LEADERSHIP TRANSITIONS & PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION – LESSON 2: RESILIENCE IS NOT GROWTH, by Michael Stanford, Summit Leadership

Different paths out of transition

Early research into how we manage ourselves through life’s dramatic transitions showed that they tend to lead to three distinct outcomes. Either we are broken by the experience, we are unchanged by it, or we grow because of it.

Our community of transitioning leaders fell into the same three outcome categories.

Many of us had somehow managed to grow. We felt more grounded. We were clearer in our understanding of who we are and what’s important to us. We were more confident in our sense of what we were willing to compromise and what we would always protect.

Some of us felt we were more or less the same after the experience as we were before. We’d managed to keep ourselves intact through our leadership challenges. Not much had changed in our view of our work our ourselves despite our difficult leadership challenges.

And a few of us were still struggling to come to terms with our experiences. The leaders in this last group felt less capable and less confident after their transitions than they had before. They felt somehow diminished.

I met enough leaders in this last category to know that not all leadership transitions are harmless. They are more often more damaging than I expected them to be when I began the research. When I tested this observation with people who witness how leadership transitions play out in their organisations, the feedback confirmed the observation. One global head of leadership development in a large organisation told me: ‘We promote all these good leaders into senior roles. The roles are more complex than anything they’ve managed before. And they often fail. Sometimes they fail catastrophically. We’ve dealt with these failures by just replacing those who failed with someone else.” The comment came in the context of our discussion about how his organisation was rethinking its approaches to supporting leaders through their most complex transitions.

Early clinical research into post trauma growth focused on the category of people who grew out of their challenges experiences. They made their own observations about the three different categories of outcomes post trauma.

The people who were broken by their experiences had a lower sense of well-being and diminished access to positive emotion after the event than before it, for an extended period time. In trauma terms, these were the people who were less able to function in daily life. Their emotional landscapes tended toward negative, protective emotions – fear, hate, bitterness, anger, pessimism – because of their experience. Most existing trauma research focused on helping these people process their experience so that they could regain their ability to function.

In leadership work, these were the leaders in our community who had taken on a new leadership role only to be surprised by the unexpected difficulty of their new work, and especially hurt when the difficulty came from colleagues and bosses they trusted and who (they felt) had betrayed them. Their wounds hadn’t healed. They often showed up with the same negative emotions observed by the post trauma growth researchers: they were angry at the people who they felt had betrayed them, cynical about organisational life, less confident with their ability to lead and much less sure that they wanted to lead.

Research on the topic of resilience grew out of observations of the people who emerged from their challenging transitions unchanged. Not long after the destabilising event, their sense of well-being, levels of optimism and access to other positive emotions were back to their previous levels. Their experience hadn’t changed them in an essential way. The leaders in our community who had demonstrated resilience all had the same resources that research into psychological resilience in the workplace suggested they should have: good support systems inside and outside of work, a sense of self-efficacy, secure attachments, a realistic sense of control, for example. They all adapted well to the challenges of their new environments without having had to change anything essential to their sense of who they were.

In leadership work, resilience is a good outcome. It is far better to emerge from a challenging leadership experience unchanged rather than broken. The attractiveness of this outcome explains why resilience training is so popular in the leadership development world. Resilience work is useful work. It is necessary work. But it can get in the way of the best (and most difficult to achieve) outcome. That outcome is growth.

Post trauma growth researchers noticed that some people emerge from their challenging transitions with a long-lasting elevated sense of well-being and positive emotion. Facing up to their challenges had caused something to shift inside of them that improved their sense of themselves, their appreciation for their lives and, in leadership terms, their ability to engage the organisation in the healthy evolution of its DNA.

They valued this shift so much that they would repeat the experience if they were given a chance to relive their lives. Researchers in the field of post trauma growth sometimes refer to this reaction as the phenomena of the sacred trauma, the destabilising and difficult experience that results in such valued growth that the experiencer learns to cherish the experience no matter how painful it might have been at the time.

Leadership development tends to focus on the second outcome. This tendency is natural. Emerging from a challenging experience unchanged by it is not a horrible outcome. It is a far better outcome than being broken by the experience. The usefulness of the ‘resilence’ outcome explains why so much of the conventional leadership transitions work emphasizes a strategic approach. Working on transitions strategies helps the transitioning leader minimise the possibility of massive, avoidable disruption. Resilience demonstrates and ability to protect how you are against forces that might otherwise break you.

But in our work we find that resilience often rests on a desire to not change. It can be a protective reflex, and therefore a limiting reflex. The discussions about outcomes in our community of leaders reflected this difference. Resilience happened when we asked ourselves how we could survive our experiences intact. It was only when our experiences pushed us the the sometimes brutal but almost always generative question of how we could grow, how we could be different in ways that we valued and appreciated, that we could move in the direction of what narrative psychologists call our preferred self. Once we made that important pivot in our description of what a successful outcome of our leadership transitions could be that we began to view them as opportunities to develop rather than as threats to survive. The shift in thinking was often uncomfortable, but it was a crucial pivot in our work towards growth.

Next: Lesson Three – The Four Dimensions of Growth

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LEADERSHIP TRANSITIONS & PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION – LESSON 1: INNER MAPS ARE AS IMPORTANT AS OUTER MAPS, by Michael Stanford, Summit Leadership

Stepping into the Unknown

What surprised us most, in our community of transitioning leaders, was that the roles we stepped into seemed to be governed by different rules than we had expected, and exposed us to different behaviours than we were used to. Sometimes the differences were small. Sometimes they were extreme. But even when the changes were slight, they had an exaggerated impact on what it meant to be successful.

These differences were especially important for those of us who stepped into roles that came with the responsibility to ensure that the organisation’s DNA was fit for its changing environment. We learned quickly what recent research has already uncovered: that transitioning into senior leadership is more than a matter of developing an ‘enterprise’ mindset. It is also a test of our ability to understand what is really going on behind the cover of our organisations’ strategies, culture proclamations and official standards of conduct. We learned that any leader who is responsible for improving the company’s DNA better be prepared for the responses of those who like the DNA just the way it is.

Because of these changes, many of us described our leadership transitions interns of stepping into a new world. Our new worlds operated in ways that meant that our old beliefs and assumptions were outdated. An important challenge to our new leadership work was managing this disorientation, with struggling to reconstruct both our outer maps (how does this new world work?) and our inner maps (how should I work, given this new environment?) at the same time. The challenge was complex. It wasn’t always clear how to reconstruct ourselves without throwing away something that we felt might be essential to who we are.

What do I mean by our inner maps?

We all have mental models that we use to navigate through our worlds. Clinical researchers sometimes refer to them as our schemas. They are the assumptions we make about the world and about ourselves so that we can navigate our way through life with some sense of certainty and order. Because these assumptions are important to our psychological stability, they are hard to give up. According to researchers, the more important our core assumptions are to us, the less likely it is that we will give them up voluntarily.

Researchers describe three beliefs that often dominate our inner maps.

  1. Benevolence: We like to believe that the world usually kind, caring and good, and that positive events in our lives will outweigh negative events. In leadership, the assumption of a benevolent world might take the form of a believe that organisation’s are generally honest and good, that bosses live up to the promises they make, that Boards don’t sabotage the CEOs that they’ve charged with running the organisation, and that people in the organisation are more likely to do what’s right for it than be guided by pure self interest. It might also take the form of a belief that my peers and my team will be trustworthy and constructive more often than not, and that if I take on the new leadership role that I’m being encouraged to take, those who are doing the encouraging can be counted on for support.
  2. Meaning: We also like to believe that there is a strong correlation between how people behave and what happens to them. We like believe that good things happen to good people, and that people who misbehave won’t be rewarded for their misbehaviour. In our leadership, meaningfulness might translate to a belief that if I work hard and focus on what is right for my organisation, then I will benefit. Or that leaders who are loyal will be treated with loyalty. Or that the sacrifices I make for the sake of the organisation will earn me some measure of goodwill from its leaders. The researchers point out that an insidious implication implicit in this assumption is that if something bad happens to me, then it must be because I am not good enough. That is, when bad things happen to me there’s a good chance that it is my fault.
  3. Worthiness: We like to think of ourselves as generally kind, competent and morally correct. We like to think that we are worthy players on the organisational stage. And we like for self-evaluations to be positive rather than negative. We appreciate when the evaluations we receive from others to reinforce our sense that we are kind, capable and morally correct. Our inner maps reflect our sense of basic self-worth, even when our internal critics push us to be better.

As leaders, we like believe we are good people living in benevolent organizations making a meaningful difference in a meaningful world.

Except sometimes we aren’t.

Sometimes our experience threatens, even shatters, our core beliefs. Sometimes the new worlds we step into as leaders are more confusing or complex or malevolent than our old worlds. to work effectively in these worlds we need to construct new ways of understanding how the world works (our outer maps) and new ways of navigating our way (our inner maps, or the assumptions and beliefs, values, and sources of meaning that guide us, especially when the world behaves in unexpected ways).

How do we go about exploring our inner maps? We found that a good start is by asking ourselves questions about how our outer maps might change, and to ask ourselves if and how our inner maps would help us to navigate through these changes. A common experience in our community of transitioning leaders was that we had predictably imperfect understandings of how our organisations would work once we stepped into our new roles. We also hadn’t explored our inner maps to understand where we were vulnerable to misguided assumptions.

What questions guide our inner-mapmaking? The list depends on the leader, but five categories of questions helped all of us understand ourselves better.

Who am I at this time, as I’m preparing to enter into my new role? What values guide me? What beliefs shape how I look at the world? Which of my strengths helps me have the leadership impact I want to have. How do I think about success? How do I regenerate myself?

Where do I come from? What events and experiences have shaped my beliefs? My assumptions about myself? My assumptions about the world?

How am I seen? Hope do the people around me experience me, for better our for worse? In what ways is my reputation aligned with my identity? In what ways is there a gap between the two?

Where do I want to go and who do I want to be when I get there? What are my leadership aspirations? What are my aspirations for myself in my new role? How will I need to be different to have the impact I want to have in the world I am entering?

What are my strategies for my own growth? If my future self is different from my current self in ways that I appreciate, how will I use my new leadership role to amplify what I want to amplify in myself?

There are no perfect answers to these questions. There is only exploration. The leaders who manage to grow through their transitions often do so only after they’ve do hard exploration of understanding and refining the inner maps that guide their deepest sense of what it means to be a successful leader.

Next: Lesson 2 – GROWTH IS NOT RESILIENCE

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LEADERSHIP TRANSITIONS & PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION – 7 LESSONS FROM AN ORIGIN STORY: INTRODUCTION, by Michael Stanford, Summit Leadership

A new way to think about leadership transitions

If you’re familiar with Summit Leadership, there’s good chance you know that our work is guided by the outcomes of an eight year deep-dive into the limitations of conventional approaches to helping leaders through their transitions. You might also know that the doctoral dissertation that came out of that research, storied transitions: post-trauma growth and narrative imagination in leadership development, frames leadership transitions as fertile opportunities for profound personal growth.

This is the first in a series of blogs on leadership transitions and personal transformation. I’ll use the blogs to highlight some of the lessons that came out of the research, hoping that they will be useful for leaders who are undertaking their own transitions and who are interested to see how they might grow through the experience. I’ll do my best to stay away from the heavy and scientific so that I can focus on the practical.

And I’ll start by telling a short version of the research story.

I began the research because I wanted to understand the strategies that were most helpful for senior executives who were transitioning to complex roles. Leaders go through transitions all the time. These leaders and their organizations depend on the success of their transitions to maintain healthy businesses. And while the popular transitions writing gave long lists of possible transitions tactics, I wondered if there were a few fundamental approaches that cut through the dozens of suggestions proposed by the authors. Part of my curiosity came from an observation that at least at senior levels, leadership transitions seemed to be more challenging than most of the popular writing acknowledged, for reasons that weren’t clear.

My research question in the early stages of the work was: what strategies can best help leaders who are navigating their way through challenging role transitions?

It helped that I was stepping into my own leadership transition at the time, and that we students were encouraged by our supervisors to synthesize our personal experiences with what we read in the literature and what we observed in action. Our task was not just to build on theory. Were also expected to advance practice.

This last point is critical. My leadership transition played out in the early months of the research, and it was far more challenging than I expected it to be. Even though I was a veteran of the organisation in which my transition took place, even though I understood the organisational landscape well, and even though I had checked all of the tactical boxes that most writing on leadership transitions recommended, I struggled badly to reconcile who I was with what seemed be expected of me. Excellent results were counterbalanced by worsening relationships, and in the end my transition into the new role became a transition into a new chapter in my career.

It also became a new direction for the research.

Trying to make sense of my experience – trying to find credible answers to the question: what the hell is really going on here – connected me with a fascinating community of leaders who were also working hard to learn from their own uncomfortable, sometimes chaotic and sometimes tragic transitions. While almost all of these leaders were continuing to function at very high levels in their work, not all of them had survived their transitions completely intact. A few of them had made significant career shifts. Many of them continued through their transitions with energy and enthusiasm, dancing with increasing grace with the challenges they faced, although perhaps slightly sadder and wiser (I’m paraphrasing Coleridge here) than they were before. A few were still deep in their struggles to understand the pain of the lessons they’d learned.

No matter where we were in our personal journeys, we in the community of exploring transitioners had three things in common:

  1. We were shaken by our transitional experiences. Our leadership work had taken us into unfamiliar, uncomfortable territory. Despite all our smart preparation mapping out our new territories before stepping into them, there were aspects of these new territories that were unexpected and that challenged us in unpredictable ways.
  2. We were driven to make sense of our experiences. We wanted to understand what had happened to us, and why it had happened. We were compelled to extract something useful from the messiness the experience. I don’t use the words ‘driven’ or ‘compelled’ lightly. We all seemed recognise that our experiences in our new territories contained some hidden treasures, and we needed find out what they were. For all of us, it was impossible to ignore this need for too long.
  3. We emerged from our transitions with a much stronger sense of who we are, of what is important to us, and of the difference we want to make through our leadership. We might not have enjoyed the journey, but we valued the clarity, courage, direction and strength that eventually came out of it. The more we looked for treasure in the experience, the more we found. We might have needed to dig further beneath the surface than was comfortable, but the clarity, curiosity and conviction that came from the digging made the exploration worthwhile.

Thanks to these observations, the research turned to how our minds, bodies and spirits tend to function when we go through important life and leadership transitions. I had a new research question: how can clinical practices dedicated to helping us through our most profound life transitions guide our work helping leaders through their own role transitions? I refocused the research on the fundamental beliefs of clinical practices that dedicate themselves to turning challenging life experiences into personal growth, and on understanding their usefulness for leadership development.

I chose at that moment to explore not just one school of psychological thought but many. I think that this decision came from a natural suspicion I had at the time about anything that claimed to be the ‘truth’ about how we live our lives and how we manage our passages within them. For all sorts of reasons I was suspicious of authority at the time, and I was cautious about falling into the trap of looking at my world through a single lens. It seemed to me that multiple lenses might provide more nuanced exploration. And so I turned to a wide variety of clinical practices.

For the sake of understanding which schools most impacted the initial thoughts I then tested through the filter of my own experience and through its application in my leadership development practice, I’ll outline the five clinical schools that guided the research work. They are the clinical practices of post trauma growth, of narrative psychology, of evolutionary and existential psychology, and finally of depth psychology.

Post trauma growth was my first port of call, thanks to the leaders in our community of transitioners who described their experiences in terms of the dramatic negative impact it had on their sense of themselves and their sense of their worlds. It was a useful first step, in part because post trauma growth clinicians tend to equate trauma with the significant stress that comes from challenging circumstances that invalidate important components of our self and world views. This type of stress is prevalent in the stories of our transitioning leaders. It was also useful because it outlined a path to growth out of this stress.

That path to growth focuses on work with our inner narratives, and so I turned to narrative psychology next. Post trauma growth clinicians emphasise the importance of what they call ‘intentional rumination’ of our inadequate self and world views into wiser narratives about who we are and how the world really works. Narrative psychology gives some clues about how we can work with our inner narratives to understand what was there, and to turn the unwise to the wise.

Evolutionary psychology helped me to understand the survival benefits of our narrative reflexes, including the reflex towards protective and stabilising narratives. It also helped me to detach from my own stories, a step that narrative psychologists say is a fundamental contributor to the growth process. We are NOT our stories, according to the narrative clinicians. We can only really dance with them once we detach from them. Evolutionary psychology’s explanation of our unconscious narrative-making mechanisms helps us to understand that our narratives are not purely of our own making.

Existential psychology dives deeply into one of our most powerful narrative-making mechanisms. It explains how our world and self views often form to protect us from the anxiety that comes from fear of death, isolation, meaninglessness and freedom. According to existential psychology, many of life’s struggles come from our inadequate answers to these fears. It was a useful exploration because it showed how organisational life can distract us from finding the answers we need.

Finally, depth psychology explores how life’s transitions happen naturally, are important for our growth, and are worth exploring deeply. Deep exploration of what we’ve taken from experiences, consciously or unconsciously, helps us to turn our lives towards what is most meaningful. Depth psychology was especially helpful for showing how many leaders transition into their most challenging senior leadership roles at about the same time that they are searching for greater meaning in their life and in their work.

Each of these five clinical practices has a point of view on the usefulness of transitions in our lives. Most of them claim that it is often the uncomfortable transition in our life – the nuclear or seismic event, to use two of the common terms – that helps us turn in more positive directions. The seven lessons that follow show some of the ways that leadership transitions can lead to these positive turns.

Next: Lesson 1: Inner Maps are as Important as Outer Maps

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