Most leadership conversations assume someone needs to develop new skills or tactics to lead more effectively. Usually that isn't it. More often, it's how much of who they actually are is available to them at work.
I've been working with someone where the contrast is unusually clean. In a disagreement with their partner, they stay grounded and direct — they say the hard thing without softening it. With their family's finances and their kids' logistics, they make decisions cleanly and move on. They see what needs to happen and they handle it.
Inside the company, same person, different behavior. They build consensus they wouldn't ordinarily need. They add structure and process to decisions they already know the answer to.
Nothing about them changed. How much of themselves they bring into the workplace did.
A few reasons this happens. Sometimes the environment genuinely doesn't support how they work — no stable direction, the strategy keeps resetting, nothing solid to push against. Sometimes it's the role: they can see clearly but don't have the authority to act on what they see, so everything gets slower and heavier.
But most often, nothing outside the leader is forcing them to change who they are. They're simply running the version of leadership they think they're supposed to run. A different person than the one who shows up everywhere else in their life.
That substitution gets expensive over time. Not because it's wrong, but because it isn't who they are.
The fix isn't "be more authentic" — at least not the way that phrase usually gets used. In Axis terms, authenticity is more specific: it anchors the coordinates of how you lead when what you're doing is aligned with what you believe.
So it's simpler than that. See those coordinates clearly. Notice where you stop using them, and why. Then come back to them.