Leaders have two kinds of problems. Firstly, they don’t know what sort of problem they have, and secondly, they have to contend with the shady side of their ego.

As a coach to both individual leaders and their teams, I get to look into what affects leaders. In general, I meet successful leaders who are not always happy with the way they live. They’re busy, very busy, and they have many commitments. They’re building their career, keeping various stakeholders in check, stopping attacks, ducking just in time, continually fighting for their position. They’re just never done. Somehow, job satisfaction gets pushed to the back. What’s more, I’ve noticed that leaders have difficulty finding the right level of abstraction for defining their problems. Sometimes they approach a problem with superficial skills. Another time, they dig too deep. As coach, I searched for a model that would provide an insight into the depth of various problems. In collaboration with Nyenrode University, I looked into what actually makes leaders happy. Here are the results of both studies.

What makes leaders happy?

Leaders are happy when they have proof that they ARE MEANINGFULL. It’s an existential issue, being allowed to be there, a case of to be or not to be. A leader, as everyone else, likes to be recognized.

How can you prove that you ARE MEANINGFULL as a leader? To answer this question, let’s put the leader in his environment, in this case, someone else’s space.

Several flow lines appear. Flow line 1 develops when someone tells you that you ARE MEANINGFULL. For example, if an employee tells you that they’ve progressed under your leadership, they’re telling you that you ARE MEANINGFULL.

The strange thing is we often have difficulty actually receiving this message.
We normally play down the praise we receive, because we don’t know how to carry it. That’s not smart. Hey, it feels good, so just accept it.

Flow line 2 is a very successful flow line. The aim of this flow line is to position yourself with respect to the other person.
By positioning yourself, YOU ARE MEANINGFULL. This is the Ego flow line.
An Ego is a sub-personality, a survival strategy. We use this behaviour particularly in unsafe situations (when you worry about your position in the group). A number of egos can be identified, such as the friendly ego that really wants to be liked by everyone. It can be very successful, except that if you go too far, the thing you were afraid of will happen – you’ll be rejected from the group as a creep. Then there’s the independent ego, the ego that refuses to accept help because it’s afraid it will then lose esteem. Take this characteristic too far and it becomes the soloist. People find they can’t work with the soloist, so this ego falls out of the group.
The success of an ego is always short term. In the long term, it becomes a negative self-fulfilling prophecy. Your fears become reality. Your position becomes endangered. This is the shady side of egos. It’s one of the biggest problems leaders have to deal with. It’s all the more complex because it’s very difficult for a leader to realize when he has taken an ego character too far. After years of working successfully, egos seem to have become natural behaviour.

So now a third flow line comes into play.
The ‘giving based on a mission’ flow line is where the authentic leader can be found. Research suggests that a leader is happiest when he is...

witness to the creation he wants to bring about.

By witnessing growth in another person, the leader receives proof that he IS MEANINGFULL. A mission is a definition of what the leader wants to create. It is what he wants to contribute. Now this is important: my aim when coaching is to bring leaders back to this level. I want to provide them with insight into the egos that stop them getting there. This makes leaders happier. It is an exciting though sometimes confronting journey. That's how I make a difference...

So now we’ve an insight into the flow lines that can make a leader happier – the flow lines that prove to him that he IS MEANINGFULL. I started by outlining two problems: encountering the shady side of your ego and ‘not understanding the sort of problems you have’. The following model helps leaders understand the depth of their problem. This model is an adaptation of Bateson’s logical thinking levels. (I got stuck in Bateson’s deeper levels. They didn’t work or make sense to me, so I worked out what did work for me).
 

environment -------------------------  observe
behaviour      -------------------------  do
skills              -------------------------  knowledge/ability
norms           --------------------------  rule of conduct
ego                --------------------------  positioning
values           --------------------------  your belief
authenticity  ---------------------------  mission
The 7 level model © of Authentic Leadership

The model aims to identify the level in which the problem lies. Resolving a problem with insufficient depth will result in a non-solution, and therefore disappointment. Delving too deep will unearth issues which only make the problem worse.

Imagine you have the following problem. A difficult board member is incredibly dominant, doesn’t really listen and always wants to push his opinion.
· Wording the problem like that places it on the outermost level, the environment. After all, there is something wrong in your environment. If you leave the problem at this level, you position yourself as a victim of the environment. Not a clever move.
· We go down to the next level, behaviour. At this level, the question is: what will you do with this problem in your environment? Complain? Deal with it? Accept it? Go away? Each solution has its pros and cons and in the scenario outlined above, the problem would be defined as “how am I going to tackle this board member?”
· Imagine you now want to tackle the problem. You naturally progress to the third level, skills. This level comprises your knowledge and ability, the innumerable experiences that will help you handle the problem. It is at this level that many training organisations intervene with discussion models and the like. But you don’t help the experienced leader with skills – he already has those. There’s just one skill that can help in our scenario, namely ‘giving constructive feedback’.
· The next level down is much more interesting: norms. What codes of conduct do you have? What are your dos and don’ts? It’s at this level that you, amongst other things, come up against the norms that stop you going further. These norms are the codes of conduct that you accept but that tell you to stay small. For example, you say: "You shouldn’t speak to your boss like that because it’s not good for your career" when actually you know that it's good for the company. These rules often dwell in the back of your mind. If you keep to these norms, you can practice giving constructive feedback as much as you like, you’ll never actually do it. A leader should investigate these norms, both his own and the organisation’s (it would appear organisations also have these blocking norms, for example the idea of not standing out from the crowd). It is these norms that hinder success and happiness. Did you know that norms describe a culture more than values do? One of the reasons many cultures perish, is because values are too vague.
· The next level down is that of your egos, which we’ve discussed. Imagine in this scenario that you’ve managed to overcome the blocking norms, but the friendly ego can still get in the way.
· Beneath the egos lies the values level. Values and norms really are at different levels. Values are more abstract, more general and universal. We all live by values and they can be found in every culture or religion. It is the translation of values into norms that makes a culture more specific and manageable. Your own values as a leader can help you overcome your ego. Ask yourself: "How would I behave if I let my values lead me?" You’ll notice that the behaviour that comes to mind is incredibly authentic.
· The deepest level represents your authenticity. This is the layer that encompasses your worth or your mission. It’s the third flow line we discussed. The level that forms the foundation for the actions of an authentic leader. It is beyond ego. The key question here is: what is your contribution, the contribution that will make you happy?

In summary, this was a short description of what I notice among today’s leaders. The good news is that there are more and more authentic leaders in top positions. An increasing number of companies understand that the ego-leader is pretty much history. The ego-leader is less able to keep it up, companies are less able to keep it up. Finally, it’s important to realise that there’s an authentic leader in everyone.