Why Isn't Insight Enough to Change a Leader's Behavior?
Photo Credit: Nicolas Houdayer via Unsplash
Insight can show a leader exactly what needs to change, yet under pressure, the old pattern tends to return anyway, because noticing a pattern and interrupting it in the moment draws on different capacities.
One of the assumptions we make about leadership development is that insight leads to change.
In a way, this is true. Once we understand a pattern (where it came from, how it affects others, what it costs us), we should be able to choose something different. But after years of coaching leaders, we have learned that insight and change are not the same thing. We can see ourselves with remarkable clarity and still, particularly when we are challenged or under pressure, fall right back into the old ways of being that we thought we had left behind.
Henley Leadership Group’s executive coach and facilitator, Alan Cahn, shares a very personal coaching story of a longtime coaching relationship that challenged some of his own assumptions about what it really takes for people to change.
Alan’s Story
There is a leader I have been coaching on and off for over eight years. By on and off, I mean we have taken two breaks in our coaching, and each time we took a break, I thought (and secretly hoped) we would not work together again.
Why was I, an almost always very optimistic guy who is committed to the belief that all people can grow and develop themselves, happy that we wouldn’t work together? Well, it was because I could not see that this leader was using the coaching to change his behavior in a meaningful way.
Once, we spent two days together doing era work. On the first day, he spent hours distinguishing the moods, behaviors, patterns, narratives, accomplishments, and failures of the past 20 years. Then he named that era and went to bed, waking up committed to creating a new era. On day two, he created new patterns of behavior, new goals that he was committed to, new ways of being he would practice daily, and he gave that era a name. This is an approach that I had used successfully with other leaders and teams, and I was confident this could and would make a difference.
At the end of the two days together, we drove the two and a half hours back to the city. We had a fine meal together, and halfway through dinner, I noticed him slipping into an old way of being and interacting. I gently pointed it out to him. I then got attacked. He went into a rage, accusing me of being unprofessional and telling me all the things I should be doing differently. When I pointed out that the way he was being was a pattern he had just identified as something he wanted to leave behind, he attacked further and got very angry. I stopped talking. We awkwardly finished the meal in silence. I went back to his place to sleep and flew home the next day.
I never found a way to point out to him how ironic and inconsistent his behavior had been. We stopped working together a few months later. We reconnected a year or two after that when he reached out to me, and he started referring to those two days of work together as something that had made a real difference. I could not see any difference at all.
That experience has stayed with me. I believe what it really takes for coaching to make a difference is a willingness to be vulnerable and to look at things through another person’s eyes. Insight alone isn’t enough. You have to be willing to see yourself, particularly when what you see is uncomfortable.
It also taught me something about my responsibility as a coach. I need to pay attention not only to whether someone understands the work intellectually, but also to their capacity to see themselves and actually allow the coaching to make a difference.
I am still an optimist. I still believe people can grow and develop themselves. But I no longer confuse seeing a pattern with changing one.
— Alan Cahn
Insight Is the Beginning, Not the Change
Alan’s story captures one of the paradoxes of leadership development: we can understand ourselves remarkably well and still be controlled by the very patterns we are trying to change. This pattern shows up well beyond executive coaching. Researchers Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey at Harvard's Graduate School of Education have spent decades studying why people struggle to change even when the stakes are severe, and their research suggests that desire and motivation rarely overcome deeply held, self-protective habits of mind on their own (Harvard Graduate School of Education). Under pressure, the old ways of being often return because they are familiar and, at some point, they worked for us.
Lasting change asks more of us than awareness. It takes an open heart, a willingness to listen to feedback, practice, and the self-awareness and capacity to notice when we've slipped back into the familiar and choose again. Harvard Business School's Amy Edmondson, who studies the conditions that allow teams and individuals to learn from their mistakes, calls this willingness to expose ourselves to correction "interpersonal risk-taking," and her research points to it as the ingredient most often missing when insight alone fails to produce change (Harvard Business School).
Perhaps the real measure of development is how quickly we recognize the old pattern when it resurfaces, and how much power we're willing to give it, rather than whether it disappears completely.
Reflection Questions for Leaders
Is there a pattern in your leadership that you can see clearly but still find yourself repeating, especially when you’re under pressure?
When someone says something to you that is difficult to hear, how do you respond?
Think about a time you returned to an old way of leading, something you thought you had changed. When did you recognize it, and what did you do next?
What is a recent insight about yourself as a leader that you are trying to put into practice?
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Self-awareness helps leaders recognize their habits and patterns and how they affect others. But awareness alone does not create new behavior. Lasting leadership change requires practicing new ways of leading after recognizing that old patterns no longer serve us, and being willing to choose differently when we slip back into familiar habits. Sometimes that means being honest with ourselves and others, asking for (and being willing to hear) feedback, and having direct, sometimes difficult conversations with the people we work with.
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The way we manage or lead others often develops because what we did once worked for us, so we default to it.
Under big change, stress, or uncertainty, familiar leadership behaviors (such as taking tight control, doing things ourselves rather than collaborating, coalition-building, becoming defensive, or withdrawing, to name a few) can quickly return.
Leadership development helps us recognize what works and what doesn’t sooner, understand why certain approaches no longer serve us, and find other ways to respond rather than react.
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Lasting change does not necessarily mean an old pattern disappears. It may mean recognizing it sooner, recovering more quickly, and having greater choice about what happens next. Over time, the old pattern has less power over how we lead.
Seeing a pattern clearly is the easy part. Changing it is the work. If you have a leader in your organization who is stuck in that gap between insight and real change, we'd love to talk about what coaching could do to help close it.