When complexity requires more of you
Confronting self-sabotage, blindspots, and imposter syndrome in complexity
When you find yourself saying things like, “I don’t know what to do, I’ve tried everything,” or you feel overwhelmed at the vision ahead, or when the anxiety of uncertainty keeps you up at night, you’ve likely come to the end of your strength and need something more expansive.
You’ve heard the phrase “past performance does not guarantee future results,” well the same is true of leadership – no matter how successful you might have been up to this point. Common leadership advice would say, “double down on your strengths and ignore your weaknesses.” And while that might work for a star performing individual contributor, it won’t take a senior leader very far. The strengths we develop to navigate the complexity of life work, until they don’t.
As your company grows, you’ll have to learn to rely on the collective wisdom of your team to navigate your way forward, which requires a more nuanced way of being and learning. To grow as a leader, you’ll have to take full responsibility for a more complete picture of yourself and how others experience you – including your weaknesses.
In coaching, I spend a lot of time helping leaders become aware of – and learn to calibrate – three limiters:
Self Sabotage – which most often has to do with overidentification with and overuse of strength.
Blind Spots – which most often has to do with underidentification with and underdevelopment of weaknesses.
Imposter Syndrome – which most often has to do with underidentification with strength and associated overcompensation.
For self-sabotage, leaders often have their strengths dialed up to 11, at which point it starts to work against them. Think about the highly analytical leader who shuts down the team with their intellectual sparring. They might feel powerful and energetic in the moment because they were using their strengths, but it often ends up disempowering the team. Or think about the highly relational leader that wants to make sure everyone is comfortable and connected. The team might appreciate the care to some extent, but through avoiding conflict the leader coddles the team or offers very little clarity of direction.
On the flip side of that same coin are blindspots. Leaders who try to hide their weaknesses or avoid responsibility for them can cause problems for the team. Consider the leader whose strength in direct messaging would land better if only she used a softer, more relational tone, something she considers a weakness. Or the facilitative leader who does a great job of inviting everyone else’s opinion to the table, but leaves out their own voice at the expense of clarity and decisiveness because they believe their own thoughts would weaken the team.
And then there’s imposter syndrome, which has to do with under-identifying with strength. You know the leader who, despite a pattern of being able to figure it out, whatever the challenge, has difficulty believing they’re bringing anything of value to the table. And that it’s only a matter of time until everyone finds out they’re a fraud, even though all the external data would say otherwise! This distorted understanding of self most often comes from under-identifying with their strengths and rejecting the reality of the data they’ve gained around them. There’s some fear of what would happen if they really accepted what they are capable of. And until they do accept it, they tend to pursue satiating their anxiety with over-performance and over-responsibility until they burn out.
I’ve found that these three limiters really start to cause problems when leaders encounter a certain level of complexity in their business that demands they rely more on a senior team. Until then, a President/CEO/Founder can get by being the “top dog” and rely on their strengths and dismiss their shortcomings as “not my style.”
I use a simple framework to coach leaders in self-awareness and responsibility for their whole self based on three modes of inquiry. These modes of inquiry are the ways a leader probes into complex situations to learn and act. (I’ve adapted this framework from my work with the Enneagram and The Design Way’s ‘forms of inquiry’...more on all that in another post later). In a healthy leader, all three of these aspects of self act as a confluence — the place where three rivers meet:
Head: What is true and how do we know? Thinking + Analysis + Synthesis + Prediction
Heart: What is desirable and how could we create it together? Feeling + Connection + Purpose + Empathy
Gut: What is real and how do we deal with it? Action + Instincts + Judgement + Conviction
For any leader, one of these modes of inquiry tend to be the primary one they use to engage with the world – that shows up as their strength; then there’s a secondary inquiry, which supports the first; and then there’s a tertiary inquiry that’s repressed – it’s what we avoid asking questions about or have trouble seeing – this is our weakness.
A leader can identify their inquiry “stack” through self-observation and reflection, feedback from peers, and with the help of a coach. And once they develop that awareness, they can begin to calibrate their stack in order to have a more expansive inquiry set with which to engage the team and make decisions with. It can also help them to better appreciate others’ stacks, and build a cache of questions they can use to coach others with and get the team humming.
For instance, someone with a stack that looks like: Gut - Head - Heart; can start to pay attention to how their quick judgments and analytical bent impacts others and may shut down conversation. And that by dialing up more of their sense of relational connectedness through the heart can appreciate varying perspectives on the table.
Or someone with a Heart - Head - Gut stack might tend to create a safe environment in which to have idealistic discussions and where everyone feels heard, but lacks a sense of realism and groundedness. As a result, getting things done can suffer and strategies can lose steam.
And for the special case of imposter syndrome where someone with a Head - Heart - Gut stack under identifies with their thinking capabilities – they may overthink and collect more data than is necessary in order to compensate for the anxiety they feel belonging among a highly talented and smart group of people. They can calibrate by making more decisions in order to experience their own capability.
Our preferred forms of inquiry – head, heart, and gut – and the associated tripping points, can be intellectualized in order to hold them at a safe distance. But what I write above is ultimately an invitation to deeper inner work. Everything in our crafted sense of self desires to amplify its strength and hide away its weaknesses. When we move toward the unknown, we want to rely on what’s familiar. But the frontier always invites the entirety of ourselves to engage in a more expansive conversation – including those parts that we are most unfamiliar with. Stepping into that conversation changes you and it starts to change what’s around you. My favorite poet David Whyte, describes that most creative place at the edge of what’s most unfamiliar inside and outside of us: “It’s astonishing how much time human beings spend away from that frontier, abstracting themselves out of their bodies, out of their direct experience, and out of a deeper, broader, and wider possible future that’s waiting for them if they hold the conversation at that frontier level. Half of what’s about to occur is unknown, both inside you and outside you.”