Photo Yury Li-Toroptsov
Senior management often comes with its dose of loneliness. You carry a lot of responsibility on your shoulders, people turn to you for answers, and they expect you to make difficult decisions. Your organisation depends on you. As for you, you might have very few places where you could speak openly about the challenges you face. The gap between a public person everyone turns to for answers and the private person you are inside might get wider over time and become harder to reconcile. This is where deep personal work becomes extremely relevant to leadership.
When it comes to executive and leadership development, it is very often focused on observable and measurable competencies. Communication, negotiation, decision-making, etc. These are practical tools necessary to exercise the role of a leader. And yet, not all leadership challenges have a technical solution. We’re talking beyond skills and performance. Why does a committee member provoke a conflict? Why is delegating unthinkable to you? Why do you recruit people who eventually disappoint you all the time? These questions cut deeper than just a lack of skill.
We can’t leave at the door of the office our personal history, complexes, our habitual ways of responding, the unconscious expectations, our perception of authority, power, and uncertainty. We bring it all with us to the office, to our professional communication and interaction with our colleagues and clients. These invisible influences reveal themselves under pressure.
A top manager might be sincerely convinced they are demanding high standards when in fact they are struggling to accept other people’s mistakes. Another might believe she is a great collaborator while unaware she is avoiding conflict at all costs. The third one might think he is a decisive decision-maker, unaware of his problem trusting others. To recognize these and other deep patterns at work is not about finding who’s to blame, but to uncover and understand the root causes of these actions.
It’s lonely up there
The more senior the position, the more difficult it is to find a space where your genuine reflections and thoughts can be heard without judgement. You can’t do that among your colleagues. Family members are not the best positioned to understand your professional pressures. The result is often the same for many leaders. They get used to dealing with this on their own.
Deep personal work, like, for example, Jungian analysis, offers a different kind of space. It allows a leader to examine experiences without a performance objective, not necessarily turning them into an action plan. It creates a space where “Why?” questions are asked. “Why does this situation affect me in this way?”
This kind of personal work introduces a new line of possibilities. By becoming more aware of their reactions, the leader gains greater freedom to respond and also becomes more self-aware. What is at stake is not a change in professional behaviour. It affects the way the person handles anxiety, disagreement and failure in general.
Working with what cannot immediately be explained
One of the most important aspects, in my view, of deep inner work is a realization that not everything responds well to rational analysis alone. A repeating dream, an unexpected emotional reaction, a feeling of being trapped in a professional role might reveal something that rational problem-solving overlooks.
That is why I find Jungian psychology to be relevant to leadership. It invites us to consider the relationship between our conscious intentions and the unconscious processes, including the parts of ourselves we find difficult to recognise or accept.
From this perspective, leadership development is not about strengthening the professional facade. It also involves examining the less visible dimensions of the personality that influence how we exercise power, respond to change and see our place in the world. The goal is to widen the view horizon and the angle of attention.
The courage to look inward
Leadership is often synonymous with big-picture vision, decisiveness and the ability to influence others. Less attention is given to the willingness to question one's own assumptions. Yet this willingness becomes increasingly important as responsibility grows.
Deep personal work invites leaders to examine these contradictions without rushing to eliminate them. It creates room to recognise that strength and vulnerability, ambition and doubt, control and trust can coexist within the same person.
For a top manager, this might be one of the most profound forms of professional development. It doesn’t involve acquiring some new technique, but changing the way they see themselves, other people and the situations in which they lead.
Know thyself! The most important change starts with learning to look inward.
