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