Leading with Strategy

36From Knowing to Embodying: Reclaiming Self‐Knowledge in Leadership

For decades, organizations have approached leadership development through a familiar dichotomy: hard skills versus soft skills. Hard skills are taught, tested, and tracked, and consist of finance, technology, project management. Soft skills, by contrast, are often considered secondary, such as interpersonal dynamics, emotional intelligence, communication. This binary view leads to the widespread belief that hard skills drive business results while soft skills simply make the process smoother. But this framing misses something essential.

It ignores the person at the center.

Leadership is not just a collection of tools or traits. It is the integrated expression of who we are, what we value, and how we choose to show up. In my work with leaders across industries, I've seen this gap again and again: People develop expertise in systems or relationships but never develop expertise in themselves.

To truly develop as a leader, one must engage in three levels of knowing: knowing how things work, knowing how people work together, and knowing oneself. This structure isn't new; I've adapted it from the epistemological framework of the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas (1971), whose theory of knowledge offers a way to reconnect leadership to the human experience.

Rethinking Knowledge: From Habermas to Leadership Development

Habermas proposed that all knowledge is shaped by different human interests. He identified ...