The Titanic’s crew saw the iceberg dead ahead. The lookout yelled it out; the officer on watch ordered the turn, but sadly, the ship still went down. What opened the hull was invisible from the deck. It was an enormous body of ice sitting under the waterline, the mass no one had a way to measure in the dark, and it ran the ship along a seam that the crew was never even watching.
I think about that scene when sitting across from a leader who has been frustrated by the same problem for the third or fourth time.
It’s the room you’ve brought someone in, laid out exactly what needed to change, and watched them nod along in a way that felt like genuine understanding. You walked out believing it had finally landed. Then six weeks later you were back in the same chair, with the same person, looking at the same problem, and a quiet question starts forming somewhere in the back of your mind. Is it me?
Let’s lay this one to rest; it isn’t you, and it isn’t quite them either. What actually happened is that you were working the only layer you could see, while the thing producing the problem was sitting well below it.
Here is where the research becomes a tool for change. Organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich spent close to five years studying self-awareness across nearly 5,000 people, and found that about 95 percent of us believe we see ourselves clearly while only 10 to 15 percent actually do. The gap widens the higher you go. In a separate study of more than 3,600 leaders, the more senior the person, the more they overestimated their own read of a situation. So when a leader tells me they know exactly what is going on with an employee, I have learned to treat that certainty as the thing actually worth examining, because certainty is precisely what the data says to distrust.
The behavior you see is the behavior you’re managing. That’s the iceberg above the waterline, but you’re missing 2 additional layers. The three parts of the mind draw on what a person knows, the cognitive piece; on how they feel and what moves them, the affective piece; and on how they instinctively take action when nobody is telling them how, which is the conative piece, the one most leaders have never been handed any language for. Picture two people given the same deadline. One reaches for another round of data before committing, while the other is already building something rough to react to. It is easy to file one away as careful and the other as reckless. What you are actually watching is two different instinctive ways of getting into motion, and neither one is a flaw. This is conative wiring, and it can be measured, which matters, because you cannot coach through what you’ve quietly decided is just a personality you happen to find unproductive and annoying.
Somewhere in the last few years a lot of us started managing people as though they were software, quietly hoping the same inputs would produce the same outputs every time. It is an understandable wish, and it is the root of a surprising amount of leadership frustration, because people are not machines and were never going to behave like them. That unpredictability is not the flaw in the system. It is the whole reason a human team is worth having, because the messy, layered, hard-to-read quality of a person is exactly what lets a team invent, create, and catch the nuance a machine moves right past. Machines are doing remarkable work now and speeding up plenty of it, and that is real. What they do not replicate is the complexity of how humans read each other and build on each other, and that complexity is worth every bit of what it costs you to manage it.
That same complexity has a second face. Left unattended, it becomes the roadblock. The layers that let a person create can just as easily leave them stuck, working from instincts and assumptions that were never made visible to anyone, including themselves.
Which brings us to the bottom of the iceberg, the layer that runs everything. I say often that we are not AI and we are not robots, and both are true, but we have been programmed all the same. Down in the subconscious sits a set of beliefs we absorbed long ago, and it feels so comfortable that we never question it or even register it as something worth questioning. That is where fear lives, along with the limiting beliefs and the triggers. In a leader it usually shows up sounding like plain fact. We can’t afford to slow down. If I don’t check it myself it won’t get done right. Those are beliefs masquerading as facts, and they steer decisions you are convinced you made purely on the merits. On a team, the same layer runs as an unwritten set of rules about what actually gets rewarded around here and what gets a side-eye, a current moving under every meeting whether or not anyone ever names it.
So the trap sets itself. You can only see the top, so the top is where you manage. You decide someone is slow, or difficult, or dropped the ball, and you have the talk, reset the expectation, maybe move them into a different seat. It holds for a few weeks. Then it grows right back, because you pulled the weed off at the leaf and left the root sitting three layers down in the soil.
None of this makes the leader the problem. If anything, it locates the power, because the person best positioned to change what is happening is already in the room trying. Gallup, after measuring millions of employees, attributes at least 70 percent of the variance in a team’s engagement to the manager. That number is not an accusation. It is the most encouraging thing in this whole piece, since it means the lever that moves everything is within reach of the one person most motivated to pull it.
Smart leaders do not try to flatten the complexity out of their people, because that is where the value was hiding. What they do instead is give the guidance, the clarity, and the training that lets a team move through the complexity rather than getting tangled in it. The bar here is lower and more neglected than most executives assume. Gallup has found for years that only about half of employees strongly agree they even know what is expected of them at work, which is not a talent problem or a motivation problem. It is a clarity problem, and clarity is something a leader can actually build.
The leaders who break the loop do one thing differently. They stop negotiating with the behavior on the surface and go read the wiring underneath it, then surface the belief that has been driving the whole thing the entire time. Once they are working the layer that actually generated the problem, and once they have given people the direction to move through their own complexity instead of around it, the issue they have been fighting for months tends to resolve in a way that finally holds. That is what true alignment really is: getting what people know, how they feel, and how they are instinctively built to move all pointing in the same direction as the work in front of them.
If you keep watching the same problem regrow no matter how cleanly you cut it down, that is not evidence you are failing. It is a signal you are working the wrong layer.
I would rather help you find the root than watch you keep trimming the leaf. If your team keeps handing you the same problem in a new outfit, let’s go under the surface together and look at what is actually holding it there. We can start a conversation at support@aliciacouri.com or go to audaciousconceptsinc.com and sign up to join our next live Virtual Executive Forum.
Tune in it’s launch day for our video on https://youtu.be/KImS7WzEm2Q
Alicia Couri is Founder and CEO of Audacious Concepts Inc.