Nature versus Nurture?
The oldest debate in the world is the question if we have free will (my take on this: It is probably useful for yourself and others to pretend you have one), the second oldest about nature (DNA) versus nurture (Upbringing).
In my perception, it is not a question of Nature versus Nurture but of nature and nurture. I am a strong believer in the ‘Big Five’ and a strong believer (as well as an ‘Expert by experience’) in the role that upbringing and family structure play in our development as leaders.
However, given the fact that we cannot change our DNA, that makes our need to analyze the impact our upbringing and family structure played in our development more important than ever.
The best book I ever read about this topic was ‘Rewriting your Leadership Code’ by Shlomo Ben-Hur and Nik Kinley.
This book posits that our core instincts originate in childhood, creating neural pathways that act like the code of our internal operating system (OS). This OS determines how we process events, make choices, interact with others, and influence our teams. While professional composure usually masks these deep-seated traits, high-pressure situations strip away that filter and reveal our true reactions. Ultimately, leading through crisis exposes both the strengths and flaws of our fundamental character.
I recently had the pleasure of having a conversation with Shlomo about this book. In our conversation, we discussed:
- The Leadership Code
- The importance of Self-Awareness for Leaders
- How Leaders can increase their Self-Awareness
- Three critical capabilities for Leaders
- The Big Themes: Free Will and Nature versus Nurture
- Childhood Traumas and Executive Coaching
- Rewriting our code?
► You can watch or listen to a podcast with our conversation on:
► No time to watch or listen to the podcast now? Here is a short summary of the key points of our conversation:
Dirk Verburg: What do you mean by the word “code” in the context of your book, Rewriting Your Leadership Code, co-authored with Nick Kinley?
Shlomo Ben-Hur: Our research with 2,500 leaders showed that performance relies on an operating system built on trust, clarity, and momentum. However, under pressure, leaders often default to an instinctual operating system.
The “code” refers to automatic, unconscious tendencies shaped by early life experiences that steer leaders toward these default habits. It acts like psychological DNA, pre-programming instructions for how we interpret events and behave.
This code is active from early childhood and strengthens over time like a trained muscle. It lives in the subconscious, driving our reactions and influencing the environments we choose. Understanding this code allows leaders to recognize why they default to specific patterns under pressure and gives them the conscious ability to override those habits when a situation demands a different approach.
Dirk Verburg: Why is self-awareness critical for leaders, and what are the potential consequences both for themselves and their organizations if they lack it?
Shlomo Ben-Hur: Leaders often operate on automatic pilot due to high-pressure, fragmented work environments where reflection is rare. Without self-awareness, instinctual reactions take over, and the higher a leader rises, the larger the negative impact of these unmanaged instincts.
Without genuine self-awareness, decision-making becomes a form of blind gambling. The consequences reach beyond the individual leader: it destabilizes team culture, erodes organizational trust, increases defensiveness, degrades communication, and frequently leads to executive derailment. In high-stakes business environments, relying blindly on unexamined instincts can lead to catastrophic strategic missteps and multi-million-dollar financial errors.
Dirk Verburg: If feedback surveys and personality tests are insufficient, how can leaders truly get to know themselves and uncover their unconscious patterns?
Shlomo Ben-Hur: Standard feedback surveys only show external behavior—what other people see—rather than underlying drivers. Similarly, traditional personality tests rely on self-reports based on what you are already consciously aware of. Neither tool is designed to uncover the deeply hidden, subconscious tendencies that formed before you developed language.
To surface these unconscious patterns, leaders must engage in structured, retrospective reflection on formative childhood events, key authority figures like parents and teachers, and early relationship dynamics. This reflective narrative process works backward from current adult behaviors to identify consistent patterns in what you pay attention to, who you surround yourself with, how you react under pressure, and what reactions you trigger in others.
While this process requires more time and effort than a quick questionnaire, it provides the necessary depth for meaningful growth. Additionally, seeking input from people who know your personal history and background can help trace the true origins of your behavioral triggers.
Dirk Verburg: Can you provide an example of how a childhood experience can impact a leader’s ability to process and see information objectively?
Shlomo Ben-Hur: Information processing is active and biased by our internal code. We are naturally encoded to pay attention to what is familiar, emotive, threatening, or rewarding, while frequently filtering out the opposite.
What you were praised or punished for as a child becomes an encoded standard by which you judge others as an adult. If you grew up in a family that deeply prized hard work, your instinctual reaction as a leader will be to judge anyone who works differently as inherently lazy.
Similarly, if you experienced bullying or had critical, inconsistent parents, your neural pathways may condition you to interpret ambiguous behaviors in the workplace as threatening or untrustworthy. This unconscious conditioning heavily colors who you choose to consult with, which strategic options you consider, how you evaluate performance, and what evidence you weigh when making major decisions.
Dirk Verburg: How do early life experiences shape a leader’s capacity to manage emotions and maintain composure under pressure?
Shlomo Ben-Hur: Emotional reactions under pressure are shaped by general emotional reactivity, anxiety levels, and core self-belief. While genetics plays a role, roughly half of this makeup is shaped by lived experience and encoded during early life.
Heightened anxiety and poor emotional composure stem from specific early environmental categories, including negative life events, insecure attachment to parental figures, low emotional warmth, corporal punishment, overcontrol, and high family criticism. Growing up with inconsistent parental discipline creates continuous background anxiety because a child never knows whether a behavior will be rewarded or punished, leading them to constantly anticipate danger.
Additionally, environmental stressors like growing up in volatile regions or living with highly anxious parents double your likelihood of becoming highly anxious. When pressure mounts in leadership roles, these early encoded responses activate, dictating whether a leader maintains calm composure or reacts with heightened emotionality and defensiveness.
Dirk Verburg: How do early life experiences influence relationship dynamics, conflict management, and authority relations for senior leaders?
Shlomo Ben-Hur: Early experiences establish basic templates for how leaders handle authority and navigate workplace conflict. Under stress, leaders default to one of three primary conflict tendencies: moving toward conflict by trying to appease others, moving away from conflict through avoidance, or moving against conflict by aggressively forcing their way through it.
Family background significantly influences these tendencies. For instance, children from large families often develop higher sociability, making them naturally comfortable managing broad spans of direct reports.
Furthermore, early relationships trigger strong transference reactions toward authority figures or difficult colleagues in the workplace. A prominent example is Elon Musk, whose biographer traces his extreme risk tolerance, relentless craving for drama, and aggressive posture against authority directly to a severe, traumatic childhood in South Africa marked by intense bullying and an unsupportive father. When leadership environments lack drama, these deep-seated childhood codes drive individuals to create it.
Dirk Verburg: To what degree do we truly possess free will, and how much control do we have over this encoded programming?
Shlomo Ben-Hur: We are not entirely agents of pure free will, as human behavior is significantly influenced by inherited genetics and early environmental conditioning interacting continuously. Most leaders like to believe they operate with complete, objective control, but scientific evidence shows that subconscious programming plays a far greater role in daily choices than we realize.
However, this reality does not mean we should fall into fatalism or assume self-improvement is impossible. While we may not have absolute control over our initial instinctual reactions, we always possess the conscious choice to become aware of our code and work actively to adjust our responses.
As an ancient Jewish tradition suggests, everything has been written, but permission is given. The human brain retains neuroplasticity throughout life, meaning pathways can adapt. Executive coaching provides the deliberate space required to help leaders recognize these hidden choices, enabling them to transition from automatic habits to deliberate, well-considered leadership decisions.
Dirk Verburg: Where should the line sit between executive coaching and clinical therapy when working with early life patterns?
Shlomo Ben-Hur: Executive coaches must maintain a clear boundary by practicing child-informed coaching rather than engaging in therapy. The key distinction lies in the overall goal and focus of the work.
Therapy seeks to explore, process, and heal original psychological wounds or resolve past trauma. In contrast, child-informed coaching focuses entirely on helping healthy, highly successful executives understand how their past formative experiences shape their present-day workplace behaviors, choices, and instinctual triggers.
Coaches should help clients examine how early patterns manifest in current professional settings and support them in building new behavioral scripts. This work explicitly avoids attempting to treat trauma or heal historical wounds. If an exploration reveals deep psychopathology or unresolved trauma requiring clinical treatment, the coach must maintain sensitivity, utilize professional supervision, and immediately refer the leader to a qualified mental health practitioner.
Dirk Verburg: To what degree can leaders rewrite or override their old code, or are they permanent captives of it?
Shlomo Ben-Hur: You cannot completely erase or delete your old code because those foundational neural pathways remain permanently in the brain due to decades of repeated use. However, you are not a helpless captive to it. Leaders can actively construct new, competing neural pathways alongside the old ones through deliberate practice and repetition.
By identifying default routines in recurring pressure situations, you can consciously interrupt automatic reactions, substitute negative inner beliefs with new phrases or mantras, and rehearse alternative behaviors until they become habitual.
While a newly constructed pathway may never be as deeply entrenched as an instinct formed in early childhood, it only needs to be strong enough to compete and win key moments when it matters most. The goal is not a radical transformation into a completely different person, but rather making incremental, sustainable improvements to become a far more deliberate and self-aware version of yourself.
► About Shlomo Ben-Hur
Shlomo Ben-Hur is a Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at IMD with over 20 years of executive experience, including Vice President of Leadership Development at BP and Chief Learning Officer at DaimlerChrysler. As an organizational psychologist, he advises CEOs, boards, and global leadership teams on people strategy, talent management, team capabilities, and organizational culture.
At IMD, Ben-Hur directs the award-winning Organizational Learning in Action program and chairs the Chief Learning Officers Circle, bringing together HR and learning executives to address industry challenges. His research focuses on enabling organizations to learn faster than competitors and positioning corporate learning strategically.
A prolific author published in Harvard Business Review, Fortune, and Financial Times, his book Leadership OS compares leadership to a computer operating system. It argues that modern leadership success relies on creating optimal environments and developing talent to maximize performance across the organization.
