches a Director role. It reflects a learned belief that value is contingent on output and on keeping others comfortable. That belief operates below the level of conscious decision-making. A competency framework cannot reach it, because it was in place before the framework arrived.
How is work informed by Jungian psychology different from standard executive coaching?
Standard executive coaching tends to focus on goals, behaviours, and strategies. Work informed by Jungian psychology goes deeper, looking at the patterns that operate beneath conscious awareness. It asks not just what you want to change, but why the pattern formed, what it protected, and what understanding it might unlock. For people-pleasing Directors, this level of inquiry is often what moves things when everything else has not.
How do I know if I am ready for this kind of depth work?
A useful indicator is whether you have already done the conventional development and found that the pattern persisted. If you can see clearly what you want to do differently and still cannot quite get there, that gap is often a sign that the work needs to happen at a different level. Readiness is less about having answers and more about being willing to sit with questions that go deeper than technique.
About the Author
Danguole Litvinskaite is an executive leadership coach based in Switzerland, specialising in helping exceptional and exhausted senior leaders advance without losing themselves in the process. With 14 years in investment banking across 4 countries, an ICF PCC credential, and 3,000+ executive coaching sessions, she works with senior leaders in tech, finance, consulting, and global financial institutions. Her 3-month intensive, The Integration Method, addresses the overdelivering pattern at the level where it actually lives, combining corporate strategy, leadership psychology, nervous system regulation, and career navigation. Clients include senior leaders at the largest tech companies, Big 4 firms, and global financial institutions.
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