He would tell you that himself.
He was young. Ambitious. A career stretching out in front of him with more rungs than he could count. Management was the next rung. So he climbed toward it the way you climb toward anything when you are young and certain the destination is worth the effort.
The title. The advancement. The seat at a bigger table. Those were the reasons. Not bad reasons exactly. Just incomplete ones.
He did not know that yet.
Then something happened that removed the foundation he had been standing on.
He was put in charge of a team he knew nothing about. Different discipline. Different domain. The technical credibility he had built over years was useless here. He could not lead with expertise because he did not have any. He could not impress his way through meetings because the people in those meetings knew more than he did about everything that mattered technically.
All he had left was the people themselves.
So he started there. Asking questions instead of providing answers. Learning what each person was trying to accomplish and what was getting in their way. Finding out where they were stuck and whether he could help them get unstuck. Not because he had a framework for it. Because it was the only thing available to him.
And then something unexpected happened.
People started to succeed. Not because of what he knew. Because of what he made possible for them. And when he watched it happen, when he saw someone figure out something they had been stuck on, when he watched confidence arrive in a person who had been uncertain, he felt something he had not felt climbing the ladder.
Pride. Like watching a kid ride a bike for the first time.
That feeling changed everything about why he showed up.
A mentor helped him understand what he was experiencing. Someone who had already made this shift and lived on the other side of it. Who led not to advance but to develop. Who measured success not by his own trajectory but by the trajectories of the people around him. Watching that modeled made it possible to name what he was becoming.
Most people who step into leadership never ask themselves why they want it. The promotion arrives and they accept it. The question goes unexamined. And the why they never named ends up shaping every decision they make, who they develop, who they protect, who they spend their time on, and who they overlook.
The self-serving reasons are not wrong. They are just insufficient on their own.
The leaders who build something worth building almost always find a second why somewhere along the way. One that points outward instead of inward.
If you are developing someone into leadership right now, ask them that question before the promotion arrives. Why do you want this? The answer will tell you more about what they will need than any job description ever will.
The why you start with is rarely the one that sustains you.