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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