How to Win the Game of Leadership
The most successful leaders "Mentalize" their teammates
Mentalizing means “imagining” what your colleagues must be thinking and feeling as they communicate with you.
Mentalizing is the essential ingredient for Creating a Secure Base for Your Team.
It’s quite common I hear Leaders react to a junior’s email / call as annoying and feel the junior has some Intent is to get in their way and slow an otherwise efficient process.
However, the best leaders arrest their judgmental reaction and instead Mentalize:
What must be happening for the other person that is causing them to raise this issue with me?
For example, a group head recently related to me “I got a request from a junior to have another call with an underperforming PortCo, and my instinct was to say ‘No’ as I felt it a waste of time and unnecessary.” (SCENARIO 1)
I asked him to Mentalize what mind state could have motivated the junior to raise this request to him. The Group Head reflected “perhaps he’s worried that he underwrote the deal, and with it not performing to plan, if he doesn’t have good color for IC — that he will look dumb and unprepared and they will form a negative view of him.”
Then I asked, how he could use his Working Model of his junior’s mental state to acknowledge the junior’s concern and work through it with him? He said, “I could reply ‘Thanks for raising this. I can imagine why this is important to you. Let’s talk about the right time to have this call.” (SCENARIO 2)
Finally I asked how the junior would likely feel towards him in Scenario 1 versus Scenario 2:
Scenario 1: “He’d likely feel unmotivated and resentful of me that I didn’t acknowledge or help him with his concern.”
VS
Scenario 2: He’d feel like I took care of him and helped him with his problem. He will do his best for me and feel motivated to work on my team.
Mentalizing is not purely altruistic.
To win the game of Leadership, one must power up their unique human ability to imagine (Mentalize) what someone else might be thinking and feeling.
As a Leader, how can you arrest your reactions to seemingly irksome inbounds?
And instead challenge yourself to Mentalize ‘what state of mind the other person must be in to be engaging in their behavior?’
Your Parents Might Not Have Taught You To Mentalize
Psychological researchers theorize that kids learn to Mentalize in their early attachment relationships with their parents (see Fonagy under Additional Reading below).
But many high achievers had parents who countered their emotional pleas with a categorical “I don’t care, you’re going to the school / game / camp. You will do it and be excellent.”
While the kid obeyed and learned to hide their emotional objections (for fear repeated objections could threaten their attachment bond), the kid may have learned that their emotions — and the emotional concerns of others — don’t matter and are a waste of time.
So it’s important to realize that if you’re a high achiever, it’s possible what got you here, may also prevent you from Winning the Game of Leadership.
It’s your choice:
Challenge yourself to Mentalize your team’s mind states and Win the Game of Leadership,
Or you can stay rooted in your (unconscious) default state of non-Mentalizing and Lose because the team feels unconnected to you and not safe with you.
Additional Reading
A Secure Base, by John Bowlby (1988).
The Mentalization-Focused Approach to Social Development, by Peter Fonagy (2006).
“We assume the capacity to mentalize is a key determinant of self-organization, along with affect regulation and attention control mechanisms, and that mentalizing capacity is acquired in the context of early attachment relationships.”
”Mentalizing is imaginative because we have to imagine what other people might be thinking or feeling; an important indicator of high quality mentalization is the awareness that we do no and cannot know absolutely what is in someone else’s mind.”The Adult Attachment Interview, Handbook of Attachment, Mary Main (1985).
