There is a tendency within us to believe that good behaviour as a child marks us out as someone who will be successful in later life. If we play by the rules, do what we are told, we must – surely – do well, get promoted, become a great leader. Which is why the central tenet of a new book by the leadership expert and consultant Nik Kinley and the IMD Business School Professor Shlomo Ben-Hur, Re-writing Your Leadership Code: How your childhood made you the leader you are and what you can do about it, is so intriguing. In many ways, it suggests the opposite.
“Studies have found that children who are praised for being thoughtful, unselfish and caring are more likely to continue this behaviour as adults,” says Kinley. “This sounds great, but it means you become really skilled at making yourself liked. As a consequence, you can become too nice, to the point of wanting to avoid tension and not wanting to upset people. You may find it difficult to address poor performance and drive through unpopular change.”
Leadership is, of course, often about making unpopular choices and realising that you cannot be liked all of the time or, more accurately, that prioritising popularity over the right course of action, is an unwise choice. Another ‘good kid’ tendency that may serve you ill as a leader is following the rules. Once again, this feels like a huge positive, but a closer look reveals a potential to lack lateral thinking.
“The obedient child who is very much focused on what their parents want, tends to be very skilled at focusing on what their boss wants, what their business wants, and then going all in on actually delivering it,” says Kinley. “They then become very good at delivering what the business wants, but not necessarily thinking about what it needs. At the most senior levels, that can become a big problem.”
Kinley and Ben-Hur put exhaustive research into their book after Kinley found that the leaders he was coaching were failing to implement his methods in times of crisis or stress at work. Instead, they were relying on instinct. Fascinatingly, much of that instinct is informed by our childhoods. Their years of research concluded that so much of our outlook (pessimist or optimist) and also our leadership style (authoritarian or libertarian) is down to our parents. As our earliest models of leadership, they can dictate how we ourselves govern.
The biggest mistakes Kinley has seen his clients – including high-powered CEOs and founders – make, are related to “small, everyday decision-making and personal impact”. Both of these can be influenced by how we have been conditioned in our youth. The former can be affected by our ‘good kid’ tendencies: the desire to people-please or be obedient, while the latter stems largely from parental influence: how do we relate to others, especially our direct reports?
“Leaders with authoritarian parents are more likely to be directive or punishing, are more likely to subsequently become critical themselves and to become controlling, because they are more likely to be driven by a fear of failure,” says Kinley.
He divides leaders into two types. Promotion-focused leaders, who are more positive, tend to be those who had emotionally supportive and caring parents, who were often attentive to their every need. They can find criticism difficult and, much like ‘good kids’, can cope badly with tough decision-making.
Prevention-focused leaders, who are more cautious and risk-averse, are more likely to have had stricter discipline as children. “They don’t want to mess up, they want everything to go right,” he says. “This is because, with critical, authoritarian parents, they have always been worried about making mistakes and upsetting them. There is usually a punishment involved in that or even something as simple as fear of disapproval.”
These learned instincts, fostered in our younger years, are what we rely on in moments of stress at work – which are, unfortunately, more common than we would like to think. So how can we ‘unlearn’ these instincts, if they were embedded at such a formative time? As ever, knowledge is power and once you can understand where these instincts come from – and, crucially, what triggers them – you can start to self-regulate.
“You have to take steps to interrupt the old behaviour, or at least not trigger it,” says Kinley. “That can be as simple as saying to yourself, ‘That’s just my pessimism talking’, or it can be as straightforward as standing up: physically interrupting the behaviour or the feeling or the thought. The second thing is learning to pre-empt the situation by putting your solutions in place before you end up under pressure, because often there’s no point doing something in the moment. The third thing is to use the people around you, your team, to balance yourself: give them permission to call you up on things…”
Unpicking the ingrained instincts of our childhood is no easy feat, but as Kinley stresses, understanding their roots, their consequences and the keys to circumnavigating them, can be not only fascinating, but a vital tool for success.