By Twan van de Kerkhof

I have always been fascinated about what goes on in the minds of leaders. I think it is important to get to know how leaders think because they have a great impact on our organizations. Those organizations, in turn, leave their mark on society and thus on our lives. So, understanding what is going on inside the leaders’ minds helps us to make sense of the world in which we live.

I am not alone in my fascination of this topic. In this book, twelve authors build on the legacy of great minds that have previously considered and written about this subject. They draw from their personal experiences as tried and tested executives, non-executives, consultants and/or coaches to share in their essays what is inside the leader’s mind.

Studying the inner world of leaders is also a lively subsection of the varied landscape of leadership literature. Many books have been published about the thoughts, impulses, motives, feelings and emotions of leaders by authors such as the

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Dutch psychoanalyst Manfred Kets de Vries or the American psychologists David McClelland and George Kohlrieser. The topic also emerges in books by Joseph Jaworski (about his personal inner journey in Synchronicity) and Jim Collins (‘Level 5 Leadership’ with its humility and strong will), to name just a few. Moreover, interesting corporate biographies about companies like Enron, ABN AMRO, Chrysler and Ahold have tried to interpret the fate of large companies by looking at who their leaders were, what their strengths and weakness were, what drove them, and what could be said about their shadows, their risk appetite and potential derailers.

However, it must also be noted that not all good and evil can be attributed to leaders. Many of us are inclined to attribute the success of an organization to the leader, and vice versa; send the leader home – just like a football trainer – when losses pile up or catastrophes occur. Ber Damen and Michael van Impe point to this attribution effect in their essays. Michael van Impe: “We tend to overestimate the impact of personality on performance when things go well; and we underestimate the impact of the environment when things don’t go so well. We are quick to glorify leaders and hail them for their exceptional work, but we are even quicker to bring them down when we discover a fatal flaw.”

We as authors are aware that we stand on the shoulders of giants with this book but we still think that we are adding new insights to what has been previously written. In my view, the four most prominent conclusions from the thoughts presented here are:1. Leaders need a well-developed self-awareness.2. Reflection improves self-awareness.3. Only deep self-awareness triggers adequate behavior.4. The context of the leader is at least as important as the ‘self’.

Conclusion 1: Leaders need a well-developed self-awareness. All authors say that leaders need to be aware of what is going on in their own minds. Rens van Loon and Ronald Meijers

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refer to the ancient Greek aphorism: ‘know thyself’ or ‘gnothi seauton’, inscribed in the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo in Delphi, which they deem just as relevant today as it was in the days of Plato. “Self-awareness (…) is needed to gain accurate knowledge of our unique strengths and weaknesses, our values and beliefs; without self-awareness, we are likely to develop and maintain a significant number of blind spots”, write Rens and Ronald in their essay. Hetty van Ee writes, “Being aware of your own qualities, perspectives, assumptions, obstacles, learning style and mindset, puts you in a better position to take control of your own development, your career, and your life.”

Knowing yourself goes hand in hand with being yourself. If you know yourself well, you can peel off the layers that don’t serve you well anymore. You can become who you are and that makes you more effective as a leader. George Begemann writes in his essay, “Acceptance of oneself and staying as close to one’s inner self as possible is key in a leadership role.” I believe that in today’s world of Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity (VUCA), leaders can only lead from who they are; it has become much harder to lead from a position of power. There cannot be much difference anymore between the personality that leaders choose to show to the world and who they really are: between their outside behavior and their inner core.

The importance of being yourself or being authentic might be the most accepted prerequisite for leaders in the past 25 years. Listen to yourself, be true to yourself, trust yourself, do what feels good, are some of the mantras that we hear over and again. This is the core belief of Humanism, as the Isreali historian Yuval Noah Harrari writes in his magnificent book Homo Deus. Since the Enlightenment, we are convinced that our own feelings and desires are the ultimate source of

If you know yourself well, you can become who you are and that makes you

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meaning and authority and this has had a huge impact on our thinking about leadership. Leaders are encouraged to connect to their inner experiences, and observe them with the utmost sensitivity.

I believe that to know who you are, you have to take a journey inside. For leaders, it can be extremely effective and rewarding to take that trip. When they know themselves better, they can connect more deeply and sustainably with other people and get things done through them, because there is a positive correlation between the success of an intervention and the inner state of the intervener. The journey inside is at the bottom of the U-curve, as developed by Joseph Jaworski and Otto Scharmer, which connect the inner journey with innovation, change and organizational excellence. My claim is not that leaders who have made the journey inside are by definition better leaders than those that haven’t. My claim is not on the collective but on the individual level: given who you are today, you will be a better leader when you undertake your journey inside. It is a journey to get you closer to who you really are.

In her essay, Rianne Kuik describes her personal journey. “I realized it takes courage to choose your own path and to show your true self and that it is pointless to compare yourself to others because your road in life is yours alone. (...) You cannot create a new future if you do not take ownership of the past and the events that led to the current state of affairs. This is why being connected to yourself is so important, as hard and confrontational as the road to knowing your true self may be sometimes. (…) It might require more time and courage to look for the real complication and its causes, as doing so could uncover things that we prefer to stay hidden, but it will also lead to truly sustainable solutions.”

You will be a better leader when you undertake your journey inside

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Being aware of who you are is sometimes difficult and as Rianne writes, it can be confrontational. Many leaders get caught up in the turmoil of the day and are so flooded by what they are doing that they forget about being. As George Begemann writes, “Staying close to my inner self was a challenge early in my career. When I was working as a high potential, I suffered from the high expectations; I was stretching myself to meet those expectations. I became rational and ego driven and was losing contact with my inner self. I was stepping on the brake too late, growing fat, sleeping or getting the flu in the first week of holidays. Those were my symptoms of losing contact with my inner self. It made my life tiring.”

If leaders lack self-awareness and get only minimal feedback (or do not take in the feedback they do get) they can even derail, notes Michael van Impe. Colleagues and coaches can help leaders to become more self-aware and provide them with feedback, but leaders need to take the iniative themselves; they have to organize their own countervailing power and sounding board because they feel the need, and experience the urgency. “Leadership development and executive coaching can help a leader in achieving higher levels of personal mastery and awareness. It is a lifelong journey that requires personal investment and commitment.”

Conclusion 2. Reflection improves self-awareness.The paradox is that the busier you are, the less time you take to stop and reflect. But every lumberjack knows that he must sometimes stop chopping wood to sharpen his axe. You need to slow down in order to speed up.

Reflection is a necessity, especially for those who are chronically overloaded like most leaders are. It is important for leaders to create and retain an overview and not fall into the trap of being caught up in the order of the day and running from one fire to the next. You need an antidote to

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a world out of breath, a place of silence in the center of the storm. That is what we aim to be at ELP with our Roundtable Dialogues in which leaders reflect with peers on their dilemmas.

Sander Nieuwenhuizen gives a great example in his essay of how he organizes his own reflection. “Over the last thirty years, I have made an almost annual pilgrimage to St Luc in Switzerland to hike for a weekend on my own. There is nothing better than walking (particularly slowly, going up the mountain) to get the mind in a reflective mode. First, I think about recent, current and upcoming events. Applying my understanding of roles and context – playing scenarios through in my mind. That’s usually the first several hours of the hike. It actually starts already the evening before on the plane and during the drive from Geneva to St Luc. Once the current affairs have been digested, and as a result some peace on how things went and some ideas for the upcoming events have emerged, then it’s time to dream.”

Stepping back from the daily turmoil to sharpen the axe is extremely important for leaders. There are many ways to do that. Spiritual traditions offer an interesting guide. To access inner wisdom, these traditions suggest that you start by finding the silence within yourself. Temporarily stop the noise of the activities and turn doing into being. Taking a sabbatical, like Rens van Loon did, is a powerful example. He writes, “In 2014, I took a sabbatical, a prolonged period of stillness, meditation and walking to give needed space to the sacred practices of thinking, reflecting and writing. I developed a synergistic partnership with my physical environment, allowing it to answer many of my unspoken needs by providing a beautiful garden, a workplace with natural light and fresh air, and deep, surrounding woods; I felt completely integrated and deeply content.

Reflection can take many forms. I know leaders who find meditation very useful, others go into nature (like Sander

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Nieuwenhuizen in his example), listen to music, visit a museum or go jogging. It is important to find the method that works best for you.

Changing places also helps. Sander Nieuwenhuizen: “Expatriation is a phenomenal trigger for awareness: How do I operate? What is the context? And what is the dynamic between the two? To realize that the same behavior can be very effective in a certain context and very ineffective in another leads you to reflect on your underlying values and motivations.”

When the mind is silent, something beyond thought comes into operation. The bandwidth of our receiver becomes wider, which enables us to receive signals that were too weak to hear before. Our filters and barriers are temporarily out of operation. A momentary loss of self can occur. As American scientist David Bohm said, “The body is the individual gateway to a remarkable wealth of unexpected information.” We become more open. Our ego and superego might be silenced for an instant. From this deeper place of knowing, you can take decisions for situations for which analysis doesn’t offer the solution: Should we acquire this company? Is this the right step in my career? Can I trust this person? Access your inner wisdom, let go and the answer will come. You’ll just know.

Conlusion 3. Only deep self-awareness triggers adequate behavior. Contemplating one’s navel can be a way of life for a hermit on a mountain but a leader is judged by his or her actions. Self-awareness can be rewarding as such, but in the context of leadership, it is the results that count. Self-awareness only helps leaders when they subsequently use it to change their behavior, improve their relationships, organize their teams, et cetera.

Access your inner wisdom, let go and the answer will come. You’ll just know

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Michael van Impe connects awareness to behavior in his essay. He explains that leaders should know themselves and then act upon that knowledge. “Successful leaders identify their weaknesses and develop strategies to overcome them. They build a strong team that brings complementary skills and is able to provide feedback and critical reflection. As we live in a complex and rapidly changing world, we need different approaches in different circumstances. Leaders need to expand their own toolkit by increasing their own self-awareness and personal mastery. They know leadership is a team sport; no individual has all the answers.”

Henk Breukink and Ber Damen have based their essays on the work of David McClelland, an American pscychologist. The main thesis of his work is that our behavior is explained by implicit motives that develop early in life. Awareness of our motives, which can only be developed by working on it consciously, can help to make our behavior more effective. Henk Breukink: “After having an assessment myself, seeing the feedback and discussing the meaning of my profile, it paved the way for a new life for me. Or, without much exaggeration, I really started to live a life of my own once I understood what made me do what I do.”

Ber Damen explains McClelland’s theory as follows, “Implicit motives predict our behavioral trends over time. They manifest themselves unconsciously and are strongly connected to our emotional well-being. They direct our behavior, without always knowing ourselves exactly why and how that happens. (…) McClelland opines that our implicit motives develop early in life based on important, non-verbal, emotional experiences. (…) They are better predictors of the consistency in the actions and the spontaneous behavior of managers in the long term and of the trends and patterns that are recognizable in that behavior.”

In the concise wording of Henk Breukink, “if you think about something a lot, you are very likely to do it. Similarly,

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if you rarely or never think about something, the chances of you doing it are next to nil.”

Both Henk and Ber state that leaders are characterized by a high Power Drive. Ber Damen explains that drive as follows, “People with a strong need for power get their satisfaction from influencing others and having an impact on and control over others. They enjoy holding (and winning) debates, defeating an opponent and directing the activities of a group. They want to exert influence and power, have an impact and gain acknowledgement, status and respect.”

Action-oriented leadership also exudes from Hetty van Ee’s essay about the art of living. “It would be wonderful if everyone could develop the art of living and experience how it feels. It makes your life, your relationships, and your work so much richer. For this reason, I associate the art of living with leadership. Real leaders know what they want, they have passion, they’re optimistic and driven, they know how to create enthusiasm, and how to ensure their teams are connected, inspired, collaborate well and deliver quality. This behavior can be developed with the right mindset.” Moreover, she writes about “learning agility” as “the ability to develop new behavior based on new experiences. (…) Believing in your own development potential, combined with personal leadership leads to the courage to take action and experiment with new behaviors, which in turn creates new experiences and consequently begins the development process.”

This latter point relates to the reciprocal relationship between awareness and behavior. Self-awareness can help to change behavior, to stop behaving in a way that is detrimental to yourself or your context, and to develop behavorial patterns that feel supportive. Olivier Sprangers gives an example in

Self-awareness can help to stop behaving in a way that is detrimental to yourself or

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his essay. He experienced a burnout that was in part due to his inability to voice his needs, which was a behavior he developed as a child. “I hit a wall, but later on in life, I learned how to examine my past and change my behavior in the future.” But it also works the other way around: change your behavior and your mind will follow. New neural pathways will develop that carve your new behavior into your brain.

Conclusion 4. The context of the leader is at least as important as the self.A leader operates by definition in a context with followers. You cannot be a leader in your own splendid isolation. In Henk Breukink’s definition, “A leader is someone that can take large numbers of people by the hand and take them further.” So followers need a place in the leader’s mind. In this book, that aspect is primarily covered by Paul Kop and Leo van de Voort.

A group’s social identity and the role a leader plays in shaping and maintaining that identity, is the topic of Paul Kop’s essay. He says, “Modern leaders are always surrounded by and dependant on interactions with other successful, autonomous people. (…) One of the most important aspects of successful leadership is learning how to deal with a group’s social identity and how to harness its power to mold others into even better versions of themselves.” Paul thinks that it is vital for leaders to reflect on themselves in their context. “Truly reflecting on who you are, what you stand for and whether this is a match with the goals of the group is absolutely vital. It is often very hard for a potential leader to achieve this level of clarity because of the influence of ego and ambition, but if achieved, it directly translates into superior group outcomes.”

Leo van de Voort also talks about leadership as a social process when he presents his ideas on leadership and complexity in his essay. He explains that leaders need to work on connections and the system. “The main thing that

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leaders can do to stimulate performance is facilitate options for connections between individuals and throughout the organization, through purpose, mission and meaningful work. I call this connectedness. What really improves a complex system as a whole is working not on the parts itself, but on the interactions between the parts.” Later on he adds, “Leadership in complexity means working the system, not the people. It has less to do with the personality of the individual leader, and more with leadership as a social process. (…) Leadership in this sense operates by influencing people and their (dynamic) contexts, systematically, taking into account human individuality, meaning creating structures and value(s). Thus, leadership is becoming more and more a systems capability.”

Also Rens van Loon and Ronald Meijers conclude that there is no leadership without followership. They plead for internal dialogues that take others into account in a “dynamic self-other dichotomy.” “Without this notion of a connected inner and outer world, we don’t think leadership would be possible. In our view, leadership is a give-and-take relationship between two or more individuals. There is no leadership without followership; none of us is always a leader or a follower but we continuously combine those two quintessential roles. Leadership implies the intention to achieve something of importance for both the leader and the follower. Hence, we describe leadership as the result of a mutually beneficial and transformative interaction between leaders and followers.” The leader’s ‘self’ does not exist in isolation, but is part of society. Rens and Ronald explain, “In our view, the self is a ‘society of mind’, hence a living, continuously evolving whole, which is part of a larger, external society. A dialogical self implies that there is no static self-other dichotomy, but rather an inter-dependent infusion of the internal and the external.”

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This relates to the work of Joseph Jaworski, one of my favorite leadership authors. Joseph, who is now in his eighties, has dedicated most of his life to creating in organizations the ‘shockingly effective’ way of cooperating in a group that he experienced when he was eighteen years old. As a freshman at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, he experienced one of the deadliest tornadoes ever in the US, and afterwards found himself helping in the streets. With a small team, they searched for and dug out survivors and recovered bodies from the debris. In his book Source he writes, “While we worked together, I experienced a palpable energy field surrounding us. My sense of awareness was acute. I possessed an uncanny clarity, a sort of panoramic knowing. Time slowed down. We were able to perform very difficult tasks with apparent ease. (…) It was almost effortless, yet we were exerting a supreme effort. We operated as a ‘single intelligence’ – as one organism – with exceedingly high coherence. (…) I was acting without conscious awareness or control, doing tasks without the sense that I was personally performing them. It was as if we were being used as instruments to accomplish what we must. But most of all, I was struck by the deeper level of knowing that I embodied. My premonitions were constantly correct.”

Joseph looks for the spirit and nature of this experience to be able “to harness this phenomenon in organizational settings for the benefit of all society.” He writes that “there is a deep hunger for the experience of oneness and for being used for something greater than ourselves. I began to understand that being used in this way is what it means to be human.” You as an individual become part of the greater scheme of things.

Joseph’s question is: how can we repeat the miracle of the effectiveness he experienced in Waco in organizations,

You as an individual become part of the greater scheme of things

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without having to experience a tornado in particular, or a crisis in general? His answer is that we can all access a ‘Source’, a greater field of wisdom — leaders as well as followers — and have similar experiences to his “shockingly effective” work in Waco; repeatability is perfectly possible, and self-awareness is a precondition.

To summarize my conclusions from reading the essays, the following points stand out to me: 1. Leaders need a well-developed self-awareness.2. Reflection improves self-awareness.3. Only deep self-awareness triggers adequate behavior.4. The context of the leader is at least as important as

the ‘self’.

I invite you to dive into the minds of leaders by reading the essays in this book and develop your own conclusions.

Twan van de Kerkhof is the Founder and Executive Director of the European Leadership Platform. He is a former journalist and the (co-)author of nine books.