*** This article was initially published in EDGE Magazine by the Institute of Leadership in October 2024 under the title “Root & Branch Reform” ***

The ability to lead though disruption is more imperative than ever as the demands and expectations that leaders face have no precedence. Any given situation requires physical and psychological resilience to effectively navigate the ever-increasing complexities at the workplace. As a leader you have to consider a multitude of aspects, people dynamics, cultural sensitivities, internal and external stakeholders within a socio-political context in a world that is more interconnected than ever before. But what is it that leaders need when they are already overextending and overstretching themselves? 

As leaders are already doing their best to change and adapt to effectively navigate these complexities, what we might need is probably not more change, but rather an even deeper insight to ourselves. Leadership is a reflective practice, yet we get carried away by the amount of tasks and doing and we forget or neglect to pause and be, and look inside ourselves.

As humans we all have a creative side, which are all the behaviours we consciously choose on a daily basis, which include our competencies and our various behaviours. For example, we are collaborating with our teams, we achieve results, and we may have a strategic focus. If leadership were a tree, those would be the trunk and its branches, i.e. anything we see above the ground. There are also the roots, the less obvious, less conscious, and more reactive tendencies. Those are the product of our past, how we were brought up and they constitute our sets of beliefs and assumptions about the world. In certain cases they might have been chosen strategies of our childhood to ensure we got what we wanted. As we grow older some of those strategies might become redundant or even limit our effectiveness, so it’s important to become aware of those. For example, people pleasing may be such a tendency, or seeking perfection in anything and everything and performing at almost heroic levels to achieve this perfection. 

During times of disruption and extreme pressure, those tendencies tend to come to the forefront like uninvited gremlins whose intention is positive (to protect oneself), yet the impact is not as positive for the people around us who are on the receiving end of this leadership style that can look manipulative, controlling, autocratic, etc. 

The paradox and the challenge is that it’s not easy to simply get rid of those seemingly dysfunctional behaviours because they always have a positive payoff for the person. In the case of people pleasing, for example, it could be that through compliance, I get someone’s acknowledgement and respect. In the case of perfection, it could be the achievement of flawless results. The question that arises is, “at what cost?” These reactive tendencies take up a lot of our energy, they are like superman’s kryptonite that takes away his superpower. 

We know from Neuroscience that during times of disruption we tend to go into autopilot where the brain just has less creativity, less choice, and its only mandate is to survive. So, it will revert to the familiar in order to protect us, which means that those reactive tendencies might become even more pronounced. How that is illustrated at the workplace is usually through extreme behaviours or heroic modes wanting to fix things, to protect or to simply survive. And there is always something quite dramatic about those behaviours, obvious due to the energy they take up and the whole demeanour. 

It might be more useful to look at behaviours as a coin with two sides. Anything that we overdo can become a weakness and I always propose to look at behaviours with a dimmer switch and ask “when do I have to do more of this and when do I have to do less of a certain behaviour”, rather than an on-off switch. This provides us with more flexibility in our behavioural repertoire. 

So, how can we gain this deeper insight as leaders and become more effective with change? I would like to offer several aspects as food for thought: 

1. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that one of those would be to look into your own family system, the one you were brought up in. How were responsibilities shared/divided in this family system? How were decisions made? Who was leading on which topic? How was conflict handled? These are just some sample questions that could shed light on what you are carrying with you as assumptions and beliefs that you don’t even question. For example, if conflict was viewed as something bad or wasn’t encouraged, it’s more likely that you will be avoiding it as well. 

• Transference to the workplace: Which behaviours from our own family system are we transferring to the workplace more often than not totally out of our awareness? For example: Are you competitive with colleagues as you were with your e.g. sister? Are you still looking for support from your boss as you once did from your father? Any other parallels?

• Explore your drivers: Drivers are unconscious internal pressures that makes us do things in certain ways, e.g. with speed, perfection, little emotion, etc. They tend to satisfy inner needs rather than actual events. Examples of drivers include the following: Be Strong, Be Perfect, Try Hard, Hurry Up, Please Others. 

• The next point is stating the obvious, but it cannot be stressed enough. Remain open to meaningful feedback from colleagues, from your team and other stakeholder groups. 

• And a last point which tends to be mentioned so often that we take it for granted and sometimes it loses its real value. Self-awareness is key. In this case, I am referring to be aware of our superpowers, be aware of our triggers, and also I am referring to emotional self-regulation, i.e. to be in touch with one’s emotions, label them, explore them, make sense of them. 

The aim is not to get rid of our reactive tendencies or shadow side, the aim is to become as conscious of it as possible and measure our progress versus these three criteria: 1) How often does it happen to me? 2) How intense is the emotion I am feeling? 3) How fast am I recovering? If we see an improvement in all of those dimensions, then that is progress. 

Being in command of their reactive tendencies will enable leaders navigate through disruption much more effectively and ultimately supporting those around them as well.