3 Unconventional Leadership Lessons from Psychology
Full disclosure: I’m not a psychologist. My insights are based on my conversations with the people who are, as well as soul-searching, observations, experiences, and my own successes and struggles in human relationships.
Over the course of my career, I watched people dissolve in front of my eyes under the impact of poor leadership. To no surprise, these organisations struggled to stay solvent. I also experienced thriving, empowering and inspiring environments. Those became leaders in their industry.
We like to think that we should separate emotionality from our careers. There is no such thing. In an organisation, we are a tribe. We are all there to survive as a collective. The success of this tribe is reliant on the quality of human connections within.
If there is one thing leaders need to understand, it’s precisely that. The issue is, not many do. The basis of human connection is emotional understanding. But talking about emotionality at work is deemed strange, unacceptable, unproductive and wrong. We opt for ignoring the problem once human emotionality shows up. It’s uncomfortable. We see it as an attack. We don’t know what to do. It stirs our fears.
I learned what the key to navigate through difficult professional relationships is really about.
It took a great deal of learning about human psychology to demystify people’s reactions. An overwhelming majority of people are emotional strangers to themselves. I observed, analysed and researched every new pattern of reactions I came across with the people I worked with in a close setup. It was comparative to the way somebody on the autistic spectrum would try to make sense of the world. I found this analytical approach to understanding people made me understand and strengthen my own core self, and in turn, provided a better guidance to the people I needed to train. And that’s what it really comes down to.
Your growth as a leader will depend on how well you understand your own inner working.
One of the great concepts Simon Sinek has popularised on the topic of corporate leadership is that good leadership is essentially equal to effective parenting. In many ways, this is true. There is, however, one big difference: parenting a young child allows for influencing their formative, receptive and plastic mind. People start their professional career once their mind is already wired to operate in set patterns. Those patters are sometimes erratic and maladaptive, or in other words: difficult.
And, even more so, this includes leaders as well: they come in with their own emotional makeup. This brings in a whole new layer of complexity — how do you lead a cornucopia of different personalities, core wounds, perceptions, identity disturbances and attachment styles, while we also have our own subjectivity to manage?
Here are the three conclusions I came to.
1. Empathy is misunderstood. It’s about you, not them.
We like to think about empathy as connecting with another person’s feelings. As if engaging in a chat with somebody would evoke shared feelings between the two people. As if what we’re feeling is the same as what they’re feeling, and hence we have the same experience of happiness, fear or pain. As if some sort of a magic thread connects us. This is false.
Empathy is a subjective experience. When we ‘empathise’ with somebody, we only make our best guess on what the other person is experiencing. We tap into our memory and remember how it felt when a similar scenario once happened to us, or try to imagine how it would feel like if it had. Then we feel our interpretation of their experience. It might be completely off in comparison to what it really is. Empathy is a projection of our internal environment and makes us less capable of truly reading the minds of others.
This is important to understand because it puts pragmatism into leadership. Instead of assuming what the other person needs and jumping to solutions under the veil of best intentions, it makes us ask questions and connect with their experience better. I found that the most effective way to help people is to remove myself from my own emotional assumptions. Instead, I use what my empathy is telling me to guide me to ask better questions. Sometimes the problem we think we’re solving is completely erroneous.
2. It takes being vulnerable to become strong.
There are many books, articles and courses that can teach you about the different leadership styles, how to motivate and inspire others, and how to make sound decisions. However, knowing the principles of leadership doesn’t automatically make you a great leader. These things need to be felt and understood on a personal level.
All of the elements of great leadership come together as one holistic system, which is centred around a common thread: creating a feeling of safety in your team.
Feeling safe means trusting that others will have your back. Within the framework of organisations, this trust is earned through many means, including:
Trust in the leader’s vision.
Trust in the leader’s honesty and integrity.
Trust in the leader’s fairness and good judgement.
The truth is no-one can do it right 100% of the time. The vision we believed in might be more difficult to reach than we anticipated and requires pivoting. We might have made wrong decisions or acted in ways we later realised were not ideal. That is fine, because trust doesn’t have to be shattered by one error. And earning this level of trust requires vulnerability. Being vulnerable in a work setting is not something that many people talk about, yet it’s essential for building strong connections, and it is by far the most difficult thing to do.
It’s hard, because it requires exposing who you are and what you think and feel in situations involving risk, uncertainty, or emotional harm. Showing emotions to the team and coworkers, talking openly about challenges and asking for help when you need it creates a supportive net for everybody, including the leadership. It fosters the environment in which the team comes together. Vulnerability in the workplace is not a weakness or a fragility, but a strength and a base of authentic leadership, and a core component of building trust.
3. Complete self-control is an illusion. You will never have it.
Self-control is the absolute key to building a strong relationship with the team. However, believing we can have full control of ourselves is an illusion; your ability to control yourself depends on how well you understand your own drivers. We assume we’ll be able to self-regulate because we learned about our triggers from our past experiences. But life comes with new challenges for which we can never really be ready. Our experience has no way of preparing us for the problems that we’ve never faced before.
The next thing to understand is that we are not constant. We change, shift and adapt to the influences of our environment, the people we spend time with and the problems we are facing. Complete ownership over ourselves is impossible, because we can never fully predict how new experiences will influence us. Therefore, we will never own and control the future part of us.
What we should strive for is understanding when we are not in control of ourselves, and taking it as an opportunity for learning and practising adaptability. In other words, increasing your brain’s neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to learn and adapt, and it can be dialled up and down. You can’t know how you’ll experience a new situation, but you can make your brain receptive to forming better pathways once the time comes.
What this means in practical terms is teaching your brain to come up with good strategies on the spot when you can’t fully regulate your own emotions, thoughts and actions. A good strategy is taking a pause and giving yourself time to process new information. You might not be in control for a minute, but by not reacting and, instead, taking time to reflect, you will quickly regain it. The brain is a magically adaptable system. Make it work for you. Stop, observe, reflect and then respond. Teach your team how to do the same.
In summary,
Don’t trust your empathy; ask questions.
Normalise being vulnerable.
Strengthen your own adaptability to change.
