Leading requires Self-Leadership: What You Don't Know in Yourself Leads You – Not the Other Way Around
On self-leadership, inner parts, and why organizational development is always, first of all, an inside job.
A coaching client says to me: "I don't know what I want. Part of me wants to sell the company. Another part would never forgive me for giving up."
I ask: "How many other parts are there?"
He gives a short laugh, the kind of laugh that comes when a question lands closer than expected. Then he falls silent. And begins to count.
"Few leaders realize that, in the end, there is only one person they can and must lead. That person is themselves."
Peter Drucker
We Are Not Alone – Within Ourselves
Decades ago, Friedemann Schulz von Thun found an image for this that still resonates today: the inner team. What lives inside us is not one single, orderly voice, but a whole assembly. There is the part that wants harmony at almost any cost. The one afraid of taking up too much space. The ambitious one who never quite arrives. The exhausted one, quietly asking for a pause. And somewhere at the back of the room, one who has long wanted to say no.
And as in any poorly facilitated meeting, it is not the wisest voice that wins, but the loudest. Or the most afraid.
Schulz von Thun never suggested dismissing this team. He suggested leading it: listening to everyone, including the quiet ones at the edges, and then making a decision that as many inner voices as possible can stand behind.
A related map is known in the English-speaking world as Internal Family Systems (IFS), developed by Richard Schwartz. Here, too, there is a community of parts living inside us, each with a task and a story. Some stand guard. Some step in when there's a fire. Some carry old wounds, stored away so carefully that we ourselves have forgotten where. Schwartz captured perhaps his most comforting insight in the title of a book: there are no bad parts. They all mean well – in their own way, with the means they once learned.
The perfectionist in you may once have been a child who realized: if I make no mistakes, I'm safe. He is not your opponent. He simply never found out that you have grown up.
So the crucial difference between a person driven by their parts and one who leads themselves does not lie in discipline. It lies in relationship. Not in control.
Relationship, Not Control
This is where Eugene Gendlin comes in – for me, an underrated contribution to the question of what self-leadership really means.
In the 1960s, Gendlin and his colleagues in Chicago listened to hundreds of tape recordings of therapy sessions. They wanted to understand why some people flourish in therapy while others stay stuck. The surprising answer: it had less to do with the therapist's method than with something the clients themselves were doing. The ones who made progress paused as they spoke. They groped for words. They referred to something unclear inside them: "There's something… like a pull… I don't quite know yet what it is." And this could often be heard in the very first sessions.
Gendlin called this unclear something the "felt sense": the vague, bodily knowing of a situation before there are words for it. Not quite a feeling, not a thought. Something in between. A little like a word on the tip of your tongue – except it sits in your whole body.
Out of this observation, Focusing was born. At its heart is an attitude Gendlin called "friendly": turning towards what is there. Going to it, staying with it, giving it room. Not fighting it. Not getting lost in it either. Being curious.
It sounds simple. It isn't.
Because most people's reflex – and I see it especially often in leaders – is a different one: push it down. Rationalize. Keep going. The part that's afraid should please be quiet; we have things to deliver.
Except: it isn't quiet. It's merely invisible. And invisible parts lead anyway. They do it beneath the surface: through a shoulder that creeps upward, through a decision that feels strangely foreign three weeks later, through a reaction far out of proportion to its cause.
Focusing invites something else: to pause, to sense inward, to ask what this part needs. Not to give in to it, but to respond from a more awake place. Rilke once advised a young poet to be patient toward all that is unresolved in his heart and to try to love the questions themselves. I know of hardly a better description of this attitude.
That is what self-leadership is about. Not about having no difficult parts. But about being in friendly contact with them.
Lead Yourself
Has Focusing sparked your curiosity? I offer Focusing-oriented self-exploration sessions: 40-minute guided one-to-one sessions that bring you into contact with your inner life.
Who Leads When You Lead?
Otto Scharmer likes to tell of a sentence given to him by Bill O'Brien, the former CEO of Hanover Insurance: the success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervener. Scharmer calls this the "blind spot of leadership." We know a great deal about what leaders do and how they do it. But hardly anyone asks: from what inner place do they do it?
From fear? From the wish to be liked? Or from genuine contact with what the situation needs right now?
The answer to this question changes everything. The same action – a difficult feedback conversation, a strategic decision, a conflict in the team – takes on an entirely different quality depending on who inside you sets it in motion. The anxious part that wants to stay in control? Or what Schwartz calls the Self: that core present in every human being, which he describes with qualities like calm, curiosity, compassion, clarity, courage and connectedness. This Self doesn't need to be built. It is already there, like the sun behind the clouds. We only need to give the parts that cloud it enough trust that they can step aside a little.
Presencing, as Scharmer describes it, is closely related: the capacity to act from the deepest, most honest inner place. Not from habit, not from fear, not from what others expect of us.
This is not a spiritual concept. It is a practical competence. And it begins with getting to know your own inner parts at all.
Teams are Mirrors
Once you have understood this, you see teams with different eyes.
A team that never truly disagrees – not because everyone is aligned, but because disagreement doesn't feel safe. A team that is silent in the meeting and talks in the hallway. A team that keeps conflict below the surface like a ball held under water, until one day it shoots up with full force.
These dynamics don't arise in a vacuum. They arise in relationship to leadership.
Edwin Friedman – rabbi, family therapist, and adviser to congregations and organizations – built on Murray Bowen's systems theory to coin a term that has stayed with me for years: differentiation of self. It means the ability to remain in close contact with others without being swept away by their anxieties – or your own. To stay clear when the storm is raging around you. Friedman spoke of a "non-anxious presence": someone who lowers the temperature in the room simply by not catching the fever. In his late work A Failure of Nerve, published only after his death, he puts it roughly like this:
A system – a family, a team, an organization – cannot be more mature, more courageous, or clearer than the least differentiated person at its top.
Nicht weil diese Person alles kontrolliert. Sondern weil chronische Angst sich in Systemen ausbreitet wie Wellen auf einem Teich – und wer oben in der Hierarchie steht, wirft den größten Stein.
Das ist nicht nur eine Idee aus der Familientherapie. Die sozialpsychologische Forschung zur emotionalen Ansteckung - Emotional Contagion - zeigt, wie Stimmungen unwillkürlich von Mensch zu Mensch wandern: über Tonlage, Mimik, Körperhaltung, oft schneller, als wir es bewusst wahrnehmen. In einem viel zitierten Experiment von Sy, Côté und Saavedra übertrug sich die Stimmung der Führungsperson auf die Gruppe. Und Gruppen mit gut gestimmter Leitung stimmten sich sogar besser untereinander ab.
Führung färbt ab, ganz gleich, was inhaltlich gesagt wird.
Not because that person controls everything. But because chronic anxiety spreads through systems like ripples on a pond – and whoever stands at the top of the hierarchy throws the largest stone.
This is not just an idea from family therapy. Social-psychological research on emotional contagion shows how moods travel involuntarily from person to person: through tone of voice, facial expression, posture, often faster than we consciously notice. In a widely cited experiment by Sy, Côté and Saavedra, the leader's mood carried over to the group. And groups with a positively-minded leader even coordinated better with one another.
Leadership rubs off, no matter what is actually being said.
This holds true for confidence as much as for cynicism, for calm as much as for the need for control.
When a leader unconsciously puts harmony above truth, because an inner part experiences conflict as threatening, the team learns: truth is not safe here. When someone leads who cannot bear uncertainty, the team learns: taking initiative is risky. Nobody ordered this. The team senses what the leader has not yet resolved within themselves, and quietly adapts.
And that is exactly why this inner work is worth it for anyone who leads:
You cannot develop a team's maturity beyond your own differentiation.
Every workshop, every strategy offsite, every culture initiative eventually hits this ceiling – your own. Whoever wants to develop teams cannot bypass their own inner world.
Organizations as a Collective Inner World
Now it gets bigger. And I mean that seriously.
What holds for teams holds for organizations – except that here, the patterns don't just show up in moods; they settle into structures. In Reinventing Organizations, Frederic Laloux described how organizations as a whole embody certain stages of consciousness – and how hard it is to transform an organization as long as the people at its top don't transform themselves.
Margaret Wheatley goes one step further: organizations are living systems. They respond to what lives within them – to the quality of relationships, to what is said and what is left unsaid, to the quiet shared assumptions about what is possible and what is not.
Chronic decision paralysis. A conflict avoidance worn in over decades, like a footpath trodden across a meadow. The pattern of always escalating problems upward instead of solving them where they arise.
These are rarely just structural problems. Often they are expressions of collective inner patterns, shaped by those who held influence the longest and the strongest. Friedman would have spoken of a "chronically anxious" organization. And chronic anxiety always seeks the same way out: more control, more safeguards, more hierarchy, never less. You can read it in approval loops, in meeting cultures, in the number of people who must sign off on a decision "just to be safe." Sometimes I think: many structures are anxiety turned solid.
Culture change that stays on the surface – new values on posters, new processes, new org charts – remains decoration. Real change begins where people are willing to ask an uncomfortable question:
What in me contributes to things being the way they are here?
It is uncomfortable. It is also the most effective thing I know.
An Invitation
Before your next difficult conversation, your next big decision, your next team meeting:
Take two minutes. Sit down. Let your breath arrive. And ask yourself – not in your head, but in your body: What is here right now? What do I sense when I think about this situation? What is keeping me from being at ease in this moment?
Maybe there's tension in your neck. Maybe tiredness behind your eyes. Maybe a quiet unease somewhere in your chest that you don't have a name for yet.
Stay with it for a moment, the way you would stay with a shy animal: calm, unhurried. Be curious. And ask: What do you need from me?
This is the beginning of self-leadership. And with it – whether you like it or not – the beginning of everything else.
Comments