Perpetual Conflict – Leader Insecurity

There is a Spiritual Reality that opens or closes the door to the resolution of conflict.

If you believe that human beings do not have a spiritual dimension, then you may not find this post to be of much use. But if humans do have a spiritual dimension, it would be naive to ignore that dimension when talking about human conflict.

(See my previous posts for an outline of the 4 Dimensions of Perpetual Conflict—Relational, Structural, Personal, and Spiritual—as well as the factors in each dimension.)


The Soul of the Leader

At a seminar on building Conflict Resilient cultures, a man asked me, “How do you handle conflict in an organization when the leader is the problem?” When I probed deeper into his question, it became clear that the leader he was talking about was insecure.

Leader insecurity is the elephant in the room.

We know it is there, but we would rather talk about the traits of good leaders, the habits of good leaders, the techniques and skills of good leaders, or even the relational interaction between leaders and followers. But we hesitate and shy away from talking about the soul of the leader.

When leaders are insecure, they cannot act with courage. They cannot be open, transparent, or vulnerable. They cannot admit faults. And they must absolutely locate the source of any problem outside themselves. Insecurity is not just a lack of confidence, it goes deeper to the question of identity and personhood, to the root of who we are, all the way down to the leader’s soul. Fundamentally, leader insecurity is a spiritual issue.

Why Leader Insecurity Always Leads to Conflict

The reason insecure leaders always create conflict around them is that they are experiencing conflict inside them. They reproduce in the organization what they are experiencing in themselves.

The locus of the internal conflict is being out of alignment with reality. I have met many successful leaders who suspect that they lack some trait or quality to be a good leader. [Success is not the cure for insecurity.] They have an idea of what a good leader should be, and they judge themselves to fall short of that ideal. None of these leaders is perfect, but instead of accepting and agreeing with the truth of who they are, they doubt their own identity—they doubt that they are enough. Their deep-seated self-doubt creates a dissonance, a gap, between who they are (already enough) and who they believe themselves to be (not enough).

The Leader’s Internal Conflict

The insecure leader is engaged in a battle to protect an image that they internally believe to be false. The outward image is of the ideal self, projecting qualities they hold to be good or socially accepted. This outward leader image may be “tough but fair,” knowledgeable, confident, caring, a good listener, a strong decision maker, and so on. But internally, they do not believe this image is who they really are.

Therefore, any external doubts or chinks in the armor of the image must be rejected. They cannot hear or receive criticism; and they turn the same criticism back on others. They blame others for their own mistakes. They project their own flaws onto other people and expect others to act out of the same insecurities that they wrestle with.

It is impossible for a leader to contain this battle within themselves. It always breaks out into the relational world and creates conflicts. Any attempts to resolve outward conflicts will fail until the root of those conflicts, the leader’s identity, is stabilized. Short of that, only partial resolutions will be possible. These partial resolutions may include appeasement, face-saving compromise, or a brokered truce. But the if the source of the conflict - leader insecurity - is not addressed, then a peaceful and holistic resolution will remain out of reach.

Where do we go from here?

You may not have considered before that there could be a Spiritual Reality connected to conflict. This is one reason why leaders need to take time for self-reflection and seek wise counsel and feedback. Next week we wrap up this mini-series on conflict at work with some next steps for building Conflict Resilient cultures.

Check the blog each week—at the end of this series we will share a downloadable map of all the conflict factors and dynamics.

Follow/Like us on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook to get thoughtful articles on the bridges leaders must build and cross to inspire greater performance.

Comments are closed.