From a vague doubt, a chance overheard conversation, to an observable and fixable competency
Maybe it started as a vague discomfort. A comment overheard in passing — “he never really lets us own anything.” A 360 result you almost dismissed. Or just a private question you have never quite answered: am I the reason my team does not speak up?
Most leaders do not arrive at self-awareness through a formal assessment. They arrive through accumulated signals they eventually stop ignoring. The psychometrist’s job is to give those signals structure — to move the question from vague doubt to observable, measurable, and fixable behaviour.
One of the recurring mistakes we make in leadership conversations is turning complex behaviour into casual labels. “Insecure leader” is one of those labels. It is used often, but rarely defined carefully.
From a psychometric point of view, the better question is not, “Am I insecure?” The better question is: what repeated behaviours appear when my competence, authority, or image feels threatened? If those behaviours include defensiveness, overcontrol, weak delegation, or feedback avoidance, then we are no longer in the
territory of vague opinion. We are looking at an assessable behavioural pattern.
Control rarely introduces itself as control. It usually arrives as care, quality, protection, speed, or precision. That is what makes it difficult to detect — especially for the leader displaying it.
Leaders do not usually say, “I am controlling.” They say, “I care for my team,” “I don’t want the team’s name to get tainted,” or “I know what good looks like.” The problem is not the intention. The problem is when that intention repeatedly produces low ownership, low autonomy, and low trust.
On delegation.
A leader may say the team is still learning, the quality is not there yet, or the client requirement was not fully understood. So they sit late at night re-editing content, reworking decks, fixing what the team already submitted. It feels like responsibility to the leader. To the team, it often feels like work was delegated but ownership was not.
On alignment.
A leader may want to know what team members plan to say before they speak to others. They frame this as protecting the team from costly mistakes, or preserving the image of the function. But when people need visibility clearance before acting or speaking, alignment has quietly become control.
On feedback.
Very few leaders say, “I avoid feedback.” They say, “360-degree feedback cannot capture someone like me,” or “I am different with different people.” That may be partly true. But when structured feedback is dismissed every time it becomes uncomfortable, the issue may not be the method alone. It may be the difficulty of tolerating an external view that challenges self-image.
Sometimes leaders protect so much that they prevent growth. Like helping a butterfly out of its cocoon too early — it looks like care, but it quietly removes the struggle that was needed for strength. The butterfly emerges, but crippled.
Here is the important distinction. Insecurity as a psychological tendency is trait-like — relatively stable, hard to address directly, and not useful as a workplace label. But the behaviours it produces — overriding delegated decisions, requiring pre-visibility, dismissing structured feedback, editing others’ work after handover — those are competencies. They are observable, measurable, and developable. That distinction matters because it changes the conversation entirely. The question is no longer “Are you an insecure person?” That question leads nowhere. The question becomes: “Which specific leadership behaviours are limiting trust, ownership, and growth in your team — and what does improvement look like?” That is a question worth answering.
At Redwood Bloom, this is exactly the kind of leadership risk we help organisations assess. Not by asking, “Are you insecure?” A better assessment looks at patterns: who repeatedly reworks delegated output, who requires pre-visibility before others act, who rejects external signal under discomfort, and what the team consistently
experiences as a result.
That kind of assessment combines self-report, observer ratings, and team climate signals — because insecurity is often least visible to the person experiencing it, and most visible in the environment they create around them. The goal is not to label the leader. The goal is to make the pattern visible enough that something can change.
If leadership insecurity is present, it will rarely appear in the language of insecurity. It will appear in the language of care, quality, protection, and standards — while quietly reducing trust, ownership, and growth. The earlier that pattern is made visible, the easier it becomes to coach, assess, and develop.
At Redwood Bloom, we work with organisations on exactly these kinds of leadership questions through boutique HR consulting, leadership coaching, and assessment-led development.
