‘You are leaders right now, and leadership isn’t a role or a title; it’s the influence you have on the conditions around you.’
This is how Katie Mobed addressed participants during her keynote speech for a recent programme of ours. Katie, a Performance Psychologist and Culture Coach, has worked alongside Olympic champions, professional sports teams, CEOs, leaders across various sectors, and even co-authored two best-selling children’s books with Marcus Rashford.
Katie’s approach to leadership is grounded in neuroscience and centred on people and their relationships, helping teams perform at their best whilst staying connected to who they are on the inside.
Using the understanding of leadership as the influence we have on the conditions around us, Katie’s session, Leading Through Challenge: The Psychology of High Performance, explored how we lead ourselves under pressure, the impact that has on others, and the importance of creating a psychologically safe environment to help teams perform at their best.
Winning shallow and winning deep
Great teams can achieve extraordinary things.
But does success always lead to happiness?
According to Katie, thoughts such as ‘I’m not good enough’ are what cause ‘Olympic athletes to stand on a podium and cry tears of relief, not joy’.
Drawing on psychologist Dr Pippa Grange’s distinction between ‘winning shallow’ and ‘winning deep’, Katie used this example to demonstrate how the way we lead ourselves under pressure can affect how we experience success.
When success is centred around the outcome, this is ‘winning shallow’. The pressure we put on ourselves to reach success can mean that, when we finally do, we feel relief rather than fulfilment.
‘Winning deep’, on the other hand, goes beyond winning in the traditional sense. It means pursuing something meaningful that retains connection, fulfilment and a sense of who you become along the way.
When asked about her own experience of witnessing winning deep, Katie reflected on her work with the Rugby Sevens team during the Rio Olympics in 2016.
‘The players in that team inspired me to see what’s possible because they weren’t just trying to win rugby games but grow as people.’
It’s a distinction that sits at the heart of leading oneself: success mattered, but so did who the players were becoming in pursuit of it.
We’re not machines
Katie raised the question: ‘What’s the risk if you’re always gravitating towards achievement?’
This was only moments after giving participants five minutes to complete a team challenge: balance a handful of nails on a single nail.
Afterwards, participants were encouraged to reflect on the task and how they felt during it. Did they think, ‘How do I do this?’ or ‘How do I get the best out of the people around the table to help solve this?’
For those who were placing the pressure on themselves to solve the problem, Katie cautioned against the risk of burnout and stated: ‘We are not machines. We are human beings.’
When leading ourselves, it can be tempting to take full responsibility for finding the answer. But responding this way can impact those around you, influencing whether they feel able to contribute their own ideas and strengths.
Sometimes, the more effective leadership response is to step back and ask what the people around us need.
The challenge offered participants a simple but revealing opportunity to observe how they behave as leaders – and to consider how they can move away from turning responsibility into a burden and instead use the strengths of those around them to reach a shared goal.
Red brain, blue brain
You can put a group of exceptionally talented individuals together, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to get an exceptional team.
A team needs to understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and the best place to start is through open communication.
Of course, stepping back and responding thoughtfully isn’t always easy, particularly when we’re under pressure. Understanding why we react the way we do was another important part of Katie’s session.
This is where the ‘red brain’ and the ‘blue brain’ come in.
The red brain describes the faster, more threat-sensitive response patterns associated with limbic and stress-response activity. Its number one job is to keep you alive. This means it can react quickly, focus on potential threats and be influenced by factors such as uncertainty, past experiences, tiredness, or failure.
‘It’s important to remember that each member of your team will have a red brain, making them act and do things that they don’t want to do. The red brain is what’s given to you at birth; it’s primitive, whilst the blue brain is something you develop over time.’
Here, Katie introduced the concept of the ‘blue brain’. This describes our greater access to prefrontal processes involved in perspective, planning and flexible decision-making.
Katie spoke about working with one team who referred to the ‘purple patch’ – blending the red and blue brains to get the best out of yourself and your team. This idea is central to how you lead yourself and others under pressure and, in turn, how your response affects those around you. Rather than allowing emotion to take over or trying to suppress it completely, the aim is to recognise what your red brain is telling you while bringing the perspective and choice of your blue brain alongside it.
‘We’re not trying to dismiss our red brain.’ Katie said. ‘You need to get to know it and educate it because the most important relationship is the one you have with yourself.’
Creating a safe environment
When leading a high-performing team towards success, understanding yourself is only part of the equation.
This is where creating a psychologically safe environment comes in. It’s an environment where people feel able to contribute, ask questions, challenge ideas, admit when something has gone wrong and bring more of themselves to the work they do.
Creating those conditions isn’t separate from how we lead ourselves. It is the consequence of it. Our ability to recognise our own reactions, respond with greater choice and consider other people builds the environment around us, interaction by interaction. The nail challenge set during this session acts as the perfect example, demonstrating how an individual’s response to pressure can shape the contributions of those around them and, ultimately, the outcome.
And that brings us back to where Katie began: leadership isn’t simply about a role, a title or even an outcome. It’s ‘the influence you have on the conditions around you’.
Performing at your best doesn’t have to mean pushing harder, carrying everything yourself or winning at any cost. Sometimes, the greater challenge is understanding yourself, recognising the impact you have on others and creating the conditions in which people can succeed together.
The question for leaders, then, might not simply be: are we winning? But how are we winning, and who are we becoming along the way?