As a trainer, I enjoyed working for many years with start-up managers, until at one point I got tired and wanted to focus more on introducing a new management philosophy with experienced managers. A couple of days ago I did the ABC of Leadership training again after a long time and again enjoyed this kind of training and deep discussions with the group. It seems that I still have a real passion for both audiences. Looking at myself on the day of the training, the question arose: where does this passion come from? Why am I interested in human beings as such in the first place?
Psychologically, there are 2 of the most challenging moments in a vertical career path: moving from specialist to manager and moving from manager to manager. And then there’s the third: when the career and life you’ve had needs to be redefined, simply because the process of life has led to a breaking point. Often, the dismantling of one’s identity and the construction of a new one overlap. Perhaps grief and joy at the same time.
It is in these psychologically difficult moments that people are most interested in learning, and it is in these moments that they need a reference point to rethink themselves as a whole and their suitability for different roles. To make sense of new angles of the experience of being human. All this is accompanied by a sense of grief about the old role, and in the process of shedding one’s identity, strange behaviours may emerge that are surprising even to oneself. Overwhelmingly, this will start to show up in the team as a mirror of the leader (indecisiveness, accountability problems, commitment disorders, overwork, resistance to change, etc.).
These transformational moments are often not systematically thought through. Particularly in smaller organisations where there is no systematic leadership development system. But also in large ones, where people go through routine training and learn technical skills, but there is a lack of reflection on being human and going deeper. In the depth of every leader there is a reason and a story as to why they are a leader. Technical skills are secondary if the leader is not aware of the layers of his identity that have shaped him as a human being and does not bring to the fore the themes and stories that dominate him over technical leadership skills. And then fails to recreate his identity. And so the next career step for former successful top professionals is to become a mediocre manager who focuses solely on the use of management techniques.
All this suggests that the leader has not, from the outset, thought through the deeper levels of themselves, laid a foundation of being that will last. There is a failure to think through who I am as a person.
And that’s the most exciting part of being human – to find the answer to the question, what does it mean to be human? Because how else can you manage people if you haven’t figured out what it means to be human and how to manage and enjoy the experience of being human.
It is precisely at these turning points in your career, which I wrote about at the beginning, that you need to redefine what it means to be human. A new identity of being human emerges. And it seems to be in these moments that I value being human most.
