Leadership is a Choice: Challenging How We Think About Power and Leadership

How do the choices leaders make shape the way power is exercised?

On February 2, the Corporations and Society Initiative (CASI) departed from its usual event format to host a leadership workshop with Linda Ginzel of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and Stanford GSB Senior Associate Dean Deborah Gruenfeld. Drawing on their shared backgrounds in social psychology and decades of experience teaching future leaders, Ginzel and Gruenfeld guided the audience through a reflective conversation about how leadership is learned, practiced, and ultimately chosen, beginning with our earliest encounters with influence and authority. The discussion throughout was firmly tied to research-driven insights about power, behavior, and responsibility, many of which can be found in their books, Choosing Leadership and Acting With Power.

Gruenfeld said that her relationship with Ginzel, which began more than 30 years ago, is strengthened by their common belief that leadership develops from the inside out. Rather than learning to lead by mimicking people in positions of authority, she and Ginzel emphasize self-knowledge as the starting point. For them, leadership begins with an understanding of your own instincts and habits, as those patterns help determine how you can be an effective leader.

Ginzel traced this perspective to her early career as a corporate trainer, where she learned a simple lesson about adult learning: people learn best from their own experience. Her teaching approach centers on what she calls individual written reflection, a method that helps participants become their own coaches by identifying patterns, giving themselves feedback, and seeing how habits and instincts play out in real situations over time.

“Lectures are important,” she said, “but I help people to collect the data of their own experience and to process that.”

To demonstrate how a simple prompt can be used in her approach, she asked Gruenfeld to recall an early leadership experience. Gruenfeld shared a memory from first grade, when her teacher asked the class to color a drawing of a lion. She colored the lion black, while her classmates chose yellow and orange. Although her preference drew clear disapproval from her teacher, she remained committed to an idea she believed was right. Looking back, Gruenfeld framed the episode as an early leadership test, a willingness to diverge from expectations, trust her own judgment, and stand by it, even when she stood alone.

Ginzel used the story to underscore that early leadership moments do not need to be dramatic or even effective to matter. What mattered was not the black lion itself, but Gruenfeld’s response to authority. She noticed disapproval, questioned it, and stayed committed rather than backing down. Leadership, Ginzel argued, is often a choice made in moments of risk, before outcomes or approval are clear. The exercise, she explained, is less about the story on the surface than about uncovering the deeper reasons why someone steps forward, what triggers that choice, and how it shows up across time.

As Gruenfeld reflected on her own career, she recognized that same instinct at work in her research.

“I look at things other people are looking at, I see them differently, and then I write papers about what I see,” she said. “I don't think about whether anyone's going to applaud or boo, and I don't think about how many citations I'm going to get. I have a vision and I execute on it.”

Ginzel then turned to the group and offered a structured exercise that paired quiet, individual reflection about an early leadership experience with brief small-group sharing designed to uncover new insights through what she calls collective wisdom.

She emphasized the importance of capturing insights in writing, because reflection is more valuable and enduring when the results are recorded. The goal is to recognize how leadership understanding is deeper when people learn together. In Ginzel’s framing, this exchange builds leadership capital, along with the capacity and courage that develop through intentional reflection and shared learning.

During the Q&A, the conversation returned to the tension between learning from others and leading authentically. Gruenfeld noted that role models are most useful when they share the characteristics and behavior that are most like our own.

“I think we all do get inspired by people and try to emulate them.” But she warned, “unless it's coming from someplace that is really you, it's not going to land the way you want it to.”

Ginzel agreed, observing that while leadership education often defaults to analyzing other people’s decisions, it is far harder and more necessary to look inward. When the discussion turned to high-stakes decision-making, Ginzel distinguished the difference between a true leader’s focus on the future vs. the great tendency for managers to focus on the present. In moments of uncertainty, she argued, leaders must act with the competence and judgment they have and commit to their visions and decisions even without guarantees.

Gruenfeld claimed that while effective leadership begins with understanding one’s natural instincts and why these feel comfortable, one should also recognize when what is comfortable is often rooted in fear of the alternatives. Growth, she argued, comes from learning to draw on different parts of oneself when circumstances demand it.

“The question is, can you dig a little deeper and find some part of yourself that may be terrified?”

The challenge, Gruenfeld observed, is to stretch beyond instinct without losing authenticity and to find the courage to show up differently when leadership requires it.