When Reflection Surfaces Shame

We’ve just closed the third cohort of our Leading in the Presence of Fear programme, and I’ve been thinking about it since.

The premise is that fear cannot be removed from a working environment, and that pretending otherwise helps nobody; the people being led feel it, and the people doing the leading feel it too. Most of our work is about helping senior teams notice fear, understand where it comes from, and recognise what it looks like and what it sets in motion once it takes hold.

We close every cohort with a long stretch of reflection and discussion, because I want to understand what people took from the experience, what they intend to change, and how the programme shifted the way they think and feel about themselves, their teams, their peers, and the culture they have often had a leading hand in building.

This third cohort surfaced something I rarely see when people reflect after a programme like this: a strong, shared sense of shame.

I’m still working out how I feel about that. It’s never a good thing for people to feel ashamed, but as we dug into it, this leadership team had never once considered how their own actions and approach might be generating fear across the organisation.

Much of our work with them, predictably for the moment we’re in, centred on AI adoption. Their stance had been full speed ahead, get on board, embrace the idea that anyone using AI will replace anyone who isn’t, so you had better climb aboard or you’ll be gone; and that stance was producing a great deal of social friction, eroding cohesion within teams and departments, and creating an undercurrent of fear. From the outside, the consequences look obvious, but this was a team under considerable pressure that had not stopped to think about the effect they were having.

In hindsight, when I asked them to describe what came up for them, almost all of it arrived as some form of shame, or regret about what their decisions had done to the people they lead. Those are heavy feelings, and, possibly, a powerful engine for change; a team that feels the weight of its own impact has a strong emotional reason to lead differently, which is the entire point of the programme.

Reflection often surfaces things you weren’t planning to hear, and if we are going to invite people into that kind of conversation, we have to be ready for it ourselves, setting aside the plan and the script and being honest, direct, and open with the people we are asking to do the same.

We are quick to criticise senior teams for a lack of awareness. We are far less quick to create the conditions in which that awareness can develop, and to stay in the room when what someone reflects back seems obvious to everyone but them. If we won’t do that, we forfeit the right to complain.