Overcoming Internal Barriers: What Sets Great Leaders Apart
I once had a boss who was completely unflappable. It was amazing. I was early in my career and hadn’t been a manager in a big company for very long. Before then, I’d worked for myself for over a decade, and I hadn’t really learned how to play nice with others in the organization.
He was so cool though, even under immense pressure. There were plenty of topics to get frustrated about in the company every single day, and there were some strong personalities that were hard to deal with. But he never let it bother him.
I was totally reactive, on the other hand. So convinced of my own viewpoint in those days, that I would take any feedback or criticism as an attack.
One day, on a walking 1-1, I asked him how he could remain so calm when dealing some of these aggressive colleagues. He told me it’s not that he doesn’t get angry. But he had trained himself to notice that anger as it’s happening, and every time it emerges in a meeting, he takes a deep breath and counts to 5 in his head before responding.
Most of the time, before he even finishes counting, the other person has already noticed that they sound like a jerk, and will soften their words or apologize first. So usually he doesn’t have to do anything but keep his cool and wait!
I was blown away, and vowed then and there to try that one for myself.
—
We all have internal barriers, deeply ingrained behaviors that operate from our subconscious, seemingly on auto-pilot. These behaviors make it difficult for us to perform the new skills required of leadership. Once we understand the nature of internal barriers, we can clear the space to learn new leadership skills.
In order to become successful as a senior leader, you will need to develop new skills that are not required of individual contributors, and some are not required of line managers.
You will need to delegate work to your subordinates that is appropriate to their skills and interests, pushing them a little bit but not too much. And you will need to provide career path guidance and succession planning that align their development goals with the needs of the organization.
You will need to manage up to senior leaders, sometimes pushing back on their requests of your or your team’s time. You will need to help them understand where work is on track and where it is getting stuck without drowning them in unnecessary detail. You may need to help them change their mind about an issue or a strategic decision that you feel is incorrect. And you will need to earn their support for your initiatives by both trusting them and earning their trust in you.
You will need to communicate effectively across the entire organization. You will need to be able to transmit the appropriate messages with the right words and at the right level of detail to your team and others in a way that all understand the mission and their role within it. You will need to build relationships with other teams and departments and coordinate your efforts with them effectively.
Most new leaders struggle with one or more of these capabilities, despite their best efforts, because of internal barriers that prevent them from acting with complete honesty and openness, with confidence and compassion.
Without overcoming these internal barriers, a leader is unlikely to ever be able to operate at their true potential, and will likely progress much more slowly through their career than they desire.
What Are Internal Barriers
An internal barrier is a deeply ingrained psychological response to a particular situation that feels outside of your control, a seemingly automatic reaction.
An example might be wanting to speak up in a meeting, but failing to do so out of fear.
Or getting in the same disagreement with a colleague over and over again without resolution or closure.
Or being unable to accept feedback or criticism without getting defensive.
Internal barriers originate from your earliest years as a child. They are learned behaviors that developed in response to your parents and other family members, as well as your cultural and environmental background. They are behaviors that are now so automatic for you as an adult that most of us are completely unaware of them.
If your parents believed that children should be seen and not heard, as was common in early 20th century America for example, you will have learned not to speak unless asked a question by an adult. You behaved appropriately to your parents wishes, enabling you to be rewarded rather than punished by keeping quiet. However, that same impulse to defer speaking until asked now makes it more difficult for you to speak up in a group as an adult. This is just one example of a possible internal barrier, and your own barriers will be unique to your upbringing.
Internal barriers are not all bad. You developed a specific behavior in response to what your child brain believed was necessary to keep you safe and healthy. They are there for a reason, to protect you. However, they may have outlived their usefulness and it is time to get past them. This is harder to achieve than it sounds.
How Internal Barriers Work
What you perceive as the world around you is not entirely accurate. Your brain generates a working model based on a fraction of the available sensory detail and fills in most of the picture based on guesses from past experience.
Your brain is a prediction machine (see Feldman Barrett, 2017). It instantly generates thoughts and feelings based on your experiences as new data is first coming in from your senses. It has already formed an opinion before the observation data has even been processed. It then more slowly updates its predictions based on the data, and as more data comes in. This is why we can see optical illusions on paper that aren’t really there, or hear voices in background noise, or feel “ghost” sensations in our bodies. Your brain is doing its best to update the working model based on combining what you sense and your memories.
As you were developing as a child your brain was making predictions about the world, and then updating those predictions based on actual experience. The more it received feedback, the stronger the “wiring” for particular behaviors became. Positive feedback reinforced some behavior while negative feedback slowly eroded wiring for other behaviors. This is how learning works.
The most reused behaviors that were followed by positive feedback ultimately became automatic. Talking, eating, and walking came first. Later throwing and catching a ball, playing an instrument, driving a car, were developed. But responses to other humans in social situations were also in the mix.
Today, you may find that there are ingrained behaviors in your brain that get in the way of your development as a leader. Now you’re going to dig them up, evaluate them objectively, and overcome those that no longer serve you.
Barriers at the Organization Level
David Marquet asks us as leaders what we need to overcome mentally and emotionally in order to delegate properly. He points out that delegation requires letting go of control. But letting go of control is hard for most leaders. It is an ingrained behavior, an internal barrier.
As he relates the story in “Turn the Ship Around”, nuclear submarine Capt. David Marquet developed a very counterintuitive leadership method when he was forced to adapt to a new situation in which he had little control or advanced knowledge. Assigned to an unfamiliar submarine at the last minute, with a crew that was struggling to perform, he had to toss out the traditional leadership method and try something new.
Through a series of experiments, Marquet and his leadership team were able to transform a ship full of under-performers into one of the best crews in the Navy. They managed to push authority and responsibility down the chain of command to where the work was being done. Teams were able to make their own decisions based on immediately available information in the field, and adjust to new conditions on the fly, without having to escalate every decision up to the Captain. As a result, ship operations were much more flexible and adaptive to changing environments.
In order to accomplish this, Marquet needed to overcome deeply ingrained behaviors of giving orders that he had been trained for in the Naval Academy. It was not easy, and did not happen overnight. Even when he was able to change his own behavior, all of his direct reports also had to learn to overcome those same barriers they had learned through their training. Eventually, the behavior on the entire vessel was changed.
Overcoming Your Barriers
You may already be aware of one of your internal barriers, after observing your own behavior for a while, and yet still feel powerless to change it. Often, you only notice the phenomenon has happened afterwards, and wonder why it happened again despite your best efforts to prevent it from repeating. This observation process without initial success may feel depressing but it is actually the first step to changing your behavior.
Here is an approach to try:
Observe your current behavior that you want to change. Write down an example of when you acted this way. What were the circumstances? Why did you react this way?
Analyze the origins of the behavior. Think about where you learned this behavior. How was this behavior beneficial for you in the past? Did it once serve you? Was it intended to protect you from something? How can you avoid demonizing it, and rather, see it as something that is no longer useful to you?
Set an intention for changing the behavior. What change of behavior do you want to practice. Visualize yourself performing the new behavior.
Practice the new behavior. During the normal course of your day, practice performing the new behavior in appropriate circumstances. Were you successful? If not, why not?
Continue to repeat and refine the new behavior. Continue to visualize the new behavior and practice it. Eventually, it will replace the old behavior.
Changing behavior is hard. But the good news is, the brain is very flexible. Anything you were able to learn, you can un-learn. It just takes time, discipline, and focus. You can do it!
—
Want to learn more? Get in touch with us.
