Why the Best Leaders Are Explorers: The Case for Self-Awareness in Leadership
- Merve Kagitci Hokamp
- Feb 2
- 8 min read
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.
— T.S. Eliot
I’ve been thinking about this poem a lot lately.
Exploration is rarely the glamorous, expansive thing we imagine it to be.
Most of the time, it’s disorienting.
It strips away labels.
It removes the scaffolding that once made life feel coherent.
It asks uncomfortable questions long before it offers any clarity in return.
I know this firsthand.
When I decided to transition from my corporate career to doing my own thing after 15+ years, I didn’t have a neat narrative or the perfect five-year plan. I had, instead, curiosity, unease, and a quiet sense that something important needed to be re-examined.
Titles fell away.
External validation softened.
The shorthand credibility of the brand — the way “I work at Google” once spoke for me — stopped doing the heavy lifting.
What followed wasn’t reinvention in the dramatic sense. It was something subtler. More confronting.
I explored new avenues.
New ways of working.
New identities: founder, coach, advisor, consultant, facilitator, fractional executive.
I tested ideas.
I said “Yes” to things that stretched me.
I said “No” to things that looked impressive on paper but felt hollow in practice.
And somewhere along the way, something started to feel right.
I didn’t become someone entirely new.
I started recognizing myself again.
The version of me who is energized by building from first principles. Who enjoys sitting with ambiguity rather than rushing to premature answers. Who cares deeply about how people think, decide, and lead — not just what they deliver.
The irony is that none of this was new. It was simply buried under years of momentum, performance, and well-intentioned busyness.
That’s the part Eliot captures so precisely.
Exploration doesn’t always take you forward. Sometimes it takes you deeper.
Back to values you once held instinctively but stopped naming.
Back to strengths you used naturally before you were told to optimize them.
Back to questions you learned to defer because they didn’t fit easily inside a highly operational, fast-moving ecosystem.
Patters in My Clients' Experience
I see this pattern constantly in my coaching work.
Senior leaders who have “done everything right” but feel oddly disconnected from their own judgment.
Founders who are scaling companies while quietly shrinking their own sense of agency.
High performers who mistake exhaustion for ambition because that’s what the environment rewards.
They don’t need a radical pivot. They need perspective.
They need the space to arrive — again — at who they are, and to see it clearly this time.
This is why reflection is the most foundational strategic step that helps people lay a foundation to use as a launchpad for their tactical actions.
Knowing the place for the first time doesn’t mean going backwards.
It means integrating experience with self-awareness.
It means choosing deliberately rather than defaulting to momentum.
It means building the next chapter with coherence, not just speed.
Exploration, at its best, isn’t about finding something new to chase.
It’s about remembering what matters — and having the courage to act from that place.
Why Exploration Feels So Uncomfortable (and Why That Matters) for Leaders
From early childhood, many of us are conditioned to treat life as a sequence of correct answers.
If you grew up in systems like the one I did in Turkey, the path is often linear and prescriptive:
good school → right exam → right university → sensible degree → respectable job.
You’re rewarded for certainty. You’re penalized for deviation.
Exploration, in that context, doesn’t look brave. It looks irresponsible.
But psychologically, this wiring creates a problem later in life:
When the external structure disappears, so does internal orientation. People who have “succeeded” by following the map often struggle most when the map no longer applies.
And that’s not a personal failing unlike what people might think it is in the moment. It’s a systemic flaw.
What the research says about exploration
1. Exploration is linked to long-term fulfillment, not short-term efficiency
David Epstein's Range makes a compelling case against early hyper-specialization. He studied elite performers across domains — sports, music, science, business — and found a counterintuitive pattern:
The most successful people often had winding paths, not straight lines.
Take Roger Federer. Unlike many tennis prodigies who started drilling backhands at age 4, Federer played basketball, handball, soccer, skiing, and wrestling before focusing on tennis as a teenager. His coaches didn't push early specialization. They encouraged broad athletic development.
As a result, Federer developed exceptional court awareness, timing, and improvisational skills that narrow tennis training wouldn't have built. His ability to read patterns, adapt mid-match, and synthesize movement across sports gave him an edge that pure technical drilling couldn't replicate.
Epstein calls this the "sampling period" — a phase where exploration beats optimization.
The same pattern shows up in business. CEOs who held roles across functions (operations, finance, sales, product) before reaching the top perform better than those who climbed a single ladder. They've seen more of the system. They understand how different parts connect. They don't optimize locally at the expense of the whole.
You can't optimize what you haven't explored. And what looks like a "detour" early in your career often turns out to be the thing that made you effective later.
2. Self-awareness is rare — and leaders overestimate it dramatically
Organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich studied thousands of people and found a striking gap:
95% believe they're self-aware, but only 10-15% actually are.
The gap between how we see ourselves and how others experience us is where leadership breaks down.
You think you're being "decisive and efficient." Your team experiences you as "dismissive and closed off."
You think you're "giving people autonomy." They feel "abandoned and unsupported."
Most leaders never close this gap because they never see it in the first place.
Often times because feedback becomes less honest as you climb the ladder.
When you're junior, people tell you when you screw up. When you're senior, they work around you instead. They stop bringing you problems. They manage your reactions. They say "yes" in the meeting and "what was that about?" in the hallway afterward.
According to research from the Center for Creative Leadership, self-awareness is the strongest predictor of executive effectiveness.
Leaders who lack it make worse decisions (because they're working with incomplete information about their own impact), create more team friction (because people experience them differently than they think), and plateau faster (because they can't diagnose what's actually holding them back).
Exploration, in this context, helps leaders build the self-awareness to lead from who they actually are — not who they think they are. And that requires data, not just introspection.
Real feedback. Honest mirrors. People willing to tell you what you don't want to hear.
3. Identity flexibility predicts adaptive leadership
Herminia Ibarra's research at INSEAD shows that successful transitions — whether career shifts, role changes, or leadership evolution — don't follow a linear "plan then execute" model. They follow a more iterative pattern: test, learn, adjust.
In her book Working Identity, Ibarra tracked professionals making major career changes and found that those who succeeded started with experimentation. They tried on different "possible selves" through side projects, temporary assignments, or new relationships before committing to a new direction.
The leaders who struggled tried to think their way into a new identity instead of acting their way into one. Exploration, in this frame, requires building a more flexible relationship with the concept of identity. The ability to ask "who am I becoming?" instead of defending "who I've always been."
4. Exploration ≠ Navel-Gazing
This matters, because exploration is often dismissed as indulgent.
It isn’t.
It’s not journaling for its own sake.
It’s not endless introspection.
It’s not a personality overhaul.
It’s disciplined inquiry into:
What actually gives you energy
Where your judgment is strongest
Which environments amplify you — and which quietly drain you
Strengths are discovered through exposure + feedback + reflection.
Practical Application:
If this resonates, here are grounded ways you can actually do this work: I use a few frameworks with my clients that cut through the noise:
1. The Johari Window (Four Quadrants of Awareness)
The Johari Window divides self-knowledge into four areas:
Open Area: What you and others both know about you
Blind Spot: What others see but you don't
Hidden Area: What you know but others don't
Unknown Area: What neither you nor others recognize yet
Most leadership development focuses on the open area — building on known strengths. But the real breakthroughs happen when you shrink your blind spots and explore the unknown.
2. The Leadership Circle Profile
This is one of the most powerful 360 tools I've used. It measures two dimensions:
Creative competencies (visionary leadership, collaboration, authenticity)
Reactive tendencies (controlling, protecting, complying)
It shows you the relationship between your reactive patterns and your leadership effectiveness.
When you're stressed, what do you default to?
Do you become overly controlling?
Do you withdraw?
Do you people-please?
I worked with a CCO who scored high on "controlling" under pressure. He knew he was detail-oriented, but didn't realize his team experienced it as micromanagement during critical launches. The data made it undeniable. He couldn't unsee it.
3. Values and Behaviors Audit
Here's a simple exercise I run with almost every client:
Write down your top 5 leadership values (e.g., transparency, accountability, innovation)
Ask your team to describe your leadership in 5 words based on what they observe
Compare the lists
The gap is your work.
One client listed "collaboration" as a core value. His team's feedback was "Fast-moving, independent, doesn't wait for input." He thought he was being collaborative by moving quickly so people didn't have to wait on him. They experienced it as being left out of decisions.
Closing that gap required small, deliberate behavior changes: flagging decisions earlier, asking "who else should weigh in?" before finalizing, and slowing down (even a little) in the planning phase.
Returning to Eliot
I've always been an explorer at heart. Six countries. Multiple roles. Constantly testing new ways of working, leading, building. It's how I'm wired. But the most important exploration I've done wasn't geographic or professional. It was internal.
When I left corporate after 15+ years, I thought I was exploring new career options. What I was actually doing was stripping away the scaffolding — the titles, the brand, the external validation — to see what remained underneath.
What I found wasn't exactly new. It was familiar. The version of me that had always been there but got buried under years of momentum and well-intentioned busyness.
Disorienting at times, yes. But all the more rewarding and fulfilling.
Steve Jobs famously said you can't connect the dots looking forward — only looking back. The dots only connect if you're willing to explore in the first place. If you're willing to step off the path that got you here and ask whether it's still the path that serves you.
Exploration, for me, has become a discipline. A way of resisting autopilot. Integrating experience with self-awareness. A refusal to let past success decide future direction by default.
Returning to Eliot reminds me that the work is not to constantly reinvent, but to periodically re-see. To arrive back at yourself with enough distance, honesty, and perspective to actually recognize what’s there.
Here's to a lifelong pursuit of exploration!
If this resonates: I work with leaders and executives on exactly this — closing the gap between intent and impact, building self-awareness that drives results, and leading with clarity instead of autopilot. If you're ready to explore what's actually holding you back, let's talk.
Hi, I'm Merve. I work with senior leaders, founders, and leadership teams who want clarity, alignment, and momentum — especially in complex, hybrid, or fast-growing environments.
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