The Inner and Outer Game of Leadership Development
You’ve delegated an important piece of work to someone in your team. You trust them, genuinely want them to take ownership, and know that giving people space is part of helping them grow. Then you find yourself checking in a little more than you intended. You make a few suggestions, perhaps tweak something they’ve done and, before long, you’re more involved than you planned to be.
It would be easy to call this a delegation or empowerment issue and load ourselves up with more 'how to’s'. But what if you already know how to delegate? You understand the principles and genuinely believe in empowering others.
Rather than only asking “What do I need to learn?” we invite you to go a little deeper and also ask “What might be driving me here?”
Maybe letting go makes you uncomfortable.
Perhaps being the person who knows, fixes or delivers has been an important part of your identity.
Maybe you worry that if something goes wrong, ultimately it sits with you.
Or, if you’re really honest, being needed feels good.
This is where leadership development gets interesting.
When knowing isn’t quite enough
Much of leadership development understandably focuses on what we might call the outer game: the knowledge, skills, behaviours and capabilities that help us lead well. This might include how to have a difficult conversation, give feedback, think strategically, navigate change or empower others.
We need these capabilities, but as leaders we can’t stop there. Alongside the outer game sits an inner game: the beliefs, assumptions, values, emotions, fears, motivations, identity and experiences that have shaped us. It is the inner landscape through which we see ourselves, others and the situations around us.
And that landscape comes into the room with us. It can show up in the urge to step in, the discomfort when someone challenges our view, the need to have the answer, or the story we quietly start telling ourselves about someone who is “difficult”.
Sometimes what looks like a capability gap may have something else sitting underneath it shaping whether, and how, we are able to do it.
What got us here can also get in the way
Some of the patterns that get in our way as leaders may be closely connected to the qualities that helped us succeed in the first place.
Being the expert may have built our credibility, yet make it harder to create space for other experts. Taking responsibility may have made us someone others can depend on, yet make it difficult to truly hand responsibility over. Being highly attuned to people may make us thoughtful and relational, while also making it harder to say something we know will disappoint them.
The question isn’t whether these qualities are good or bad. It is whether we can notice when a quality we value, or a trait that has served us well, starts running the show.
Leadership development has no shortage of frameworks, models, assessments and tools. We use many ourselves and see enormous value in them. But the next step in our development may not always be another skill, tool or framework.
Sometimes it may be consciously noticing what is already there: an assumption we’ve never questioned, an identity we’ve become attached to, or a way of operating that worked brilliantly in one chapter of our leadership but may need loosening in the next.
We believe leadership development is as much about seeing and loosening as it is about learning and adding.
Bringing the inner and outer game together
This isn’t about choosing one over the other.
Leadership asks both of us.
The outer game can expand what we are capable of doing.
The inner game can help us understand what may be shaping what we actually do, particularly when things become difficult, uncertain or personal.
And seeing it doesn’t necessarily mean we’ve solved it. We can become very aware of one of our patterns and still find ourselves doing exactly the same thing again. Awareness gives us somewhere to begin. Acceptance can help us stop fighting what we see and, with practice, create a little more space to choose differently. Sometimes we do, sometimes the old pattern gets there first.
For us, leadership development is more than getting better at leading. It is also an opportunity to become more fully ourselves. Not an idealised version, but more able to see what is actually there and work with it consciously.
Because our inner world rarely stays inside us. It finds its way into our conversations and relationships, our decisions, how we use authority, how much space we give others, and how we respond when things don’t go to plan. Over time, those patterns impact the environment we create around us.
A few questions to sit with:
- Where do you know what to do, but still find yourself doing something different?
- What strength that has served you well might now be getting in your way?
- What might you discover if you looked beneath what you do, with curiosity about why you do it?
Images by Sebastian Staines, Clay Leconey and Tommao Wang on Unsplash
