#73: The Inside-Out Leadership Part 2
The shadow side of leadership and how it impacts everything else
In Part 1 of the Inside-Out Leadership, we touched upon a few points:
Most people, when they’re new to leadership optimize for the visible side of leadership. Because it’s what’s on our JD and what gets noticed AND eventually get rewarded by the system we’re operating in.
But the invisible side of leadership, the shadow side, is 50% of the job. It’s what makes having an impact sustainable for leaders and their team.The “shadow side” is the part of leadership most people try to suppress or don’t even realize they have. But they leak out anyway in our everyday interactions and decisions whether we’re aware or not.
The integration of the shadow side of leadership is learning to lead yourself. And being able to lead yourself well asks us to be aware of our beliefs and our values that influence the way we feel towards the situations and challenges we face in our leadership and how we respond to them.
Last we left off, we already started exploring how we can begin leading ourself: by getting curious about our beliefs, surfacing what we already bring to the table, and embracing failure and starting to see it as a natural part of growth.
So now we get to the fun part.
How do we connect the dots between leading ourselves and leading others? How do the two work together and make us effective leaders?
Your role as a leader
Before anything else, I want to put on the table again what your role is as a leader so we have something to align on. Especially for the new ones who don’t get their role framed helpfully aside from being given a list of responsibilities.
Our roles as leaders is to create the right environment and conditions for our teams to successfully deliver value.
This means:
Strategic alignment - make sure that there is a clear alignment between you and the team, the leadership, the stakeholders on what the goals are and what needs to be prioritized to get there
Set up the organization - hire the right people, provide training access to your team, make sure they have the right tools and processes to get their work done.
Coach and mentor - help people do their job and do it well, develop the next generation of leaders, and coach them to face their challenges with confidence and cheek.
But in between the lines of trying to set up the environment for teams to succeed, there will always be misalignment, politics, conflict, pressure (*side eye to the founders/executives who keep changing the company goals every 6 months*). And it’s in these in between, is where our self-leadership lives.
The Cost of the lack of Self-Leadership
Becoming a leader is cool and all, but it’d be super difficult to hold the responsibility of being a leader if we don’t know how to lead ourselves.
What do I mean? If we’re unable to lead ourselves:
Every conflict can feel like a personal attack.
Everybody’s needs will feel like an emergency that needs an immediate solution.
Seeking visibility or navigating politics will feel like selling our souls to the devil.
The uncertainty that comes with the job will put us in a constant fight-flight-freeze cycle.
And everybody else will feel like they’ve got their shit together… except us.
And what’s the impact of these things on our work as leaders? How do they impact the team and other people we work with?
A. When every conflict feels like a personal attack - we tend to avoid it in favor of trying to keep people happy.
We’ll soften feedback; which can impact the team’s performance
We’ll optimize for consensus vs clarity; which can delay decision making or dilute the impact of what we’re doing
We’ll bury the feelings under the guise of not wanting to get into an argument; but this can fester into resentment over time, which can harm our overall collaboration by creating biases for us that impact our interactions (not to mention the impact of unreleased anger on our health)
B. Everybody’s needs will feel like an emergency that needs an immediate solution - so we tend to take it upon ourselves to figure out a solution for everybody.
For the people in our team, we’re not coaching them to learn to be independent or navigate their own challenges
Not pushing back on our peers and our leaders is also “training” them that prioritization is optional
C. Seeking visibility or navigating politics will feel like selling our souls to the devil - so we avoid it to not be a sell out.
But avoiding visibility and politics dilutes potential for influence and removes opportunities for the organization to trust us.
And for us leaders, especially in corporate tech, influence and trust are the currencies of our work. It’s how we gain agreement more easily or how we’re able to push back without the negative recoil.
Opportunities we fail to open up through influence and trust are opportunities we fail to open for our teams, too, to have more impact and even growth.
D. The uncertainty that comes with the job will put us in a constant fight-flight-freeze cycle. - as leaders, our job is to try to provide certainty to our teams but that means being able to navigate uncertainty ourselves. And if we can’t?
That energy will seep into our interactions, whether we do it consciously or not, and our teams will inherit the stress from us.
Being in constant fight, flight, or freeze mode is us trying to be safe. Or our brains are trying to be safe. So it’ll get us playing defense or playing small instead of trying to push the boundaries of innovation lest we make a mistake.
E. Everybody else will feel like they’ve got their shit together… except us.
And then we try to prove to ourselves that we’re fit for the role. But operating in constant proving doesn’t give space for our own wisdom and expertise to emerge. Because we’re constantly seeking approval from other people who have their own biases and motivations.
Which also means we’re spending more time trying to fill in our gaps vs leaning into our strengthts that can have bigger returns in terms of impact and faster.
⛑️ Are you seeing potentia gaps in how you might be leading yourself can impact how you're leading others?When we lead ourselves first
And while there are more, the gist of it all is to cultivate self-awareness of:
The drivers and beliefs behind our patterns
The reactions we have towards certain situations
The values and strengths that we already carry
The kind of leader we want to show up as day to day
Who we are outside of our work
Awareness is step one. Step two is turning it into action: using what you know about yourself to guide how you will choose to respond to the situation of conflict or pressure versus reacting based on your defaults.
Self-leadership and team leadership aren’t separate skills. They’re two sides of the same system. And here’s what that can look like in practice:
When conflict feels like a personal attack
Before → You soften feedback, avoid the hard talk, or optimize for keeping everyone happy
After → You still acknowledge the sting, but anchor yourself in the shared goal. You’ll be flexible where it matters, co-create solutions with the right people without fear of losing control, or strengthen your arguments to provide more clarity. Your interest will be on doing the right thing vs being right.
When every request feels urgent
Before → You jump in, fix it yourself, and end the day buried under other people’s work.
After → You don’t feel bad about slowing down to ask what’s really needed. You might even coach others to take the next step themselves. And saying “no, there’s no bandwidth for this” won’t leave a bitter taste in your mouth like it used to — leaving you to create space for what’s truly important.
When visibility or politics feels like selling out
Before → You avoid it completely, keeping your work (and your team’s) in the shadows.
After → You reframe it as giving your work and your team’s, a seat at the table, and you do it in a way that feels like you. And it becomes about sharing perspectives and knowledge so other people can learn from you too.
When uncertainty pushes you into fight-flight-freeze
Before → You play it safe, make small moves, and unintentionally pass the stress down to your team.
After → You’re ok with not knowing what you don’t know, give your team what certainty you can, and make the next best decision based on the information you have instead of waiting for perfection or readiness. You’re aware of the risks, minimize what you can, and mitigate for what you can’t. Failure is no longer a scary thing but an opportunity to do better next time.
When everyone else looks like they have it together
Before → You overcompensate by proving yourself in every direction, burning through your energy while still feeling like not enough.
After → You ground yourself in your strengths, lead from them, and choose whose feedback is worth integrating. Other people become an inspiration vs a goal post that keeps moving.
Working with your shadow won’t make the discomfort vanish. But when you work with it instead of against it, you stop letting your old patterns run the show. And your leadership presence stops being reactive and starts being intentional.
And this is when the outside, the more visible parts of your leadership start to change.
⛑️ If you're a new leader or a middle manager finding the day-to-day of your leadership life challenging, it might be time to face your shadows and challenge old patterns and beliefs that might be holding you back from creating the right environment for you and your team to succeed.
Click here to join my 90 minute guided session on August 27:
"Leading through the Messy Middle"
In this workshop, we'll take the time to surface your shadow, design a new way of leading, so that you can lead more effectively but without the burnout.Inside-Out leadership is simple, though not easy.
The Inside-Out leadership starts with who you are, not just what you do. It asks you to know your values, energy, and patterns and how they shape your presence as a leader. The more grounded you are on the inside, the more effective and sustainable your impact on the outside becomes.
You’ve probably heard that “to become an effective leader requires an identity shift”. But a lot of people make the mistake is thinking that means becoming someone you’re not. So they resist and keep pushing through with trying to do better work. Sometimes there’s impact. But it’s rarely sustainable. And when a new challenge comes in, they start from zero all over again.
What I do with my clients is different: we define the kind of leader they want to be. As in the one who makes things happen, acts in line with their values, and protects space in their calendar to think and breathe.
We don’t create a brand new persona. Instead, we create habits that reinforces their ideal leader self and let go of old beliefs that no longer serve them. So that they can always embody who they’ve always been at their best: minus the fear, empowered by their ambition, and aligned with their values.
Because as leaders, especially the ones in the middle, misalignment, conflict, and uncertainty are pretty much what we face every single day.
For example, we won’t agree with every company decision, nor will we be able to influence all of them. But when we’re aligned with the highest version of ourselves, we trust ourselves to navigate it. We can choose how we will deliver a tough decision, how we can motivate people to commit (even though they might disagree too), and how we can still deliver excellent results with our team regardless of how we might feel about it. And these things will matter more than the decision itself.
That’s the Inside-Out approach in action: your inner work doesn’t just make you feel better; it also directly expands your capacity to lead so you can create the right conditions and environment for your team to succeed.
Leadership will change you, but not because you become someone else. At the end of the day, it’s not about fixing yourself (there’s nothing to fix). It’s about trusting yourself enough to lead as you are… at your best.
The Inside-Out approach asks you to remember who you’ve always been, and letting that version take the lead.
📌 Coaching Bulletin Board:
📌 I’m doing a 90-minute leadership reset for new leaders who are feeling bogged down while navigating the murky and messy life of being a middle manager. It’s a few weeks from now. Join me!
📌 1:1 Coaching for the new Product, UX, and Tech Leaders going through career dilemmas. If this is you, I’d love to help you define your strategies to set yourself and your team up for success. Book a free call and let’s discuss how we can work together.
If you got to this part of this newsletter, thanks for staying with me until the end. And thank you for sharing with me topics that you’d like for me to share my thoughts, feelings, and violent reactions on.
💙
Kax