The Five Drivers That Shape High-Performing Leaders

Executive coaching Geneva | Transactional analysis for leaders | Drivers and leadership patterns

There's a particular kind of leader I often end up working with. They are, by most external measures, performing. They've built something, scaled something, been promoted into something. They are respected. They get results. And somewhere underneath all of that, there's a quieter fact: the way they're getting those results is becoming the problem.

It's the founder who cannot let anything ship until it's perfect, and whose team has learned to route around them. It's the engineering lead whose default pace is faster, and who wonders why their best people keep burning out. It's the creative director who says yes to every brief, every ask, every new thing, until the quality of their own work has started to erode. It's the CEO who has never once, in ten years, said I can't do this alone, and who is close to discovering why that was a bad strategy.

These patterns have a name in transactional analysis. They're called drivers — and they are one of the most useful concepts I bring into executive coaching, because they describe something that high-performing leaders almost universally recognise the moment they see it.

What are drivers in Transactional Analysis?

In Transactional Analysis, drivers are unconscious internal imperatives that govern how a person tries to be good enough — usually developed early in life, usually out of conscious awareness, and usually working hard behind the scenes of adult behaviour.

They were identified by the Transactional Analyst Taibi Kahler in the 1970s as part of his work on what he called the process model. Kahler noticed that under pressure, people displayed one of a small number of repeating micro-patterns — in their language, their posture, their tone, the speed of their thinking — each of which corresponded to an underlying command about what they had to be in order to be acceptable.

There are five:

• Be Perfect

• Hurry Up

• Please Others 

• Be Strong

• Try Hard

Most leaders have one or two that dominate. Some have a primary and a secondary that alternate under different kinds of stress. All five can be useful in small doses. All five become expensive when they're running the show.

Why drivers matter more in leadership than almost anywhere else

The thing about drivers is that they work. That's the trap.

In early career, drivers are often the engine of success. Be Perfect produces excellent output. Hurry Up gets things shipped. Please Others builds relationships. Be Strong gets you through hard things without falling apart. Try Hard earns you a reputation for effort and commitment.

The problem arrives later — at the scale, complexity, and relational demand of senior leadership. The behaviours that got you here are the same ones that now cost you disproportionately, because leadership is no longer about your individual output. It's about the system around you, the people you're developing, the quality of your thinking under sustained load, and the signals your way of operating sends to the organisation.

When a driver is running unseen, a leader tends to mistake the cost for a performance problem. They work harder. They try to fix the symptom. They wonder why the pattern keeps re-forming.

The shift happens when the driver becomes visible — not as a flaw, but as a strategy that once made sense and now needs updating.

The five drivers — how each one shows up in senior leadership

Be Perfect

The internal command: nothing I produce can contain a flaw, because flaws reveal something unacceptable about me.

In leadership, Be Perfect shows up as the executive who cannot delegate without micromanaging, because anything that leaves their hands must meet an impossible internal standard. It shows up as the founder who re-edits the deck at midnight. It shows up as the creative leader who can't praise work until they've found everything wrong with it first — and then genuinely can't understand why their team has stopped taking risks.

The cost is almost never visible as perfectionism. It's visible as slowness, bottlenecks, and a team that has learned not to bring ideas forward until they're fully formed — which means the early, generative, messy thinking that used to happen openly now happens privately, or not at all.

Hurry Up

The internal command: I must move fast, and any pause is wasted time.

Hurry Up leaders are often brilliant in early-stage environments. They make decisions quickly, cut through deliberation, and generate visible momentum. In a scaled organisation, though, the same pattern starts to degrade the quality of thinking — their own and everyone else's. Meetings become transactional. Complex problems get surface-level solutions. Team members start to feel that they're being processed rather than heard.

The deeper cost of Hurry Up is often internal: a nervous system that can't settle, a chronic sense of being behind, an inability to fully arrive in the present moment of any conversation — because some part of the leader is already two meetings ahead.

Please Others

The internal command: my role is to attune to what others need and provide it, because being needed is how I belong.

Please Others looks, on the surface, like excellent leadership. These are the leaders who are skilled at reading rooms, who build loyal teams, who show up for people. In a relational sense, they are often outstanding.

The cost becomes visible when they have to hold a position that will disappoint someone important. Their capacity for hard decisions — the ones that require holding ground under relational pressure — is quietly compromised. They over-negotiate. They find themselves saying yes in meetings and then having to walk it back privately. They sometimes discover, late, that their niceness has been confused with conviction, and that people who needed a strong decision from them got ambiguity instead.

Be Strong

The internal command: I must not show weakness, need, or vulnerability, because those are dangerous.

Be Strong is often the dominant driver in senior leaders from technical, operational, or turnaround backgrounds. It produces an appearance of unflappability. It allows people to carry enormous weight without visible strain. It is, in many organisational contexts, rewarded.

The costs are usually paid elsewhere. In the leader's health. In their relationships outside work. In the quality of the support they allow themselves — a Be Strong leader often cannot receive coaching, mentorship, or honest challenge, because any of those things require admitting that they don't already have it handled. And critically, Be Strong leaders rarely model psychological safety for their teams, because they haven't granted it to themselves.

Try Hard

The internal command: my worth comes from visible effort, and finishing something cleanly feels less important than being seen to be working at it.

Try Hard is the driver that rewards the attempt over the completion. It produces leaders who are always busy, always engaged, always on — and who have a surprisingly difficult time finishing things, delegating cleanly, or letting something be done.

In creative and tech contexts, Try Hard can get misdiagnosed as dedication or passion. The underlying pattern is different: a deep, often unexamined belief that effort itself is the proof of worth. The cost is a leader who is exhausted, a pipeline full of started-and-restarted work, and a team that's never quite sure what "finished" actually means.

How drivers interact with the rest of a leadership script

Drivers don't operate in isolation. They sit inside a broader script — the set of early decisions a person made about who they had to be in order to be loved, safe, and acceptable. The injunctions I wrote about in Why You Allow Yourself to be Underestimated in the Room are one part of that architecture. Drivers are another.

Where injunctions tend to say don't — don't be important, don't succeed, don't be you — drivers say do, and keep doing. They are the counter-movement, the as long as I keep being perfect, I'll be okay strategy that holds the whole system together.

That's why you can't really address one without the other. A leader who sees their Be Perfect driver but doesn't see the injunction it's protecting — the early message that said you weren't enough as you were — will tend to relapse into the same pattern, sometimes in a more subtle form. The driver will reappear as a commitment to excellence that looks acceptable from the outside but feels, internally, just as compulsive as it ever did.

Good driver work doesn't just stop the behaviour. It understands what the behaviour was doing, and finds a way to get that need met that doesn't cost the leader their strategic capacity, their team, or their health.

What changes when a leader sees their driver clearly

I want to be specific about what shifts in this work, because self-awareness is an overused word and it doesn't quite capture what actually happens.

When a leader sees their driver clearly — and this usually happens in stages, over a period of weeks rather than in a single aha moment — a few things become possible that weren't before.

They gain the capacity to notice the driver in flight. They can feel the Hurry Up pressure rising in their body before a meeting and make a different choice about pace. They can catch the Please Others pull in a difficult conversation and stay with the harder position anyway. They can feel the Be Perfect contraction before sending an email and choose to send the imperfect version.

They stop conflating the driver with their identity. The driver was never who they were. It was a strategy that kept them safe in a particular early environment, and they no longer need it to run the whole operating system.

They become better to work for. This is the part most leaders underestimate. The cost of an unseen driver is almost always paid, partly, by the people around them. When the driver eases, the team experiences a different kind of leader — one who can think, who can pause, who can hear, who can let something be good enough, who can acknowledge effort without demanding more.

And they reclaim range. A leader whose repertoire was Be Strong plus Hurry Up now has access to slower, softer, more reflective modes of leadership that were always available to them but felt, previously, impermissible.

Why this work matters particularly in creative, digital, and technology sectors

The industries I work in — creative, digital, technology — tend to select for drivers, often without realising it.

Creative work rewards Be Perfect. Start-ups reward Hurry Up. Client-facing digital agencies reward Please Others. Engineering cultures reward Be Strong. And almost all of these environments reward Try Hard, because visible effort is how most of these organisations measure commitment.

This means that leaders in these sectors are often operating with two or three drivers in heavy rotation, in environments that keep rewarding the behaviour — right up until the point where it stops working. The reckoning, when it comes, tends to arrive at the senior transition point: the move into the C-suite, the move from founder to leader of a scaled organisation, the move from individual contributor to the person responsible for a hundred other people's working lives.

That's the moment when the old strategy finally collapses under its own weight. And it's the moment when transactional analysis-informed executive coaching tends to be most useful — because it doesn't treat the problem as a skills gap. It treats it as what it actually is: an inherited operating system that needs updating.

A question worth sitting with

Think about the way you tend to perform under pressure. Not what you do — what you feel you have to be in order for the situation to be survivable.

Faster. More perfect. Less needy. More helpful. More visibly working at it.

Which one is it, when the pressure is real?

That answer is useful information. It's not a character flaw. It's a strategy that worked once, and that has almost certainly kept working long past its expiry date. And it's the beginning of the work.

Fleur Jaworski-Richards Executive Coaching

Fleur Jaworski-Richards is an executive coach and psychotherapeutic counsellor based between Chamonix and Geneva. She works with senior leaders in creative, digital, and technology sectors, bringing over 25 years of industry experience together with ICF coaching certification and UKCP psychotherapeutic training in Transactional Analysis.

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