Time is where change happens

More often than not, participants in TeamCatapult programs reflect that, at the beginning, they didn’t fully understand what the outcome of their leadership development program would be — and that not having a clear understanding of the pay-off made it feel really difficult to participate in months-long leadership development work. Specifically, that not knowing made it difficult to invest the time and resources when they had clear deadlines and priorities demanding their attention.

Early on in our programs, there’s often a sense of impatience. Can’t we just speed up the process a bit? Can’t we just onboard the learning and go back to our teams armed with new thinking and see immediate results?

It’s often not until the halfway point of a program (or even beyond) that participants start to recognize the results. It can be four or five months into a nine-month engagement when it starts to really sink in that the investment of time IS where meaningful, sustainable change happens. That the commitment to staying in the process is HOW we develop the self-awareness and others-awareness to be able to show up differently as team leaders — and help our teams function better as a whole.

Investing intentional time is how we learn to surface the important conversations as a group and hold the space to work through difficult material effectively.

It’s a bit like the idea of saving for retirement. When we put away money for the future, it can feel like we are sacrificing the things that our money could be doing for us right now to invest in a future that has no guarantees. Some people commit to retirement savings anyways, and others prioritize the here and now only to have deep regrets about their lack of forward thinking.

Investing in your leadership and your capacity to change behaviors — your own and your team’s — means investing time and resources that could be expended in the here and now instead. It means rethinking what “high-priority” means. 

Is the next deadline the highest priority, or is it the ability to change a team’s culture and behaviors to meet all future commitments more effectively, more collaboratively, and with better results? 

What leadership development program participants learn is that it’s not actually an either/or. It’s an opportunity to make progress and move forward in ways that are unfamiliar or radically different from what has previously seemed to get results. It can feel unnerving, scary, and intensely vulnerable. And it takes a leap of faith. 

Welcome back to Horizons Tech

For those of you just joining us, The Leader’s Edge is a multi-part series showcasing a leadership development program initiated at Horizons Tech, a fictionalized organization struggling to capitalize on their potential.

This series is dedicated to exploring participants’ experiences when making the time and energy investment in their communicative competence as leaders — meaning, their ability to navigate complex behavioral patterns and interpersonal dynamics on teams. The goal is to reflect some of the “ah-ha” moments and see changes that participants might experience as they commit to a program when the process and outcomes may not be fully clear to them yet.

In this week’s episode, we’re exploring the idea of what makes staying in the work worth it — especially when things get difficult or confronting. Today, we’re meeting up with Mike and Angie,  two leaders at Horizons Tech who took a very different path when it came to investing their time and energy in developing their leadership.

Two leaders, two choices: the challenge of learning as a results-driven leader

“Mike”

Have you ever been offered what seemed like a fabulous opportunity for growth and development and said “yes” without hesitation — only to find yourself frustrated or challenged by how the learning was taking shape? 

Well, that’s what happened to “Mike.” He had just received a promotion to a senior leader position in Horizons Tech. He was well respected, sought after as a problem solver, and recognized for producing results — and he found his sense of his priorities deeply challenged by the leadership program. 

Mike was still young in his role as leader when he was tapped by peers he respected to be part of the new leadership development program. The program was focused on helping leaders grow their range in their leadership by developing their communicative competence — a foundational skill for leaders today who are navigating the high stakes of uncertainty and change. The sponsor of the program was the COO, Dara, who had a vision for team-building at a senior-leader level. The goal was to help participants learn to navigate complex cross-organizational needs and politics more effectively by focusing on behavioral change.

Now, part of what Mike was known for was his spontaneity and action orientation. These traits had been serving him really well. They were how he delivered results in his role — by pivoting as needed, focusing on results, being reliable, and just “getting things done.” He’d also had previous experiences with professional development. It was learning that he found valuable. So it was no surprise, really, that he responded to his peers’ invitation with an easy “yes.”

On the first day of the program, Mike was all in. He was hopeful about the process, looking forward to the learning, and self-aware enough to name some of the challenges he expected to face in this program. His biggest challenge, he knew, would be feeling the weight of all his responsibilities while committing to a program that consisted of three rounds of 3-day workshops separated by six weeks in between. Those six weeks would include the ongoing work of practicing the concepts addressed in the workshops, bringing the new learning back to the team, individual leadership coaching, and consistent journaling to explore and grow through the process.

When Mike stepped into the first day of Session 1, he was enthusiastic. He was intrigued by the idea of communicative competence as the key to creating meaningful behavior change and cultivating highly effective teams. He was interested in what he was learning: 

• There are different structures of communication that you can actually see and name
• These structures have a direct impact (whether spoken or unspoken) on interpersonal dynamics and the overall outcome of the conversation
• His own assumptions and beliefs as a leader were affecting the team culture in ways he might not be aware of — yet 

But as the day continued, he felt his other priorities sneaking in. He started getting distracted by the pressures he was feeling about his new role — especially the looming deadlines. By the end of the day, he began to seriously wonder how he would find time for this development work. 

He was not alone. 

On Day 2 of the first session, the group dynamics began to emerge in this group of leaders. And — as often happens — this was the day when the group as a whole started voicing various concerns about what their participation would do for them. What were they really getting for their time? 

Angie, a senior leader for another key vertical in the organization, asked, “What’s the purpose of this development learning? How will I actually use what I’m learning here with my teams?” 

Vijay, a senior leader who reported to Mike, built on her question. “Yes, when will we get to the part where we learn how to bring this learning back to our team?”

Mike, who had remained quiet for a while, finally spoke. In a very calm way, he said, “I’m just not sure I can commit to this program. It’s six months long and I don’t see how this will fit into my current set of priorities. There’s a lot being asked of me, and I’m realizing this does not feel like the best use of my time or my highest priority.” 

Mike’s voice and opinion carried weight in the group, and now that he had offered his perspective, the group dynamic shifted as everyone considered how they felt about his words. Some remained silent, while several others joined Mike in voicing concerns about the amount of time the program would require them to be “out of the office” or away from their daily tasks. 

And sure enough, on the day before the second session was to start six weeks later, Mike sent an email saying he was dropping out and would not be participating. He felt too much pressure in the new role and really needed to focus all of his time on a series of crises that were emerging in the organization. 

What I could see in that moment was that Mike was cheating himself out of the experience. Moreover, he was onboarding a very specific set of invisible costs. When he left the program, he lost the opportunity to really see and understand how specific patterns and behaviors —his own and his team’s — were impacting their collective ability to reach their full potential. Yes, they were able to get things done, but they were losing the chance to explore how to get things done so much better. 

Mike was focused on the short-term pressures, and he lost the chance to create and engage with a bigger vision for what he could help accomplish as a leader.  

I can’t help but wish he’d made a different choice for himself. So often, it’s the experience of working with and moving through material that challenges our sense of things — including our very sense of ourselves! — that we experience the most personal growth. Sticking with it through the impatience and frustration is where the real breakthroughs happen. 

Investing time and patience in the challenging and unfamiliar, especially when the status quo seems to be working well enough, takes a leap of faith. This is where things change in our thinking, where we unexpectedly catch sight of a well-worn behavior pattern, and where we have the space to realize that our intent in our behavior — no matter how well meaning — may be having a negative or unwelcome impact on others.

Still, like everything, it has to be an investment you are willing to make, and Mike simply chose not to.

“Angie”

What might have happened if Mike stayed?

To explore this question, let’s turn to Angie, who stayed in the program despite her initial misgivings.

Angie had been invited to join the program by the organization’s COO, Dara, who knew Angie played a critical role supporting many of the line organizations on a daily basis. Dara knew Angie to be someone who navigated internal politics exceptionally well most of the time. But she thought Angie would benefit from having deeper relationships with her peers — an idea that Angie felt unsure about from the get-go. 

Like Mike, she just wasn’t sure if the pay-off at this point would be worth the time spent. She was deeply aware of her other responsibilities and the difficulty of feeling like she was “setting them aside” to participate. Moreover, as the program unfolded on Day 1, she encountered material that she had heard before. It sounded familiar, and at times she was tempted to mentally check out. She found herself feeling impatient with the time spent away from her team.

But, unlike Mike, she found a reason to stay. 

Angie wound up having an experience the very first day of the program that was pivotal for her — and it challenged her deeply. It started when the group began to talk about patterns of communication and how they impact work. Angie’s ears perked up as a peer shared a story about a leader who was stuck in a pattern of making decisions without consulting others (a dynamic Angie later learned was called a “closed operating system” in the language of Structural Dynamics). In the story, the leader had a toxic effect on the team culture. 

As she listened, Angie quickly began to see herself in the story. As she processed her peer’s words, her mind drifted to a recent encounter in her own team where she became increasingly frustrated by the lack of progress the team was making on a critical deadline. Her reputation was riding on being able to get the product released on time, and she simply could not understand what was taking so long. One day, she showed up at a meeting angry — blaming the team, venting her frustration, and then, without further conversation, simply told them what she thought they should do. She told them to “make it happen” and invited no further conversation about it. 

In the end, the team did deliver on time, and up until this very moment she felt accomplished in the leadership she displayed that day. After all, there comes a time when you have to just make a decision and put some pressure on the team to make things happen — right? 

But now she was listening to a peer describe the impact this behavior had on others, and she had the bone-chilling realization that she might be acting exactly like the kind of leader she never wanted to be. 

She realized she had never really taken the time to pause and think about what might have been getting in her team’s way as they struggled toward their deadline. What was causing them to be slower about this particular task? Was it a one-off issue or a problem that could rear its head again at any moment to bog the team down and risk future deadlines? She simply didn’t know, because she had never taken a step back to inquire.

Moreover, she now understood with a sinking feeling that it was highly possible she had left a wake of misunderstandings or bad feelings in her wake — and that these might also show up to haunt the next task the team needed to accomplish.

In other words, Angie was catching sight of the  invisible costs she was risking by not exploring and addressing her impact on her team. 

When Angie first committed to the leadership development program, she wasn’t sure where it was going. Even after part one, she didn’t have complete clarity. But what she did recognize was that she clearly had learning to do as a leader if she wanted to lead in a way that aligned with her values. This became her purpose, and she was willing to stay with it and trust the process. 

It wasn’t easy. She found it difficult to speak or contribute much. She silently battled with herself: she wanted to make some changes in her leadership approach but was feeling shame and guilt about catching sight of her past behavior. It took her a while to feel willing to share any of her thinking with the group. 

But, unlike Mike, who caught sight of his discomfort and decided the program was not his priority, Angie made up her mind to push through and see what might come if she committed with curiosity. 

And over the course of the next six months, she found herself engaging more with the program. By the second part, she even shared her story about not liking the impact she realized she was having on her team (a topic we’ll explore in more detail in future episodes of The Leader’s Edge). She dove deep into the concepts and the reflective work, and she engaged her whole team in the process. 

Over time, as we’ll see later in this series, she made incredible strides in her leadership. And as she scaled her learning with her team, they were able to move forward faster than they ever had in the past.

Development takes purpose

When we find ourselves in situations that challenge, perturb, or frustrate us, chances are we are in “high stakes” mode. This is when our intentional and confident behaviors (the ones we express when the stakes are low) go out the window. Instead, the triggered, high-stakes behavior takes over. We are less in control of ourselves. We are more reactive; less intentional. We have less choice because our triggers have been flipped and our internal survival narratives have taken over. 

One of the major high-stakes behaviors is to abandon a situation. This is a mode that can happen for me, for example, if I’m not watching out. If I dislike something, I become frustrated with it and then abandon it — I head back to the more comfortable space of how I like things. 

Here’s one thing I will never know: did Mike leave the program or did he abandon the program? Did he make an intentional decision to leave well, or did he abandon ship the night before because he felt triggered or challenged by the idea of rethinking his priorities and exploring new dimensions of leadership? 

The thing about human developmental processes — including leadership development — is that it’s never a straight, predictable path. It looks different for everyone. We will all start at different places and see different sites along the way. And, more often than not, what we are seeking as we enter is very seldom what we actually need, especially if we are looking to bring about change — change in an organization, change in others, or change in ourselves. 

Are you looking to be comfortable and to have all your questions answered immediately? Or are you willing to explore to find your own answers? Are you willing to trust that everything you are thinking, feeling, and experiencing is data that allows you to learn something about yourself? Are you willing to see the feeling of frustration or impatience as something to learn instead of something to fix or make go away? 

Development, by its very nature, can and will be confronting. If it’s not, then you are not growing. You will only be repeating your same patterns. And, for better or worse, true insight and growth only happen when we stay in the soup and choose to invest our time.

What do you need to believe will be true at the end of a process in order to invest in it and stay with it?

By all external factors, the organization — let’s call it Horizons Tech — was knocking it out of the park. It looked very successful from the outside: they were wildly successful in delivering their product, they were seen as a cool, hip place to work, and they were growing exponentially. 

But, if you spoke to someone long enough, the real story of what it was like inside would start to surface. Everything was a crisis, so much so that most people’s work day seeped into their evenings and weekends. Everyone was tired, exhausted even. Many felt like they had to “always be on.” 

In no small part, this was because Horizons Tech had an unspoken leadership philosophy: if things were urgent, it meant people would step up and get amazing things accomplished. In other words, urgency was what brought out the highest performance in people. 

The goal was to grind it out and keep reaching for higher performance

“What I didn’t know at the time,” said one leader in retrospect, “is that we were actually wearing people out, and I believe that became one of the greatest causes of our inability to continue to scale. The pace we were working at was not sustainable. We were overly focused on our WHAT — getting our product out the door — and we undervalued HOW we were approaching the work process, including our attention to people.” 

This overinvestment in getting things done at all costs played out every day in very small ways: competitiveness among divisions, inability to make commitments without having to reschedule, constant small fires to put out…. At every turn, seemingly small subjects became huge mountains to cross, and there were endless meetings in which the same conversations were had over and over again without ever seeming to resolve the topic at hand. 

Something had to change

“Dara,” the COO of Horizons Tech, was exhausted. For the past few years, she’d seen the behavioral gap emerging throughout the organization’s leadership: an over-attention to results and an undervaluing of the people. She watched others, including herself, leave meetings feeling really misunderstood and like their ideas and concerns were not being heard. 

Intellectually, she knew this to be a leadership and relationship challenge, but she thought she could be the hero and fix it. She thought she could single-handedly course correct the underlying leadership philosophy by modeling a more people-first approach and inspire greater organizational investment in leadership development. At a certain point, though, she realized the truth: her individual efforts were not bearing fruit. 

She kept waiting for the Learning and People department to sponsor a leadership program, but it seemed they were overly focused on new hires and completing the standard “check the box” training that every large business finds themselves filling. And it had been years since she had seen any of the senior leaders do any kind of collective growth or development work. 

What she heard over and over was that there was only so much time in the day.

But Dara continued to believe that leadership development at a senior level was critical to getting the organization back on track. She felt certain that leveling up the organization’s leadership would enable it to meet the exponential growth goals it was striving for. 

So Dara began to form a new idea: she wanted a peer group of senior leaders from across the organization to join her in building relationships with one another, forming trust, and aligning on a shared vision. 

And to make sure this peer group got off the ground, Dara decided to sponsor it herself, beginning with a leadership development program that would help senior leaders learn to navigate complex cross-organizational needs and politics more effectively by focusing on behavioral change. She had experienced this kind of program at a different organization, and she was certain it would help in this setting. 

As Dara envisioned it, the program would be focused on helping leaders grow their range in their leadership by developing their “communicative competence” — a foundational skill for leaders today who are navigating the high stakes of uncertainty and change.

“Communicative competence” encompasses two main skills:

1. Our individual ability to see the patterns in our language and behaviors that are serving and not serving us.
2. Our individual ability to use different language — or language structures — as needed in order to change the nature of what’s happening in a conversation. 

In short, communicative competence is the ability to make ineffective conversations more effective. It ensures that conversations that need to happen do happen, and that they unfold in a way where participants can really hear and engage productively with each other. 

To be sure her vision for a leadership development program came into being, Dara realized she would have to be the one to get it funded. It would require her to deprioritize other things over the coming year, but it was not a hard decision. She met with her boss and shared her vision with him, and while he was skeptical about the investment and — more importantly — the time, she had been with the organization long enough that he had a high amount of trust in her ability to deliver results.  

Finally, she saw a real pathway for change, and she knew just the group of people to invite into the journey with her…  

The Leader’s Edge: A multi-part series to showcase the challenges and outcomes of investing in leadership development

I just recently met with a leader from Horizons Tech who I haven’t seen in three years — not since the end of the leadership development program brought together by Dara. He was reflecting on our past work together and noted that it had been really hard and often confronting. He had found himself tired. But, in the end, he had found it to be worth it.

The interaction got me thinking, as his words resonated with the kinds of reflections I often hear from individuals and teams who have gone through TeamCatapult’s leadership development programs.

• It was hard.
• It was confronting.
• It was worth it.

In a world of constant change disruption, it can be hard to diagnose the issues that are holding us back. But among the leaders I speak with every day, there are some regular refrains I hear that capture the daily frustrations that prevent otherwise incredible organizations from meeting their full potential:

• We keep having the same conversations over and over. 
• We keep repeating the same actions and expecting different results. 
• We make everything harder than it needs to be through redundancy and miscommunication. 
• We’re stuck in old patterns of thinking, which leads to frustration and overwork. 
• We are not aligned on a common vision. 
• Our decision making takes too long and it’s unclear who’s making the decision.
• Everyone has slightly different ideas about how to move forward and no time to sort out what’s different about each option. 
• There are too many misunderstandings and debates. 
• We don’t have time for one more meeting!
• Seemingly small issues escalate quickly to major misunderstandings that require others to get involved and mediate. 

At the heart of all these commonalities are two core components: unhelpful behavioral patterns that are hard to break in complex systems, and the inability to communicate effectively in high-stakes situations where everyone has different perspectives and a lot of skin in the game. A big piece of what makes our programming “worth it,” participants tell me, is that it gets right at the heart of these two issues. 

But one thing we hear a lot at TeamCatapult is that not having a clear sense of process and outcomes in a leadership development program can feel difficult. We hear things like “what actually happens in the program?” or, “what will the outcome be?” 

These can be sticky barriers to overcome. The truth is that leadership development outcomes will be as unique as the individuals and cohorts who participate — and those outcomes only tend to become clear by participating. 

That’s why I’ve developed The Leader’s Edge, a multi-part series depicting one leadership cohort’s experience in a leadership development program. Designed to help leaders get a sense of the work to come, the series illuminates the individual and collective challenges facing a fictionalized organization (Horizons Tech) that was struggling to scale and repeat its meteoric initial success.

Like many organizations, the challenges at Horizons Tech were ultimately cultural — meaning that they stemmed from issues related to interpersonal dynamics, team processes, and a general inability to help teams produce at their full, innovative potential. And, like many organizations, a lot of the cultural issues hovered in the space of opposition and resistance.

The fictionalized story of how this organization’s leaders developed their “communicative competence” is a fable depicting the rewards of investing in leaders’ ability to navigate behavioral patterns and group communication dynamics — and the risks associated with not taking the time and resources to commit to this key component of leadership development.

Why this story matters NOW — for all of us

Since the pandemic, organizations are suffering from a range of now-familiar symptoms:

• Quiet quitting
• Lack of diversity and inclusion
• Challenging “return to office” transitions
• Downturns and layoffs

And yet, in this evolving context, we see organizations not only investing less in leadership development, we see them investing in treating the symptoms of upheaval and change rather than addressing the root cause of why morale is seemingly at an all-time low: organizational culture.

Organizational culture is the framework for success, and it starts with leadership.

Leaders bring the weather. When the organization is experiencing one crisis after the next, leaders need to look inside. What’s the role they are each playing in the outcome they are getting?

A 2022 Harvard Business Review study found that, of the organizations who are most successful at implementing leadership development programs, 35% reported an increase in revenue as a result of their efforts. According to a BetterManager’s study titled “The ROI of Leadership Development,” 42% of respondents observed an increase in revenue and sales as a direct result of leadership development programming; 47% of those who observed an increase in revenue and sales credited better-performing managers and/or their direct reports.

And there’s more data where that came from. The International Coaching Federation (ICF) found that 86% of organizations saw an ROI on their coaching engagements, and 96% of those who had an executive coach said they would go through the process again. 

Tangible factors included: 

• Increased productivity
• Higher levels of overall employee performance
• Reduced costs
• Growth in revenue and sales
• Higher employee retention 
• Higher employee engagement 

Intangible factors were increased, as well: 

• Confidence-building in those being coached
• Improved communication
• More vital employee/peer-to-peer feedback
• Improved key stakeholder relationships

So, what does this all mean for you? 

One of the big things that holds leaders back from committing to personal and collective leadership development is lack of clarity or certainty about what they will get as a result of investment — and if the result will be worth the time trade off. Especially because one of the most precious resources for any leader is that of time. 

But rather than asking what you will get or what it will cost, I’ll invite you to ask a different question: What’s the cost of continuing to behave and do things just as you’re doing them right now? 

If you are satisfied with your current results, then now’s maybe not the time for you to think about leadership development. But if you’re challenged in some way — it means that you’re on your edge. The way things have been going is taking more time and energy without yielding the results you’re looking for. If this sounds like you or your organization, then now’s your time. 

It’s time to take a strategic pause and begin to imagine a way that’s easier, more fulfilling, and more engaging. A version of your own leadership that achieves your desired results with ease and feels authentic to who you want to be as a leader. 

But, as The Leader’s Edge multi-part series will showcase over the coming weeks, this is not the work of a single day or a single workshop. There is no silver bullet. There are no simple promises that anyone or any program can make to say that if you “do X” you will “fix Y.”

The work is inner work and interpersonal work. And it’s hard, it’s confronting, it’s worth it — and you too can do it! You just have to make the choice to believe that going a little slower is worth it to go much, much faster.  

What’s at risk if nothing were to change in your leadership right now?

Keep reading through the upcoming episodes of The Leader’s Edge to discover how
leaders in the fictionalized organization of Horizons Tech answered this question for themselves — and what they got as a result.

What got you here…won’t get you there.

Today, we’re talking about the critical factors that contribute to effective leadership, productive teams, and high-impact results for senior leaders new to their role.

You’re here because you got it! Finally! That leadership role that once felt out of reach or unattainable — it has finally landed at your feet. Congratulations! You must be thrilled. 

But, if you’re really honest with yourself, you’re likely getting a bit nervous as you start settling into what’s expected of you. There is a lot riding on this position and the results you are expected to deliver. 

Luckily, you have a clear vision for what you want to achieve, and you’re passionate about where the team and the company are headed. In fact, it’s likely this clear vision and passion have landed you in your new leadership seat! But, if it hasn’t already, the excitement may start to wear off as the magnitude of your responsibilities start to sink in. 

This is normal. After all, you’ve never done this exact thing before. You were likely handed this new responsibility because of your excellent work delivering results. But this level of leadership responsibility? It’s a whole new set of skills and expectations — and there are no playbooks. Mentors, yes, but playbooks? Nope. 

So, how do you start? You’re not going to get it all right. You will make mistakes, and there will be failures. For many new leaders who have been promoted due to their consistently high performance, this is such a terrifying prospect that they live in a perpetual state of anxiety. And, counterproductively, their fears and anxieties often show up in their leadership in detrimental ways. They exhibit behaviors that they think signal “good leadership,” without ever stopping to assess the bigger picture of what would serve them, their team, and the organization as a whole most successfully.   

Your first step, therefore, needs to be committing to a journey of self-exploration and investing the time for critical self-awareness to build amidst the challenges that organizational leadership poses.

What kind of leader will you be?

The list of challenges that organizations are facing at the moment is long. As a leader, you’re probably swamped by critical questions, without the time or guidance to know where to start — much less how.

• Will you focus on outcomes first, or will you focus on people first? 
• How might you combine both approaches, instead of thinking of them as separate and distinct?
• How will you weather challenging circumstances, mistakes, and failures? Will they be tolerated by others? 
• Which challenges and mistakes are yours to own? 
• Where will you need help from others? 
• How will you enroll others in your vision? Will they get to have a say in that vision, too? 

There is an age-old debate in the leadership space. Some argue that if you focus on the product or outcomes and you get them right, the other issues will go away or become less important. Others advocate that if you get the right people on board, help them communicate well, and focus on your group process (your HOW, as I like to call it), the right product will emerge in a way that is more sustainable, resilient, and repeatable. 

What do you believe?

Here’s what we know at TeamCatapult: there are two kinds of successful leaders. Those who recognize that investing in themselves and their development as leaders is the only pathway to being successful in their role — and those who are getting ready to learn the value of investing in themselves and their leadership development.

It’s about people

Investing in your leadership is the only and best way to navigate the high-stakes landscape of leading people through the organizational challenges we’re facing in this moment. 

Here’s what a leader said to me recently: “I thought I was starting the job that I had dreamed of. But before I could get my feet under me and start to put my vision into action, I was confronted by the challenge of all challenges — a breakdown between two senior leaders in my team who were critical to my vision. Until I could help them solve their issue, we were not moving forward. I would go home at night thinking, ‘I did not sign up for this!’ I felt like I needed to send them out for counseling or therapy. How did I get into this? I just wanted to get back to what I enjoy doing and stop navigating this interpersonal drama. Can’t people just come to work and get their job done?”

It seems simple, doesn’t it? If only other people would pull themselves together, everything would go smoothly, right? But here’s the crazy thing about delivering amazing outcomes or products: unless you are a team of one, you will need to work with other humans. And working with other humans is neither straightforward nor linear. 

Humans are complex. When we gather with others, there are so many dynamics at play in the room. As leaders, we will likely have deep technical expertise in our domain that our careers have been focused on — but most of us lack deep expertise in working with other humans. And that’s the real role of successful leaders. 

The ability to work with others and effectively navigate interpersonal dynamics and behaviors is table stakes for the successful leaders of today. 

We live in a world where change is a daily, hourly event. It is not going to slow down or stop. We cannot continue to be the hero — the single person who solves all the issues. We need others to join us, to fight alongside us, to be a team. And we all want to thrive. We want to do good work and live a life worth living outside of work. 

This doesn’t mean you need to become a therapist to be a leader. But it does mean you need a model that allows you to work with relationships and be able to see the visible and invisible dynamics that create ineffective conversations — as well as how to change the nature of the discourse when things are moving off track. 

At TeamCatapult, we offer programming to help you develop a leadership model for yourself, but we often hear things like “but what does that really mean?” or, “what will the outcome be?” The truth is that what it means and what the outcome will be are unique to you and can only become clear by participating in a sustained exploration. 

To help leaders get a sense of the work to come, I’ve developed a multi-part series depicting one leadership cohort’s experience in a leadership development program. I encourage you to read it!

We need skills for working with other humans. Individual and collective leadership development is the key for thriving at work and in life — no matter what obstacles show up.

What kind of leader do you hope to be?