Taking on a new leadership position can be harder than it seems, but research on post-traumatic growth shows how to manage the change
Think of the last time you went through an important transition – a move, a job change, a disruption in one of your most important relationships, a health scare – that left you feeling as if you had lost something important in yourself. Think about what you lost, about the scars of that wound, and how you were different after the transition.
Now think about another transition: one that was just as challenging, but from which you emerged a better version of yourself. In this second transition, you were somehow able to process the experience in a way that made you different, in a good way. What was different about how you managed the second experience compared to the first? What was different about you?
These are important questions for all of us as we navigate the many transitions we experience in our lives. They are essential questions for leaders who find themselves in a transitional space. Leadership transitions, like life transitions, can break us. We can be diminished by them. Or we can use them to grow. Clinical research in post-traumatic growth teaches us encouraging lessons about how to grow.
Psychological challenges and clinical insights
My doctoral research in leadership transitions took a turn towards human psychology when I met an executive who had left her company after a difficult transition into a new role. She was a senior leader in her organization, and a respected scientist with exemplary technical credentials. A promising start to her career with her current company took a dark turn when recommendations she made based on her expertise proved unpopular with a few of the leaders above her. She soon found herself pushed aside, then ignored. It quickly became impossible for her to do her work.
The executive described her experience as “psychological torture” and “an abuse of the soul.” While not all executives face such destructive transitions, enough do to make the study of the psychological mechanisms of transitions an important addition to leadership development research. In our transitions work, we have engaged with hundreds of leaders who are trying to make sense of the unexpected and psychologically profound challenges of a new job, a new CEO, a new boss, changing cultures, shifting organizational structures – or just the uncomfortable sense that no matter how happy they think they should be with their work, something is not quite right.
Each of these transitions presents important challenges. We are challenged to somehow manage the powerful, unconscious and often irrational protective instincts that show up in us when we feel threatened. We are challenged to confront how we have dealt with our deepest needs: to feel special, to build a community around us, to have structure and meaning in our lives. We are challenged to admit all the ways in which we may not yet be the person we want to be. And we are challenged to explore whether the core narratives we use to make sense of the world and navigate through life are as wise and mature as they could be.
While in some cases we are diminished by our transitions, in other cases, our transitions fuel tremendous personal growth. With the proper approach, even our most difficult transitions can become rich sources of wisdom.
Four essential narratives
The most important lesson to emerge from the growing body of clinical research in the field of post-traumatic growth is that we grow when we use life’s transitions to intentionally explore our core narratives, so that they integrate the wisdom of our experience. Researchers call this process intentional rumination.
Post-traumatic growth researchers have identified four core narratives that are critical to our sense of who we are: the narratives of our Orientation, our Roots, our Relationships, and our Resources. Transitioning executives can explore and develop wise narratives around each of these. The more we explore and strengthen these four narratives, the more likely it is that we can shape the environment around us, rather than be a victim of it.
1. Orientation
Think of your Orientation as the direction you’re headed, the point of you, your purpose, or the difference you want to make. Orientation can be explored from both a cognitive and a metaphorical perspective. Leaders need to examine their definitions of success, being careful to test whether those definitions are inherited, are old definitions that might have been useful for a past stage in life but are less appropriate now, or are conventional definitions that focus on the usual financial indicators rather than on deeper meaning.
When exploring these in conversation with leaders, there is often an initial hesitancy to dig into personal meaning. Get past that, though, and we often find rich veins of possibility. Executives talk about their desire to unleash the energy of their people, to help them understand that they are more powerful than they realize, to help their organization develop fundamentally different capabilities.
Since questions of meaning are profound, our digging usually accelerates when we step into metaphorical territory. Here, a leader may talk about how they want to see themselves as Captain America, organizing a host of superheroes into an unbeatable force; as a voice in the organizational wilderness, guiding the company to a better future through cooperation rather than destructive internal competition; or as a guide who could help leaders walk above the storms of their work, because they understand the best part of themselves more deeply.
In all cases, understanding Orientation is key to a clearer picture of who we are when we are making the difference that is most important to us.
2. Roots
If the narrative of our Orientation draws us forward, the narrative of our Roots grounds us in our most essential values and beliefs. Exploring our Roots means understanding our intricate and often unconscious system of core narratives about how we should behave, and why we should behave that way.
Ask any group of executives to name their most important values, and you’re likely to find that trust, collaboration, integrity and excellence are at the top. But developing our Roots narratives means going beyond the usual bullet points to examine the stories of the beliefs and values that are truly most essential to how we see the world and how we believe we should operate in it. In narrative form, these beliefs look something like, “I believe that organizations have a duty to help their leaders to do their best possible work,” or “If I put my head down and just get on with the work that matters most I’ll succeed,” or “We should all put the health of the organization above our own personal gain.”
We all have our own set of essential beliefs and values that guide us, often without our awareness. Becoming aware of them, articulating them, questioning and evolving them are all important steps in ensuring that the narrative of our Roots is a wise one.
3. Relationships
Our third essential narrative is the narrative of our relationships. Post-traumatic growth research notes how we often have a much deeper sense of the relationships that matter most to us, and are therefore worthy of our time, after we have gone through a life-changing transition.
For leaders, relationship narratives often come in three parts: the narrative of our relationship with our ‘secure bases,’ with our organization, and with ourselves. Our secure bases are the people who we trust and who have our best interests in mind; who are calm, present and caring, and who challenge, guide and encourage us. Often, we find that leaders have good but insufficient secure bases. In many cases, leaders struggle to balance an adult-to-adult relationship with their organization with the parent-child dynamic that hierarchies encourage. And in most cases, we find that leaders are eager to transform their inner dialogues into something more encouraging and less self-critical.
Exploration of all three Relationship narratives helps us to understand the state of our most critical connections, including our connection
with ourselves.
4. Resources
The final narrative is that of our Resources. Post-traumatic growth research shows that people who have grown through their most difficult experiences often understand that while they might be more vulnerable than they once realized, they are also much stronger.
For many leaders, the confusion of a transition can often strip them of their confidence. In such times it is essential to reflect on stories of our victories, of overcoming past challenges and of growing through difficult times. When we remember the many ways in which we are strong, we remember that we have every reason to believe that we will be at least as capable of facing the challenges of our future as we have been facing the challenges of our past.
By acknowledging and naming our strengths, we practice the kind of intentional rumination that post-traumatic growth clinicians note helps us to understand our wisest selves. We also recognize that we are at our wisest when we accept, with appropriate humility, that our gifts play an important role in enabling us to live our best lives.
Transitioning to greater wisdom
Not long ago, we worked with an executive who was struggling with how his approach to leadership was turning him into someone he didn’t like. His story is a good example of the observation that leaders are better able to shape external chaos when they’ve taken care of their internal chaos.
This executive had a history of great success in his work. He was promoted to a senior role at a young age and he performed well, despite the many challenges of his business. Yet this leader was struggling. It was not that the business was suffering – on the contrary, it was doing well – but rather, he struggled with what he thought was a disconnect between who he was and who he wanted to be.
About a year after we began working together, the circumstances of his business became extremely difficult. For all sorts of reasons, the environment within which he worked became almost overwhelmingly chaotic. Yet the executive remained calm throughout. He had somehow managed to find within himself a source of equilibrium. When I asked him about the source of his new inner peace, his simple response was: “I know myself better than I did a year ago.”
This is the essence of the four narratives. When we explore them, we are much clearer about what is essential to us, and much less likely to be buffeted by the storms around us.
Dr Michael Stanford is founder and managing director of Summit Leadership, and author of Leadership Transition: How Leaders Turn Chaos into Growth (LID Publishing)