“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” — Viktor Frankl.

When a leader enters the safe zone, stagnation follows next. However, there is a thin line between optimal performance within a safe zone and peak performance outside a safe zone. Optimal performance, if well managed, can be sustained for a long time, whereas peak performance in leadership usually follows a crisis-growth-repeat pattern. The famous Lincoln failures illustrate the pattern because each of Lincolns’s major victories was preceded by at least one major crisis.

Fundamentally, a crisis is a dissonance between the perceived self and the actual self. As such, the experience feels as real as it gets, but simultaneously an individual leader in crisis may not fully expose the experienced inner struggle but suffers from it. In practice, sharing the crisis with a trusted friend ameliorates the conflict to some extent but rarely resolves it unless something changes fundamentally.

Why does crisis ignites change?

Human beings perform optimally in a state called homeostasis, which is the perseverance of stable equilibrium. Homeostasis is brought about by a natural resistance to change in optimal conditions. As a leader can tell, convincing staff working in optimal conditions to change anything quickly turns into a heroic task because of the established resistance to change.

A crisis implies a homeostasis disbalance and incents the restoration of the equilibrium. Doing so forces a hard decision between two choices: either going back or going forward. The choice depends on the personality, but leaders usually prefer moving forward.

How does a leader grow through a crisis?

A few more stages involved in going through a full-blown crisis, and these stages follow roughly the five stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Depression, and Acceptance.

Denial of a dissonance between the perceived self and the actual self may help to survive for a short moment, but suppression usually amplifies a crisis. Chronic denial, however, turns into pathological lies, the inability to discern true from false, and a strong tendency to use any means of distraction to shift the focus away from the dissonance.

Anger, however, usually focuses on oneself and takes many forms, from unhealthy to destructive behavior that inflicts harm. Anger, however, paves the way for the next stage, when the true crisis takes off.

The human mind cannot handle two contradicting beliefs simultaneously, but at the bottom of a deep crisis lay two conflicting beliefs about the actual self so that the mind seeks a resolution to restore equilibrium. The inability to isolate and resolve the contradiction prolongs the crisis indefinitely. Conversely, knowing the underlying mechanism allows us to let go of an old belief to allow the competing one to grow stronger through reinforcement. An alternative perspective on resolving contradicting beliefs centers around the 3-step model of “conscious evolution” by Robert Kegan. The 3-step model discerns between three types of self:

1. Socializing-self = a highly dependent person
2. Authoring-self = an independent person
3. Transforming self = a person becoming interdependent by recognizing context and connection’s importance.

Only the transforming-self facilitates the co-creation of true synergies because synergies require personalities that are interdependent yet complemented. When a team or an organization lacks synergies, the first question to ask is about the degree of interdependency in leadership.

Conscious evolution often implies a transition from one stage of the self to another, accompanied by a substantial crisis. While moving from dependency into independency may entail one crisis, transcending from independence into interdependence certainly imposes a very different set of crises. However, whether contradicting beliefs seek resolution or conscious evolution occurs, the core of crisis resolution demands the loss of a long-held belief.

Letting go of a long-held belief about the actual self ignites a grief process, which entails a temporary albeit light form of depression. The downswing follows from the perceived loss; at its core, grief is all about coping with loss.

However, depending on the crisis’s scale, the grief stages can last between a few weeks to about half a year before a liberating acceptance settles in. After that, an irreversible leadership transformation follows. Moving forward often means assuming new responsibilities previously considered out of reach but after the crisis becomes manageable.

Marvin F. L. Hansen