Your Best People Might Not Look Like They’re Struggling

There is an interesting contradiction in organisational life, because some of the behaviours most likely to be rewarded at work can also be the behaviours somebody has developed to protect themselves.

Perfectionism can produce exceptional work, people pleasing can create strong relationships and over-responsibility can make somebody an extraordinarily dependable colleague. A need to prove yourself can fuel ambition for years, while a strong desire for control can make a leader appear organised, prepared and exceptionally capable.

None of these behaviours automatically mean there is a problem, and it would be far too simplistic to suggest that every high performer is secretly struggling underneath their success. What matters is understanding what is driving the behaviour and whether the person feels able to choose it, rather than being driven by it.

We all learn ways of being in the world

Long before any of us acquire a job title, we have started forming ideas about who we need to be.

We learn which behaviours bring approval, which parts of ourselves are welcomed and which are better kept hidden, while our experiences teach us about success, failure, belonging, conflict, rejection and what it takes to feel valued. Some of those lessons are explicit, while many happen without us ever consciously deciding anything at all, and over time they become patterns that feel completely normal to us.

In The Silent Middle^®, these patterns are explored through the Pretender Masks Model^®, which describes the different ways we can learn to present ourselves to the world when simply being ourselves doesn’t feel quite enough.

A mask isn’t about somebody being fake. These behaviours usually develop for a reason and can become such a familiar part of how somebody operates that they no longer recognise them as anything other than their personality. By the time that person reaches a senior position, some of those patterns may also have contributed significantly to their success.

Success can reinforce the very pattern that is costing us

Imagine somebody who learned early in life that achievement brought recognition. They work hard, achieve good results and receive praise, which naturally reinforces the behaviour, and as their career progresses the stakes become higher and the rewards become greater.

Working hard can gradually become working harder, while high standards become increasingly difficult standards to meet. Eventually, they are the person who cannot submit a piece of work without checking it repeatedly, finds delegation frustrating because nobody does things quite as they would, and experiences mistakes as something far more significant than a normal part of working life.

From the organisation’s perspective, they may simply look like an extremely committed high performer.

Something similar can happen with people pleasing. Someone who has become highly attuned to other people may be brilliant at building relationships, reading a room and understanding what colleagues need from them, all of which can be enormously valuable leadership skills.

The problem comes when keeping everybody happy starts to matter more than saying what needs to be said, because the same behaviour that helped somebody build their career can eventually begin to restrict the way they lead.

The Worst Self often appears under pressure

Most of us have a version of ourselves that shows up when we are stretched. It might be the version that becomes controlling, withdrawn, defensive, critical, indecisive or overly accommodating, or perhaps we stop listening properly, become fixated on detail, avoid the conversation we know we need to have or take over because trusting somebody else suddenly feels too difficult.

We describe this as the Worst Self, not because somebody becomes a bad person under pressure, but because pressure has a habit of exposing the behaviours we rely upon when we feel threatened.

As somebody becomes more senior, the impact of those behaviours can become much greater. A leader who becomes controlling under pressure doesn’t experience that pattern in isolation because their team experiences it too, just as somebody who avoids conflict can leave difficult issues unresolved for months.

A leader whose value depends upon being needed can unintentionally prevent the people around them from developing, while somebody who needs external validation may struggle to make an unpopular decision even when they know it is the right one to make.

Leadership behaviour never exists solely within the leader, because it influences trust, decision-making, psychological safety, performance and the day-to-day experience of the people around them.

Self-awareness needs to go further than knowing your style

There is enormous value in helping leaders understand themselves, and personality profiles, behavioural tools and leadership frameworks can give people useful language for understanding how they prefer to work and how others may experience them.

At PasedaLeader, we use tools too, including the GC Index when we want to understand where somebody naturally has energy for impact and where they may be spending significant amounts of energy in areas that don’t come as naturally to them.

Insight about preference, however, is only one part of self-awareness.

Knowing that I have a tendency to take control doesn’t necessarily tell me why letting go feels so difficult. Recognising that I avoid conflict doesn’t explain what I believe might happen if somebody is unhappy with me, while identifying myself as a perfectionist doesn’t remove the emotional response I experience when I make a mistake.

If leadership development stops at describing behaviour, we risk giving people a sophisticated vocabulary for patterns they still feel powerless to change.

Moving from automatic behaviour to choice

The work becomes much more interesting when somebody starts to understand what sits underneath their pattern, because recognising why a particular situation creates such a strong response gives us an opportunity to do something different with it.

Rather than trying to force ourselves into a new behaviour, we can begin to work with the experiences, beliefs and assumptions that have made the old behaviour feel necessary. This is one of the reasons our approach to leadership development is human-centric.

We don’t believe people arrive at work as a collection of competencies to be improved. They arrive as whole human beings, bringing with them their history, beliefs, strengths, fears, relationships, ambitions and all the experiences that have shaped the way they see themselves.

Understanding more about what sits underneath somebody’s behaviour doesn’t make leadership development softer; it allows us to work with the reasons change can be so difficult, even when somebody understands perfectly well what they would like to do differently.

Look underneath your highest performers

There is a tendency to focus development attention on people when something isn’t working, perhaps because performance has dipped, relationships have become difficult or feedback has highlighted a problem that needs addressing.

Yet some of the most valuable development work can happen much earlier, particularly with people who are already succeeding, because success itself can make some of these patterns much harder to see.

High performers don’t need us to go looking for hidden problems or turning every strength into a weakness. What they do need is the opportunity to understand themselves well enough to recognise what is driving the way they behave, particularly when they are under pressure, and whether some of the things that have helped them become successful are now taking more from them than they realise.

The intention isn’t to remove ambition, high standards, care, responsibility or drive. It is to help people retain all of those things without needing perfectionism, people pleasing, over-responsibility or a constant need to prove themselves to sit underneath them.

When that starts to happen, people don’t become less driven or less effective. They simply have more choice over how they show up, which is a very different place from being unconsciously driven by patterns they may have been carrying for years.