How To Unlock The Hidden Capacities Of Leadership

Leadership matters. It fundamentally informs our ability to progress individually, organizationally and societally. It provides the energy and direction to facilitate creation, transformation and evolution. Indeed, leadership is at the heart of our capacity to survive as a species, as we navigate increasing connection and interdependence, war, climate change, pandemics, proliferation of misinformation, genetic engineering, AI-driven technologies, and other challenges and opportunities.

Good leadership has been proven to matter across domains. For example, great leaders can drive the economic success of their companies and influence technology innovation that can transform society and improve living conditions. At the same time, challenged leaders can struggle to drive positive impact and even prove damaging to their organizations and broader context.

Consider Tom, a composite of business leaders we’ve worked with in recent years. Over a period of 10 years, he grew the health-tech business he’d cofounded 10x, from $12 million to $120 million in revenue, with above-industry-average margins and an inspiring company culture under his leadership as CEO. But in the past two years, revenue had plateaued and EBITDA went to zero; the company experienced its first financial loss.

Tom was struggling to maintain the innovation and customer orientation that had fueled the business’s success. He described difficulty with strategy and focus that made it challenging to maintain a collaborative culture and achieve operational efficiency. His decision-making was slow, and relationships with key fellow leaders and board members were strained. Traditional coaching methods had yielded only minimal results.

Here is why leadership is so hard to develop and a holistic Integrative Leadership Model that can lead to better outcomes for leaders, their organizations, and even broader society.

Why Is Leadership Hard to Develop?

Because leadership is complex and multidimensional, understanding it and developing it is challenging.

One reason is that changing behavior sustainably is difficult, and different factors will enable behavior change for different individuals. For example, business leaders can often struggle with decision-making. To improve this critical leadership capacity, it’s important to help leaders review key elements of effective decision-making, including different forms of cognitive bias, and how to keep these from compromising good decisions. This improves decision-making, especially with repetition and reinforcement.

However, decision-making is improved even more when leaders are provided with other development support around capacities. Such capacities include active listening and a leader’s centeredness; as these rise, so do decision-making capabilities.

Similarly, being centered, or in a state of calm and alert awareness, also improves decision-making. When stress is lower, confusion decreases and thinking is clearer and more efficient.¹

It’s ultimately these hidden, inner capacities—like listening and centeredness—that contribute deeply to effective leadership, supporting expressed, more observable leadership capacities like decision-making, strategy and team-building.

How to Build Effective Leadership

The vertically structured Integrative Leadership Model, below, shows the interdependent layers of capacities that contribute to leadership effectiveness, and illustrates why developing these underlying capacities are just as important as learning traditional management skills.

Returning to the example of Tom, the health-tech leader, his surface challenges—diminished focus, decision-making, collaboration, others—were informed by an interconnected set of issues linked to elements of hidden capacities, such as poor listening and low emotional stability.

Underlying leadership capacities, and how to develop them, are:

Higher-Order Leadership Capacities: Relationship with Groups

At the most expressed level, leadership inherently involves coordinating groups of individuals to act in a purposeful direction—whether setting and executing on strategy, working through an unexpected challenge, or other activities. Doing this well requires using a broad set of higher-order, complex skills such as planning, inspiration, collaboration, decision-making, creating buy-in, implementing systems, and team-building.

Tom had exemplified these in his early tenure with his business by clarifying the company’s strategic priorities, putting in place sound operational systems, and collaborating effectively with the board and key leaders. To improve these capacities, Tom attended an immersive development retreat and ongoing program to prioritize his overall well-being and state of mind, to serve as a foundation for inter- and intrapersonal capacity development.

Interpersonal Capacities: Relationship with Others

It turns out the higher-order capacities are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg—the most easily observed ways of leading. That’s because supporting a leader’s capacity to work with groups are a set of capacities associated with interacting with others one-on-one, a set of interpersonal skills.

These include capacities such as listening, speaking, empathy, compassion, kindness, and building trust. They enable effective interpersonal relationships and are a foundation for working with groups. For example, listening is a key skill to understand and connect with other individuals, and to develop empathy and trust. It’s also fundamental to many higher-order capacities in working with groups, such as collaboration, planning, and decision-making, as depicted below.²

Tom’s challenges included multiple interpersonal elements. He was experiencing poor rapport with colleagues, was short on patience, and had a tendency to lash out at or tune out others, both at work and at home. Thus, Tom practiced active listening and reflection, which yield better understanding, trust, and empathy—all critical for leadership and broader human effectiveness.

Intrapersonal Capacities: Relationship with Self

A leader’s ability to engage interpersonally and with groups is supported by intrapersonal capacities that are “within the person” capabilities, or our relationship to or experience of the self.

The three sets of intrapersonal capacities are cognitive, emotional and character.

• Cognitive capacities include dimensions like focus, intelligence, discrimination, working memory, long-term memory, empowering beliefs, and creativity. These are fundamental to many interpersonal skills and higher-order leadership skills. Listening well, for example, inherently involves focus and discrimination, as do higher-order leadership skills like decision-making, as depicted below.

• Emotional capacities important for leadership effectiveness include optimism, resilience, self-efficacy, perseverance, adaptability, and centeredness. These capacities relate to how we feel and, in turn, have fundamental impact on how we interact one-on-one and with groups. Our capacity to be effective at team-building, for example, is often informed by our ability to communicate, connect, and express energy and enthusiasm, which inherently involves positive emotions.

Goleman and other psychologists highlight how emotional intelligence (EQ) is as or more important than IQ in leadership effectiveness.³ Being aware of emotions and managing them effectively is key to all one-on-one and group interactions.

Tools such as strengths-based assessments, EQ courses, and resilience training can be used in combination with other processes to help make leaders more self and aware of others.

• Character capacities include integrity, forthrightness, respect, fairness, caring, and virtue. Character relates to the core motivating values of a leader—or what psychologist William James described as the mental or moral attitude that reflects the “real me.” Many leadership researchers, including Zenger and Folkman, believe that character is the most influential, important leadership dimension.⁴ It forms a foundation for building trust and rallying teams. Moreover, forthrightness in communication fosters trust and in turn strengthens team cohesiveness, as depicted below.

Tom was struggling with all three dimensions of intrapersonal capacity, having lost trust in his capabilities and effectiveness. This was evidenced in his poor focus, low emotional stability, persistent fear of failure, and overwhelming sense of burnout; all of it eroded his sense of character, as suggested by his more visible leadership challenges.

Intrapersonal capacities can be tricky to improve, as anyone who has tried to would attest. One of the most overlooked areas for positively impacting all intrapersonal capacities is one’s underlying psychophysical state, or mind-brain state.

Mind-Brain State: Relationship with Being

At the basis of all intrapersonal capacities and those that flow from these is our state of mind, or what we can consider our mind-brain state.

Consider what happens when we are tired and stressed. Our mental (mind-brain) state is going to be less clear, less alert, and thus lower-functioning, compromising our cognitive, emotional, and character capacities. This imbalance negatively impacts our patience, communication, and other interpersonal skills, lowering our ability to collaborate effectively and deploy other higher-order skills, in a cascading effect that begins with the internal and moves quickly to external, more observable impacts, as depicted below. Tom was experiencing this negative process in full.

Our state of mind and brain have fundamental influence on all other capacities. It’s no surprise, then, that stress and fatigue are responsible for an estimated hundreds of billions of dollars of lost productivity annually.⁵

On the other hand, if we feel rested and unstressed, our mind-brain state will be more coherent. Our focus and creativity increase, and our emotional temperament will be more balanced (e.g., optimistic, positive, calm), enhancing our interpersonal capacity and ability to work with groups.

In line with this, the leadership development plan for Tom was created to prioritize his overall well-being and state of mind, along with working on his self-awareness and interpersonal skills, to enhance his more expressed leadership capacities. This included a focus on establishing a daily rhythm of sufficient sleep, exercise, healthy eating, and meditation; he decided to eliminate alcohol as part of the process. He also practiced active listening, reflection, and collaboration exercises.

With coaching, a leader like Tom can integrate these practices into daily and weekly routines. For Tom, results came quickly. His clarity of mind, energy, motivation, focus, and emotional stability improved dramatically. As Tom became more centered and clearer, he became a much more effective leader: he clarified strategic priorities for his company, connected more effectively with his team and board, and secured their buy-in for critical decisions. He also made key hiring decisions, delegated more effectively, and implemented better systems and processes.

These efforts contributed to a banner year for Tom’s business, with revenue growth of 43%, 15% EBITDA, and 36% pipeline growth. He also successfully integrated an R&D research firm into the company, further supporting its growth strategy. Soon the business began fielding acquisition offers valued at north of $500 million.

An Integrative Curriculum for Leadership in Business and Beyond

These insights all contribute to emergent training programs around brain-based leadership development, with emphasis on the importance of increasing centeredness.⁶ In this context, wellness is increasingly recognized not only as important to reduce workplace absenteeism and improve satisfaction, but as critical to supporting leadership effectiveness and organizational success.

More companies are integrating resilience practices, meditation, mindfulness, and flexible work schedules into approaches to support employee well-being.⁷ That said, leadership models and training tend to omit the mind-brain capacities, thereby overlooking some of the strongest levers for creating meaningful leadership change across a vast spectrum of competency development.

The core premise of the Integrative Leadership Model is that becoming a more fully integrated human being is highly correlated with greater leadership capacity.⁸

The model can also extend beyond business to leadership at the societal and environmental levels—increasingly critical in our interconnected, interdependent world. Caring for and sustaining our broader social and environmental context is contingent on additional capacities such as societal compassion, social equity, cultural awareness, and environmental stewardship. Like the higher-order leadership capacities, these are predicated on the more latent capacity layers: interpersonal, intrapersonal, mind-brain.

Ultimately, the greatest impact on leadership development—and how it affects our experience—is realized only when all levels are considered and supported, as part of a truly integrative leadership model.

References

1. Valosek, L., Links, J., Mills, P., Konrad, A, Rainforth, M., Nidich, S. “Effect of meditation on emotional intelligence and perceived stress in the workplace: A randomized controlled study,” The Permanente Journal, 2018; 22: 17-172.
2. Kluger, Avraham N., and Guy Itzchakov. “The power of listening at work,” Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior 9 (2022): 121-146.
3. Goleman, D (2005). Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ.
4. Zenger, Folkman (2002). “The Extraordinary Leader.”
5. Ricci, Judith A. ScD, MS; Chee, Elsbeth ScD; Lorandeau, Amy L. MA; Berger, Jan MD Fatigue in the U.S. Workforce: Prevalence and Implications for Lost Productive Work Time, Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine: January 2007 – Volume 49 – Issue 1 – p 1-10.
6. George, B (2012). “Mindfulness Helps You Become a Better Leader,” Harvard Business Review.
7. Horwitch, M; Callahan, M (2016). “The Science of Centeredness,” Bain and Company.
8. Rooke, D, Torbert, W. “Seven Transformations of Leadership,” Harvard Business Review. (2005)