From Hero to Mentor: Finding Balance in Leadership
How waking up can you help you achieve sustainable and balanced leadership
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"Your past success is a foundation, not a permanent platform." – Denis Waitley
I can’t think of many other things as uncomfortable as the realization that while everything around you has changed, you’ve stayed the same. Sometimes it’s harmless, like using a phrase that was once cool and now not. Sometimes it’s harmful, like when you continue to rely on a once adaptive belief or behavior even when it stops being adaptive. Maybe it even becomes detrimental.
The idea that beliefs or behaviors can be productive one day and unproductive the next is not new. It is, however, something I see all levels of leaders frequently get stuck on. Sometimes, for years.
Raise your hand if you ever get stuck in a familiar, comfortable pattern. 🙋🏻♀️
The Brain Blame
This inflection point can happen at any point in our leadership tenure. Something that worked for decades can suddenly turn into something that puts us at odds with a strategy, our team or our peers. It’s not because we’re bad people.
Our brains are mostly to blame. Here are some reasons why:
Familiarity feels safe. Our brains prefer predictability. It feels good. Even negative emotions like exhaustion or depression can become familiar to us. Especially if we’ve encountered those emotions earlier in life.
You might be in a trance. If you don’t have a rigorous mindfulness practice, chances are you’re not fully aware of everything happening around you. Our brains take in about 11 million bits of information per second, but we can only consciously process around 40. That’s a good thing because taking a shower would wipe our brain budget out for the day.
We’re stressed. Or tired. Or burnt out. If you’re like most leaders, you’re running like hell trying to check the boxes before the whole cookie crumbles. Or maybe you’ve fallen into a blissful zombie-like trance to avoid hard truths, vulnerability or the pain of life. Checking the boxes gives us the immediate reward we need to keep going. Strategic reflection does not. Though, in the end, it’s what differentiates great leaders from good leaders.
Success is addictive. I have countless beliefs and behaviors that were extremely beneficial for years. They generated rewards, attention, promotion, and financial rewards. Dopamine! My brain was happy and solidified the neural networks around those beliefs and behaviors. Even when they stopped being helpful. See above.
Waking Up to the Inflection Point: The Shadow Side of being the Hero
"In any given moment we have two options: to step forward into growth or to step back into safety." – Abraham Maslow
At my previous company, the founders gave awards annually. One of the awards was a bronze statue of a wolf head, given to "The Wolf." It was named after a character in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction who specialized in handling complicated tasks, including cleaning up dead bodies and pretending it never happened. When I first received it, I was so happy I cried.
I didn't clean up any dead bodies, but I did engage in the corporate equivalent and had the scars and exhaustion to prove it. The fourth time I won the award, I also cried. This time because I recognized what it represented and the toll it took on me.
One of the greatest joys of coaching hundreds of people is that I get to see patterns. Recently, I was coaching a group of executives. I asked them to draw their most pressing leadership challenges. Each drawing was completely different from the other. Then something interesting happened. As each person spoke, they described similar experiences of struggling with how dependent the organization had become on them. They felt like the hero and it felt like a burden. And they were at their breaking points.
Each felt this for different reasons—one had been there the longest, another was a subject matter expert with no team, tasked with transforming a meaningful aspect of the business, and yet another was constantly putting out fires started by someone else.
In each case, being the person everyone relied on—the warrior, the fixer, the Wolf, the doer—helped them get to where they were. In each case, they were waking up to the idea that it was no longer a productive strategy and had the symptoms to show it: disempowered teams, frustrated peers, and personal burnout.
If you haven’t recognized how this might be applicable, let’s take a common belief that many leaders have — i.e., things will get done better and faster if I step in — and watch how it shifts from adaptive to maladaptive. While this is a fictitious story, I’ve seen a version of this play out more times than I can count.
The Inflection Point of a Common Core Belief
The First Year
Imagine you just got promoted into a new role leading a transformation effort for a large organization. You bring with you a wealth of experience. Maybe you hired your team, maybe you didn't. It's unlikely they have the same level of expertise; otherwise, they'd be in your role. So, they start looking to you for answers, and you have many. You provide them, making everyone happy. With the energy from your recent promotion, you continue this for the first six months, maybe even a year. During this time, the neural pathways in both your brain and your team members' brains adapt, fostering mutual dependence.
Then something happens. A new piece of technology enters the scene, and you're unsure how to incorporate it into your strategy. What's the timing of its impact? There's no budget to build this in mid-stream. Then, in a meeting, an executive asks you a question about the technology, and you say something incorrect. Someone on your team, who has been studying the impact of this technology, hears you. Maybe they speak up, maybe they don't. But the relationship shifts.
The Second Year
At this point, the team is building momentum and earning wins within the organization. They’re also running hard. They don't seem to mind. They're making real progress. They're just a bit tired and overwhelmed. On these days, your direction and certainty are a blessing. They appreciate it. You feel the dopamine reward of helping. They feel relieved from not having to do everything themselves. The mutual dependence results in beneficial feelings and impact, further solidifying this neurologically.
One day, you’re particularly tired and frustrated. Someone on your team energetically knocks on your door with a proposal for integrating the technology into the strategy. You quickly shut the idea down and apologize before rushing out to another meeting. They might leave that meeting feeling a bit disempowered and think, “this person doesn’t believe in me” or “maybe, I’m not as smart as I thought I was”.
Upon reflection, you realize it could work and you let them run an experiment. For whatever reason, it doesn’t work out and it fails. Their inner critic is really loud now. They’re probably thinking, “Wow, I really am NOT smart, I should just lay low for a while otherwise they’ll figure out that I shouldn’t be here.” Their brains begin to look for signals of that truth. And because work is a series of successes and failures, they minimize their successes and berate themselves for their failures. Convinced of their worthlessness, they subconsciously start to act from that belief. Their performance drops.
One day, you realize that you are the only person asking difficult questions in the weekly team huddle. You start to feel resentful. Why aren’t they taking more ownership or being more proactive?
The Impact
At this point, your team is feeling disempowered and maybe even at times like they are worthless. This creates a negative dynamic that if left unchecked, can spiral.
You also don’t feel great. You’ve been involved in everything for the past two years — ensuring that you are available to help, fix, do and manage everything. If that’s true, you’re expending far more effort—more of your brain budget—than you have allocated. For most people, that means feeling depleted, tired, anxious, and depressed.
From an organizational standpoint, HR has knocked on your door a few times to share feedback they’ve received from your team. Your boss is knocking on your door wondering how you’re going to respond to the technological disruption.
This is usually the point where you ask yourself: Am I in the right role? Should I just quit? Maybe I’ll just stay at home, become an influencer and sell herbal tea. 🙋🏻♀️
You’re not alone. I’ve had a version of conversation dozens of times in the past year. Then, instead of changing ourselves (because that’s scary), we seek to change the people or situation around us. With invariably leads to even more frustration and then inevitably some sort of a crash.
From Hero to Mentor
"And so, I just sit there quietly, and I think, I'm not going to compare. I'm not going to correct. I'm not going to complain. I'm just going to love these people. Just love them, love them, love them." – Anne Lamotte with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Becoming a mentor is hard. Part of that, I think, is because by definition we are letting go of the illusion that we can control everything. So we get stuck in the Hero phase. It’s more fun to be the main character, too, isn’t it?
Image Credit: Pace
The reality is that if we exert control or influence over things that are not ours to control or influence, we impact the natural arc of events. That’s not a good thing. We could miss out on something in store that is even better than we could have imagined.
Isn’t it also the case that when we stop trying to force a direction, suddenly things start to go in the direction they should? Perhaps you hired someone incredible because you stopped stepping in as a crutch for the low performer on your team and finally let them go. Or maybe you navigated your team smoothly through an unexpected strategic pivot because you stopped forcing what wasn’t and hasn’t been working.
One notable example of a hero refusing to become a mentor and facing difficulty is the story of Luke Skywalker in the "Star Wars" saga. After his initial heroic journey in the original trilogy, where he defeats Darth Vader and the Emperor, Luke retreats into isolation in the subsequent films. He turns away from mentoring new Jedi, particularly after his perceived failure with his nephew, Ben Solo. This refusal leads to significant consequences, both for himself and the galaxy.
Are We the Problem?
There’s a lot of conversation about how work is toxic. But companies don’t just appear out of nowhere. They don’t have an independently functioning consciousness. They are a direct reflection of us.
When we try to do hard things together without awareness or the tools or energy to navigate the inevitable discomfort, it results in more stress, fear, and shame. So we retreat further into the known (our adaptive/maladaptive belief or behavior).
Few of us are fortunate enough to use these moments of pain to wake up. Usually, our behaviors become so maladaptive, we blow up our lives and are forced to wake up. But in the over ten years I’ve worked with thousands of people in these moments of transformation, I can attest to you, they usually don’t wake up.
Becoming the Change: What Could It Be For You?
We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. - Mahatma Gandhi
What if all the change we want to see must start with us? What if, by focusing on what we can control (our beliefs and behaviors) and ensuring they align with the legacy we dream of leaving behind, we create balance within ourselves, enabling balance within our teams, families, companies, and communities around us?
How would your life change if you stopped overusing that adaptive belief or behavior to the point of it becoming maladaptive? How would your perspective shift if you balanced it with other beliefs and behaviors? What are some beliefs that need to be expired or rewritten to be in alignment with you you are today, not who you were ten years ago.
What would it look like for you to wake up?
Keep going, friends 💪🏼
Steph