The Leadership Iceberg

A serious look under the hood of what we do and why we do it.

Leading Your Self is the initial curriculum of The Leadership Lab’s approach to leadership development. In this track, our approach to the curriculum and process is on personal leadership. We are focused on a process for building resilience, self awareness, empathy, and psychological integration. We pull from and weave a narrative process that bridges counseling practices rooted in narrative psychology, attachment theory, and practical language of emotions with the components of authentic leadership theory.

Additionally, all Leadership Lab members complete an exercise of self-examination as their initiation into their Leadership Lab cohort called The Leadership Iceberg. This is a tool that helps members explore and analyze the theme of vulnerability-based resilience, empathy, and psychological integration as key components of authentic leadership.

Participants practice reframing disruptive events, naming emotions, and surfacing the hidden impact of life experiences to build psychological integrity for deepening strengths-based leadership approaches. We apply the notion that authentic leaders need people, a need which only increases with authority.

Problem and Need

Research in authentic leadership has largely rested on the foundation of positive psychology as a root construct for finding meaning and connection at work by building optimism, confidence, resilience and hope (Avolio & Gardner, 2005). Yet, the strengths-based approach leaves underexplored the role of vulnerability, “negative” emotions, disruption, and struggle that licensed practitioners in counseling regularly encounter and study. Some researchers (e.g. Diddams & Chang, 2012) have proposed a research agenda for the place of weakness in authentic leadership exposing the unintended consequences of each aspect of the theory and the strength-based view in general. We propose that developing Psychological Capital (Luthans, Youssef-Morgan & Avolio, 2015) in each of the four elements of authentic leadership rests on an authenticity characterized by “psychological integrity,” which requires addressing a leader’s “Personal Leadership Narrative”—especially issues of disappointment, shame, and trauma. There is a large body of research that finds people are shaped more by negative life events than by positive or neutral life events (e.g. Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenauer, & Vohs, 2001). Increasingly, leaders in the wealthiest countries of the world live in a culture where setting aside difficulty and struggle for optics is well accepted.

Our approach weaves wisdom from psychotherapy, leadership theory, and practice. An integrated approach that borrows and blends techniques and ideas from emerging neuroscience, narrative therapy, and attachment theories deepens our understanding and practice of vulnerability, empathy, and resilience as assets to effective leadership. Others have used a “life stories approach” to authentic leadership, but our approach adds a multi-faceted and practical depth by exploring the role of leadership development out of struggle (Shamir & Eilam, 2005). We go further and emphasize practice and guidance in building the internal and external environments in which honest and authentic relationships can thrive.

Purpose and learning outcomes

The purpose of much of this early work in our leadership cohorts is to practice a process for reframing disruptive events, naming emotions, and surfacing the hidden impact of life experiences to build psychological integrity for authentic leadership. At the end of this process, members are able to:

1. Reframe disruptive or challenging life events into growth opportunities for deepening one’s leadership;
2. Discover a framework to help individuals and teams take disruptive or challenging life events and reframe them with empathy, insight, and integrity;
3. Incorporate an internal narrative of resiliency to build psychological integrity and the facets of authentic leadership;
4. Utilize the practical language of emotions as a vehicle for identifying needs;
5. Analyze how to create an internal and external empathy-based learning environment;
6. Apply the notion that authentic leaders need people, which only increases as one takes on more responsibility and/or authority.

Framework

We use an integrated approach combining the insights of narrative psychology (e.g. Crossley, 2000), emerging attachment theory (e.g Bowlby, May & Solomon, 1989) and the practical language of emotions (e.g. Dodd, 2001). The overall experiential process utilizes individual exploration and group processing as well as role playing and didactic instruction. The individual process asks participants to explore the role that they’ve played as a leader, their expectations and influences that have shaped their understanding of leadership, and the key players that have impacted one’s life. This is followed by creating a list of the ten most disruptive or challenging events of one’s life and a brief description, feelings attached to these, and clarity around how these have shaped one’s self-concept. The participants list some core beliefs that they now carry because of exploring their life narrative. The final step will integrate this exploration into the elements of authentic leadership.

The four areas of authentic leadership we seek to deepen with this workshop are: self-awareness, internalized moral perspective, balanced processing, and relational transparency. Diddams and Chang (2012) explored the role of weakness in each of these strengths-based elements. They posited that to avoid defensiveness that may weaken leadership, epistemic humility is needed for self-awareness, moral modesty (lack of moral superiority) is needed for internalized moral perspective, mutuality with others is needed for balanced processing, and self-disclosure of limitations and vulnerability is needed for relational transparency. We use the term “psychological integrity” to describe the consistency and resilience that derives from feeling negative life experiences while utilizing one’s strengths.

Leadership Implications

The overall goal of The Leadership Iceberg is to generate exploration and analysis around the theme of vulnerability-based resilience, empathy and psychological integration in authentic leadership. We build on research on authentic leadership and bring it into conversation with narrative psychology, attachment theory, and practical language of emotions. Negative experiences can be reframed and utilized in teams and by individuals for deepening authentic leadership. We want participants to explore the following:

Psychological integrity emphasizes that who you are is not what you do. It unmasks the psychological defenses of our personality structures and names the feelings and needs that lie behind our actions as leaders.

Authentic leaders allow life to impact them rather than avoiding the reality of negative experiences. In this way, they choose substance over image.

Emotions can be seen as negative but developing a language to identify them is extremely beneficial in learning how to ask for help, name our wounds, take care in preparation, and awaken humility in leaders.

We need leaders who can be truly known by others. Authentic leaders open themselves to weakness and not just to strength.