What Sits Underneath
The inner work that builds enduring leaders and better performance
Author of When Leaders Are Lost
You’ve felt it.
The moment in a meeting when the smart move and the right move part ways. The pressure to move before you’re ready, agree before you’ve really thought, or make the decision everyone expects even when something tells you it isn’t quite right.
Leadership rarely tests you on the easy days.
It’s under pressure that something deeper becomes visible. Not simply what we know or what we’re capable of doing, but the character beneath the decisions we make and the leader other people actually experience.
What Sits Underneath asks a question that much of leadership development leaves untouched:
Who are we becoming as leaders?
Drawing on more than thirty years of working with leaders across forty countries, Dr Glenn Williams explores why capability alone is not enough to sustain leadership over time.
Bringing together classical thinking about virtue and character, contemporary research and the lived experience of leadership, Glenn examines how character shapes judgement, relationships, wellbeing and organisational performance.
It takes the conversation beneath skills, strategy and leadership technique to consider what happens when pressure arrives, when our values are tested, and when the easiest decision and the right decision are no longer the same.
This isn’t a book of quick fixes or another leadership checklist.
Instead, What Sits Underneath invites leaders to examine the influences that have shaped them, the virtues they are developing, the patterns that emerge under pressure, and the kind of leader they are becoming.
Capability determines a great deal of what a leader can build. Character helps determine what that capability becomes.
What sits underneath your leadership?
Most leadership development focuses on what leaders should know and what they should do.
This book goes deeper.
It explores the character that sits beneath visible leadership and asks how virtues such as courage, humility, justice, wisdom and self-control are formed, tested and expressed over a lifetime.
It considers what shapes us through family, culture, relationships, experience and adversity. It looks at the counterfeits of character that can emerge when pressure and ambition take hold. And it asks whether character really does make a difference to performance, wellbeing, and the organisations leaders are responsible for.
Because character isn’t separate from leadership performance.
It is part of what sustains it.
What Sits Underneath is an invitation to step away from the leadership treadmill long enough to consider not only what you are achieving, but who you are becoming along the way.
What leaders are saying
About Dr Glenn Williams
Dr Glenn Williams is the founder and CEO of LCP Global and has spent more than thirty years working with senior leaders across business, government and not-for-profit organisations around the world.
His work has consistently explored the questions sitting beneath leadership performance: what enables some leaders to remain grounded and effective under pressure, why capable leaders sometimes lose their way, and how the person behind the role shapes the organisation around them.
Glenn’s research and practical work bring together leadership, character, organisational alignment and performance. Through LCP Global, he continues to work alongside CEOs, boards and senior leadership teams as they navigate growth, change and the demands of leading complex organisations.
He is also the author of When Leaders Are Lost: Moving Beyond Disappointment, Failure, and Hurt to Redefine Success.
Speaking Engagements
Dr Glenn Williams speaks with senior leaders, boards and executive teams about leadership character, alignment, decision-making under pressure and the inner work required to sustain performance over time.
Drawing on research, decades of leadership experience and the themes explored in What Sits Underneath, Glenn creates conversations that invite leaders to look beyond what they do and examine the person their organisation experiences when the pressure is on.
These conversations are particularly relevant for organisations navigating growth, change, leadership transition or questions about the culture they are creating for the next generation of leaders.
What kind of leader are you becoming?
Leadership leaves a mark.
It shapes organisations, cultures, relationships and people. But long before that impact becomes visible, something is being formed beneath the surface.
What Sits Underneath is an invitation to pay attention to it.
Not because any leader has reached a finished version of themselves, but because the decisions we make today are already shaping the person who will make tomorrow’s.
What sits underneath the leader others see?
The inner work that builds enduring leaders and better performance
Dr Glenn Williams