Good leadership is both an art and a skill. It comes in different forms and there is no single model, but you know it when you see or feel it. The chief executive or senior team that takes a consistent and principled approach to delivering on an organisational vision, especially in times of turbulence. The manager who gives you the space and support that you need to develop in your role. The team member with a quiet authority, who others turn to for empathy and guidance. Your own sense of alignment when you are acting in accordance with your values, whether you are leading yourself, or others.

You also know when it is absent. Organisations where there is a gap between what the leadership say and what they actually do, or where there is a culture of blame and mistrust. Teams that consistently struggle to collaborate, even if there is shared commitment to what they are trying to achieve. Relationships characterised by micromanagement, conflict, or a lack of clear boundaries. Feelings of confusion or incompetence that you hold within yourself and that affect your performance. When good leadership is missing, it affects every part of the system. Work may still get done, but it is nowhere near as enjoyable, creative and impactful as it could be.

Crossing the leadership threshold

As I enter the final stretch of a two year MA programme on consulting and leading in organisations, I’ve been reflecting on my own leadership journey. My first experience of managing a team was confronting. It was still relatively early in my career, and I’d moved to a new organisation to take on a middle management role. The people in my team were knowledgeable and passionate about their work, and had plenty of good ideas about how to make change happen. This should have been galvanising, but instead I found myself constantly doubting my contribution. I had a vague sense of what I thought a leader should be – someone who had all the answers, and could tell others what path to take – and felt like I was falling short on both fronts.

After six months or so, a senior colleague recognised that I was struggling, and took me aside to ask what was going on. I felt both shame and relief that someone else had noticed what I had been trying to keep hidden, and opened up about my concerns and self-doubts. She gave me some good advice, observing that it wasn’t necessarily my job to know more than the people I was managing, but instead to give them the support that they needed to do their jobs to the best of their abilities. This was a lesson I would have to learn and keep relearning in subsequent management roles, but it was the start of thinking differently about what leadership involved, and how I could better manage the anxiety I felt when I was in a position of authority over others.

Taking up the leadership role

Many people end up in particular professions – as researchers, accountants, physiotherapists, train drivers or data programmers – because they have an affinity or an aptitude for the work itself, and not because they want to manage other people to do those jobs. Yet this becomes a logical step after a certain level of seniority is reached. Some organisations maintain separate ‘technical’ and ‘management’ tracks, but it is often only possible to progress by taking on a role that involves responsibility for leading others. This can be a challenging moment of transition, as it was for me. If you’re fortunate, you might have a supportive manager to help navigate the shift, or be offered some management training or job coaching. But my sense is that it’s more common to find yourself muddling through on your own, balancing an intuition about how best to lead with a set of assumptions or explicit expectations about ‘how things are done’ in your particular organisation or sector.

I’ve found Catherine Sandler’s emotional profiles triangle helpful in thinking about how different people approach this challenge. Her model suggests that there are three primary styles of leadership: one that is high-energy and passionate, focused on inspiring others and driving forward the organisational mission; one that is warm and relational, focused on developing strong personal connections; and one that is self-contained and data-driven, focused on completion of the task. Most people have a mode that they gravitate towards, where they perform at their best. I’d put myself squarely in the relational corner of the triangle. But each of these profiles has a shadow side, which can reveal itself when anxiety levels are high or when the wider context changes. Confidence can tip over into aggression, warmth into an avoidance of conflict, and certainty into inaction. I’ve experienced this in situations where difficult conversations were needed, but my fear of not being liked got in the way of having them. Understanding the way in which you inhabit your role, and how its requirements are likely to activate your strengths and your stressors, is a vital part of taking responsibility for how you lead, and the impact that this has on others. 

The impact of the system on leadership

A lot of leadership coaching puts the individual front and centre, focusing on their specific capabilities and developmental areas. Yet who we are does not exist in a vacuum; it is intimately linked to our environment and to our web of personal and professional relationships. When these change, so does our approach to leadership. This is most evident during times of disruption or transformation, which now feels like the norm, rather than the exception. 

In 2020, I was working in an organisation that launched a major strategy review and restructure following the arrival of a new chief executive. This coincided with the beginning of the pandemic, adding existential, physical threats to the fears of job changes and losses. Anxiety levels went through the roof, which I felt viscerally when facilitating a series of online workshops for teams across the organisation to discuss its evolving culture. It was present in what people said, but also in how they said it, and the ways in which they started relating to each other and the management team. The kind of leadership required in this context was very different to a previous organisational ‘steadier’ state. It had to walk a tightrope between trying to inspire people with a vision of future possibilities, while also containing huge amounts of stress, much of which was due to factors well outside its control. 

It was this experience that led me to the field of systems-psychodynamics, which seeks to understand what goes on within and between people in an organisational setting, accounting for both the psychological and systemic forces at work. It does not offer a tidy prescription for what it takes to be a good leader, but instead helps people to engage thoughtfully with the craft of leadership and all of the anxieties it involves, with the aim of building a capacity to genuinely lead through uncertainty. Considering all that we are facing in our institutions and communities, this has never felt more urgent.