Preparation Has a Ceiling. Most Leaders Hit It in the Room That Matters Most.
Preparation Has a Ceiling. Most Leaders Hit It in the Room That Matters Most.
A few months ago I worked with the Head of department in a large company. The organisation has regional presence across several markets, he leads a senior team. The task was to accelerate team performance: better collaboration, higher effectiveness, stronger relationships across the leadership group.
In my conversations with him, I very quickly understood that he was a leader who was deeply versed in the theory. He could describe psychological safety as if he had attended a course on it. He could diagnose its absence in his own team, sharing examples like - keeping information private, ‘false’ alignment in the meeting and then complaints through 1:1 discussions, corridor and by coffee machine chats and the like. He was very clear on what he wanted as the outcome for the team and had shared this openly with his team.
All good so far.
But, one thing is knowing. Another is doing.
What showed up in daily work was something different. High emotions, resistance, avoidance and like. Micromanaging tasks rather than trusting the team to own them. Pushing for results almost through force, when what he consciously wanted to lead with was encouragement, alignment, purpose.
A clear gap.
This gap - between the leader we intend to be and the leader who actually shows up under pressure - is one of the most common patterns I see in executive work. We intend one thing, with our best thinking and clearest values, and something else happens when we act.
Where does the gap come from?
I call it the Capacity Ceiling. It is what happens when the demands placed on us exceed our ability to hold what is coming our way. When that ceiling is reached, we revert to our oldest pattern: we act, then reflect and observe what we did, then try to adjust for next time. Reflection is useful, but - what if we could shift the cycle to start with a reset, rather than with acting out first and fixing later?
Starting with reset requires something that many leaders I work with do not have – it asks for an expanded capacity to hold more.
A larger capacity cycle looks different. Reset, after we are triggered or overwhelmed. Hold, even for a second, a moment. Read - the situation, the room, the person in front of us. Act from there, rather than from emotional preset reaction.
Easily said. Almost impossibly hard to do when we are at our ceiling. It can feel like watching ourselves from the side - knowing exactly what is needed, and doing something entirely different.
The department head I was working with described it himself: sometimes, he said, he just wants to retreat and withdraw, because all of it feels like too much.
This is where my frustration with the current state of leadership development comes in. There is more leadership content available now than any human being could reasonably consume. The leaders I meet in the room are not short on capability. They have all the skills, know-how and theoretic foundation to do the most excellent work. What’s missing in the room is their capacity to process all those insights and learning and stay with their best version of selves when pressure comes in.
Harvard professor Robert Kegan has spent forty years researching this phenomena. He believes that the mental demands of modern leadership routinely exceed the complexity of mind most leaders have developed.
Today's leaders need to hold a lot – and all of it simultaneously. Contradiction, ambiguity, multiple stakeholders, and their own reactivity. However – building and expanding this capacity to hold it all is almost always the last item on the leadership development agenda.
We build everything - strategy, marketing, finance, decision-making - and leave the inner container that has to hold all of it half-built.
We know from neuroscience research (Daniel Siegel) that under sustained pressure, the capacity for self-observation narrows. When it narrows, the advanced and ‘correct’ responses we have studied, read about, and intended to deploy are no longer accessible. We become reactive rather than responsive. We revert to the patterns we have had longest, which are usually the patterns we learned early and under distress.
This is why a seasoned leader who can describe psychological safety very well in theory will still lose their temperament in a room. The knowledge on ‘what’ exists in the rehearsed memory of calmness. The behaviour on ‘how to’ under load comes from a totally different one.
In my own leadership development practice, I have moved away from talking about leadership skill and toward talking about leadership capacity. Because – capacity precedes capability. To move to sustainable high performance we need to start building the container that can hold all that we are poring into it.
In my latest paper I go further, expanding on Capacity Ceiling and introducing my Capaciousness framework - a model for expanding the four dimensions of internal capacity that determine whether a leader contracts under pressure or expands to meet it. The four named dimensions are: Relational, Emotional, Cognitive and Systemic.
Curious as to which of the four is present the largest challenge for you now?
