Reactive leaders rarely know they are being reactive. They think they are doing the opposite. And from a distance, reactive vs proactive can look almost identical.
A few years ago, I worked with a CEO who appeared to be a great leader on the surface. The business was growing. His team was full of motivated, high performers, and he moved fast, made decisions, set extremely high standards, and held the line on them. From the outside, every signal pointed to a leader who was driving the company forward.
He would have told you the same thing. If you asked him where he fell on the proactive vs reactive spectrum, he would have placed himself on the proactive end without hesitation.
But something felt off to him. He kept circling the same feeling: that he was working too hard and he wasn’t feeling effective.
When we worked together, the pattern surfaced quickly. He lived inside a steady hum of frustration. When his team did not move at his pace, the frustration would tip into anger. When someone fell short of his standards, he would quietly write them off. The next time their name came up, he had already decided what he thought.
In his mind, this was excellence. He was striving, holding the bar high and expecting the people around him to live up to it.
What he could not see was that his striving had a cost. The team was burning out little by little, and so was he.
Reactive vs proactive, from the inside
Here is what I think was actually happening. The CEO was not driven by where he wanted the business to go. He was driven by what he could not tolerate, and the business became a place where he could practice that intolerance. Every missed deadline, every misunderstanding, and every disagreement gave him something to react to. He began to believe that he was the only one keeping the ship afloat and felt that without him, the business would fail.
Stephen Covey put this distinction at the center of his work on habits. He called proactivity the space between stimulus and response, the gap in which a leader chooses who to be next. The CEO had collapsed that space.
Reactive leadership and proactive leadership look very similar from the outside. The pace, decisions, standards, and conviction all look identical. What is different is what is moving you. The CEO was moved by all the problems and challenges happening around him.
A reactive leader is moved by what they cannot stand. A proactive leader is moved by what they long for and what they desire. You can learn more about this distinction in my article on reactive vs proactive leadership.
Where are you putting your attention?
Are you caught in the trap where intensity feels like intention?
Does pressure feel like progress?
Are you attached to the identity of the Type A leader who has built something real on the back of that intensity?
If you answered yes to any of those, the system has been rewarding you for staying inside it. That is why you think you are being proactive.
Here’s the subtle shift:
Proactive leadership is an attention discipline, not an intensity setting. The reactive vs proactive choice happens upstream of the action, where you point your attention before the day points it for you.
The reactive leader asks, “What is in my way?” The proactive leader asks, “Where do I want to put my attention this week?” Those are not the same question, and they do not produce the same behavior.
A few things to try this week, if any of this is hitting close to home:
- Notice the moment frustration takes the wheel. That is your signal that something has pulled you into a reactive state.
- Pause long enough to ask what triggered it before you respond. Identifying your triggers can help you shift your state.
- Pick the two or three things that you really want to pursue and put your attention there. Let the rest go a little longer than is comfortable.
You will know you have made the shift when frustration stops being your primary input. When you start setting the pace of the day, and feeling a little joy along the way.
