What Leaders Aren't Seeing (Leadership Through a Depth Psychology Lens)

Hello there.

In this video, I want to talk about leadership.

Now, you may already know you're a leader because you have a title.

But even if you don't have the title of leader as a formal role, you're still leading sometimes.

And the most important person you're leading is yourself, but sometimes you're leading a group of friends to make a decision, or sometimes your spouse needs you to lead into exploring a topic, for example.

So you'll get something out of this conversation.

And I want to start with a story.

And back when I was the director of a nonprofit, my style of leading was always looking for what I couldn't see on the surface.

So I loved listening and I loved doing lots of one-on-ones with people.

And I would just allow them to set the agenda.

So during one of these one-on-ones, my program manager wanted to talk about a challenge that he had with one of the people who reported to him.

And I noticed he had a little emotional tinge to the story that he told.

And he was frustrated, quite frankly, because he couldn't understand the behavior of this employee that reported to him.

And so I listened to him to describe the data points.

And then when he was done, I just tipped my head and I said, Why does that bother you? So he had never been asked a question like that before, and it led to a really interesting conversation that led him to gain an insight about himself and how he led.

And he was able to switch the perspective on the incident and sort of the emotion ended up dissipating and he could make a more effective decision.

And so, you know, many times leaders learn, you know, how to manage things.

And, you know, that's not really leadership.

Management is sort of non-people oriented, really, or managing, making sure that people put their time card in on time.

But think about what is leading.