The First Step to Inclusive Leadership

How Mentalizing Can Help Create Belonging

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We all remember these two people…

We remember the first because she made us feel that we are in control, that we are good enough the way we are. She made us grow and believe in ourselves. She stimulated us to become a better version of ourselves.

The second one we would love to eliminate from our lives, because she made us feel incompetent. She pushed us back into the child’s role, feeling powerless and not in control. Due to the way she responded to us or maybe even talked about us to others, we felt more and more insecure about ourselves.

Who am I talking about?

Bosses, leaders, managers, we all remember the best and the worst we ever had. What guarantee do you have, at this moment, that you are not one of them? One of the bad ones? How do you know you are one of the good ones? You take your role as a leader very seriously. Every morning you get up and try to do your best. But do other people perceive you as the best leader they ever had?

Did I get you started to think about yourself in your leadership role and how your followers are perceiving you? By the way  I assume for this article that you want to be one of the good ones. If not, you are more than welcome to read further so that you know what you should not do and remain a bad leader. Or maybe you will get inspired to act differently.

Belonging and leadership

If you google "research on bad leadership" or  "bad bosses", you will find lots of stuff. Academic and non-academic pieces. Micromanagement, indecisive, no feedback, avoids delegation, stealing credit for work done by others, poor communication and seventeen more threads on bad bosses are listed.

Article titles include "Bad bosses and despotism at workplace", "Three bad boss habit to avoid in 2024", "How bad leaders can drive out good leaders" or "Poor Leadership”,  to just name a few. They are all written about bad leadership and the implications of it for their followers and the organization.

For this article, I want to keep it simple yet challenging, by starting with one of our basic needs—belonging.

We all want and need to feel seen, heard and valued if we are to develop a sense of connection with others and have good relationships, achievements, successes and, most importantly, better physical and mental health.

Having a sense of belonging equips us with better coping mechanisms for dealing with whatever challenges we encounter in life

So the first critical step to becoming a good leader is to be able to see, hear and value the other.

It’s all about yourself

Why then are there still so many stories about bad leadership if the only thing you need to do as a first critical step is to be able to see, hear and value your followers?

Well, let me tell you, although the above sounds easy, believe me it’s not. In the society we live in nowadays, this is not only hard for leaders, but it is also difficult for  all of us.

Why, because to really see, hear and value the other, you need to see, hear and value yourself.

Aristotle once said,

“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom”.

By knowing yourself, I mean being aware within the here and now of what your needs, desires, feelings, beliefs, goals, purposes, and reasons are. This goes further than, for example, simply knowing that I dislike people who talk a lot, are lazy or are not on time. It goes to this deeper level of our unconscious that Freud talks about. Here is a short video that reviews the basic tenets of Freud’s theory from PsychED:

It is about that 90% of our thoughts and feelings that we are normally not aware of during our interactions.

Seeing yourself

So within an interaction you need to be able to see yourself from a distance and the other from inside. When you are able to see yourself from a distance, then you are able to be aware of what is going on within you. Within psychology, they call this process “mentalizing”. The video below offers a general overview of mentalizing. In it, noted psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist Peter Fonagy describes the process of mentalizing from the perspective of the relationship between a parent and a child.

In order to be a good leader, it’s important that you realize that you need to be aware of your own inner theatre before you can really understand what is going on within the other person’s inner theatre. Inner theatre refers to all your needs, desires, feelings, beliefs, goals, purposes and reasons that are in your mind and that colour the way you look at the world and towards the other.

To use a metaphor, think about a camera which you use to capture what is out there. We all know that, if we use a different lens on the camera, the images we perceive is different from what we would perceive using another lens. That is also what we do when we all look through our own lenses onto the world and the people around us. Our lenses are created by our needs, desires, feelings, beliefs, goals, purposes and reasons. So our lenses colour what we see.

So, as long as, we are not able to be aware of what lenses we have on our camera, we are not able to see the other as he truly is. We can’t be curious about the lenses this person puts on and how that influences how he shows up in the here and now.

What is happening in the moment

Let’s go a bit back before we go forward.  The Cambridge dictionary gives the following description of the word ‘interaction’: “A situation where two or more people or things communicate with each other or react to another”.

In short, an interaction requires an engagement between two people, and these two people react to each other.

When it comes to this reaction that occurs with the other, it is important to move toward seeing yourself from a distance. Let’s look at the following tendency that I'm sure you recognise. Say you are having a conversation with a colleague, and he says something which you don't agree with or you think he is reacting a bit strangely or aggressively. Often your first tendency is to blame the other, put it outside yourself. You will think things like "He probably is having a bad day", "I don’t think he understands me", "phh, it is always the same with him" or probably you have your own favourite thought in moments like this.

We could compare this to a situation where somebody tries to slap you, your first reaction will be that you defend yourself by putting your arm up. In an interaction, the same principle applies—you defend yourself, you will try to keep it outside your system. You try to defend yourself from whatever this person is saying or doing. This defending of yourself within interactions looks differently for everybody. Some of us react very fast and maybe even get a bit aggressive, but others could go silent and keep all the emotions inside. Whatever protection you use, they all prevent you from having meaningful interactions, which increases the chances of being a bad leader.

Two leadership examples

Let me give you an example of two leaders, one being Kofi Annan and the other Elon Musk. Kofi Annan once said:

“Sometimes I walk into a situation and know someone is going to provoke me, and I just simply refuse to be provoked”.

This shows that Kofi is aware of his inner theatre; he is aware that certain people provoke him. But he chooses not to react when being provoked.

We are all aware of Elon Musk’s seemingly uncontrolled  utterances on several occasions. For example, there is the time when Elon Musk lashed out with a profanity, as seen here:

Elon seems to react without any filter or awareness in such situations. I personally think he is aware of this tendency because he once said “Wherever possible I try to communicate asynchronously. I’m really good at email”. I understand that he likes this, because asynchronously gives Elon time to think, so he is not tempted to react too fast and say things he may later regret. By using email, he creates space for himself between the stimulus and response.

The importance of space

Viktor Frankle said:

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom”.

To become a good leader, you probably understand by now that you need to create space. Because if you have space, you have time to go and look at your own inner theatre. You are able to look at yourself from a distance.

For example, you are having a conversation with the same colleague as before, but are you aware of all that is going on within your inner theatre in the here and now? What inner talks do you have? What beliefs are at play? Could it be that this person even resembles someone from your (troubled) past? Are you aware of the  lens(es) through which you see this person and the situation you are in together ?

As Freud said, 90% of our thoughts and feelings are unconscious, so it is of no surprise  that we often just unconsciously react. This is especially the case when stress and emotions are high, due, for example, to a deadline, a merger or any other circumstance where the stakes are high. The chance that we become an emotional hostage is big in such high emotional and or stress situations and may lead to being viewed as a bad boss.

How do you create space

Space is a prerequisite for being a good leader. An inclusive leader that really wants to see, hear and value his followers. Without space, you will easily become a bad leader who is reacting from your unconscious dungeons, with all the associated consequences.

The first step in creating space is to slow down. But how do you slow down and become aware of your thoughts and feelings in a world, society, organisation and or family that is full of stress, anxiety and psychological pressure from yourself and or your environment? I can hear you think, no way! I can't slow down and look inwards, too much to do, to many deadlines, to many people wanting something from me.

No, you don't have to start mindfulness and meditation training to slowdown and look inwards. To the leaders I support in my practice, I share the following practical assignment to help them start to slow down in the here and now.

When you walk to the office in the morning, start to walk slower. By ‘slower’, I mean without the mental drive of "I need to go to the office". The mental state you should embrace is that of walking to the office in the here and now. To use a metaphor, you are taking the slow train instead of the intercity train to get to work. So it's all about mindset—a more grounded, intentional and slower mindset—rather than a simple change in your walking pace that would make everybody on the street look and think, wow look how slowly that person is walking.

At the same time, while you are trying to walk slowly, in that moment as you go to your work,  look and feel inside. Be curious about  your inner theatre and ask yourself, “What am I feeling? How does my body feel? Am I nervous? Do I feel a lot of anxiety?” or what is applicable for you in that moment.

That is it. Just start doing this several times during the day. Slow down and feel.

“To stay present in everyday life, it helps to be deeply rooted within yourself; otherwise, the mind, which has incredible momentum, will drag you along like a wild river”. Eckhart Tolle  

Awareness

Once you have adapted this slow down mindset, once you are able to be more in the here and now, you will start noticing that more space emerges.

But please don’t think after two days, this is not working for me. Things like this take time, see it as a process and keep the four stages of competence in mind

From “Four Stages of Competence” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence

The four stages of competence are collectively referred to as the "conscious competence" learning model. It describes the psychological states involved in the process of progressing from incompetence to competence, especially in regards to a specific skill.

According to the four stages model, individuals are initially unaware of how little they know. They are, in short, unconscious of their incompetence. Recognizing their incompetence is the first step in eventually developing the skill they are seeking to acquire.

Before you started reading this article, you were likely unconscious of the fact that, when it comes to your internal life, you are on the intercity train all the time. Now after reading this article for a while, you may have started to recognise that you are on the intercity train most of the time and that it’s difficult to hop off and board the slow train. You are in the stage of conscious incompetence. Once you start to experiment with taking the slow train, you will begin moving to the stage of conscious competence.

It's a success when you start to notice what train you are on. Although this is the most frustrating stage of the change process, try to see it as a big success. Change can only emerges from a place where there is awareness. Being aware that you are trying something, but you are not (yet) able to execute it all the time is a great success.

It is important at this stage is to be compassionate towards yourself. Compassion towards ourselves is central to the process of being and becoming a good leader. It may take a while before you are in the unconscious competence stage, but it will be worth the effort. Slowly but surely, you will realize and begin to perceive that you are moving from interactions to connectedness.

Hard work

As a leader, we all want to be an inspiring person to our followers. We want to be their “always remembered” leader—the one they will talk about, even when they themselves are leaders. The one they talk about as the person who was the best leader they ever had, who had the biggest impact on who they are  today as a leader.

If this resonates with you, may I invite you to start looking at yourself. Start to become curious about your inner theatre. You say you have no time for this or it is not the right moment? That is not a good argument. Life happens in the here and now and so does your inner journey.

Sometimes it’s hard or not even possible to see our own lenses. Stress or emotions can be too high or our (troubled) past can still be unconsciously activated in the here and now. To become a better leader and maybe even move toward being a good leader is hard work and will take time.

The more awareness we have  the more space will emerge. Within this space you can start to discover who you really are. What are your needs, desires, feelings, beliefs, goals, purposes, and reasons in life and as a leader?

My advice:

“Be curious without memory and desire towards yourself and the other”.

Linda Wes is an Inclusive Leadership Consultant and non-clinical expert on the topic of mentalizing. Her passion and belief is that everybody needs to be seen, heard and or taken seriously. Her mission is to create more meaningful interactions in and outside of organisations, allowing people and organisations to thrive in the best way they can.