Erik de Haan
July 29, 2026
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Our current crises (pandemic, financial, climate, warfare) are mostly man-made – arising from greed, narcissism, and fear among leaders. We know, for example, that mankind has the resources to feed and vaccinate the world, to allow biodiversity to increase and to reverse the impact of climate change. However, this calls for joint strategies and joint action, both of which are hard to achieve in the face of the many forces driving us apart and making us compete with each other for the same scarce resources.
In other words, current individualistic leadership approaches do not result in the best solutions for resolving crises – and this holds true in organizational settings too.
Leading under difficult circumstances strengthens a “leadership shadow”. This consists of a leader’s underdeveloped skills, internalized projections, personality biases, and hubristic tendencies (stretching their leadership influence beyond the agreed job role boundaries).
This is a more significant issue than one might assume, since we know from reliable estimates that less than 50% of leaders would get the predicate “good enough” from within their own team (see Hogan, Kaiser, Sherman & Harms, 2021 and Chénard-Poirier, Morin, Boudrias & Gillet, 2020).
Leadership development practitioners can help to rebalance these shadow sides. The psychological and organizational factors that influence effective leadership are becoming much more important than managerial, administrative, and behavioral factors. Many challenges of the past are currently being dealt with by computers and AI. Meanwhile, emotional challenges are coming to the fore.
This means that in leadership development we increasingly need to tailor our interventions to individual underlying needs, vulnerabilities, and conflicts.
Rebalancing the leader’s shadow
I have come to see the essence of effective leadership as an ongoing rebalancing process where the leader’s shadow is taken on board. Leaders can balance their bright, successful, and constructive aspects with elements from their own shadows, but this is an active process. They must become curious about important aspects of their roles such as their reputation, blind spots, and weaknesses. The team around the leader can help, by challenging them, as can external leadership development professionals and coaches.
This rebalancing process in leadership, which allows leaders to take more relevant information on board and make objectively better decisions, consists of a healthy flow of information and “truth” into the leader. Truth about what is really happening inside their organization, and truth about how they are perceived by those that they rely on for the impact of their leadership (which is mostly their direct reports). Essentially, such balancing means opening up, listening and drilling for information – making use of what James Surowiecki termed the “wisdom of crowds”.
At the same time as procuring new and fresh information, rebalancing is an ongoing fight against losing high-quality information, as our shadow sides screen away relevant information, about ourselves and others.
This occurs through internal suppression (we all suppress inconvenient truths and awkward experiences on a daily basis) and external oppression (leaders run the risk over time of becoming intolerant and oppressive, if they intimidate staff, demand change, or instruct employees with aggression). A leadership optimization or rebalancing process tries to mitigate these two very common and unavoidable processes in leadership.
This is why upwards influencing in organizations, including speaking up and empowerment, as well as democratic measures to scrutinize leaders and dilute the power we invest in them, are so important.
Autocracy vs. democracy in organizations
In times of crisis, it can be tempting to think that democracy does not work, both in our society and closer to home, in our work organizations. In most developed countries, there are now many political parties with substantial takes of the vote, that actively advocate against and wish to suppress democracy. They suggest that we need to be bold and aligned within, sacrificing some of our freedoms, diversity, and natural respect for fellow humans.
The same plea for autocracy has (nearly) always won the argument inside organizations, helped by the fact that organizations have owners that are an elite within and even “above” the organization – and by definition those elites are more powerful than anyone working inside the organization. The only exceptions are cooperatives and partnership firms, but even there the implementation of leadership within is usually, if not always, autocratic.
Strong, autocratic leadership can have great allure: clarity and consistency of thought, leading to rapid and often radical decisions, followed by an effective implementation of those decisions.
It looks strong, while democratic leadership is deliberately, and by nature, vulnerable and searching. This helps us to collect more information, to reflect openly and feelingly with our teams, and to deeply inquire into self and our own motivations. It leaves a lingering feeling of inadequacy or doubt, and of many depths still unexplored.
Similarly, in team decision-making, open, expressive conflict may leave members with lingering grievances or ongoing ruptures in relationships. By contrast, a strong and unified team that does not go into much depth when preparing a decision can feel a lot more at peace with itself, even safer and more effortless.
Nevertheless, from a leadership-effectiveness perspective, a strong, unified team – one that avoids information flow, participation, speaking up, whistleblowing, and conflict – is still less competent and effective overall. If its core purpose is decision-making and providing good guidance to the rest of the organization, it will start failing its remit over time.
The task for leadership development practitioners
Leadership development professionals can play an important role in supporting leadership in crisis around the world. Leadership trainers, coaches and consultants can hold a democratic model in mind, which allows for checks and balances on leaders and a healthy flow of reliable, current information toward the top team. In practice, this can mean involving teams at all levels in the selection of their leaders, suggesting rotation of chairing and minute-making in Boards, and agreeing finite term times especially at higher levels.
It is well known that accumulation of power is corrupting, that leaders who are successful and stay in the job become hubristic. Leadership development professionals can counter this by probing and challenging the leader on what might be in their shadows, as well as by encouraging the leader to look from different perspectives through 360-degree feedback.
I believe a fiercely democratic stance should be taken in leadership development. Both for leadership development professionals and leaders, it is important not to lose sight of the less powerful employees that a team ultimately leads.
First published in the DLQ50 Hult Ashridge Executive Education Supplement, Ideas for Leaders. Discover all the insights from "Hult Ashridge Perspectives: Making Leadership More Human" here.
Reflection questions
Consider your own, and your organization’s, approach to leadership. Does this lean toward an autocratic or democratic approach? What does this mean for information flow, participation, speaking up, whistleblowing, and conflict?
Explore your own “leadership shadow”:
What is remaining out of view?
What is being suppressed?
What emotions are you failing to acknowledge?
An external viewpoint can be helpful here to bring these hidden aspects to the fore, either through 360-degree feedback or coaching.
Meet the expert
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Erik de Haan
Director of the Hult Ashridge Center for Coaching at Hult International Business School
Erik de Haan studied Theoretical Physics and undertook his PhD in Psychophysics and MA in Psychodynamic Psychotherapy. He is Director of the Hult Ashridge Centre for Coaching at Hult International Business School, UK, and Professor of Organization Development at the VU University in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He is the program leader of the Ashridge Master's in Executive Coaching and PG Diploma in Organizational Supervision. He has published more than 200 professional and research articles and 16 books, covering his expertise as an organisational consultant, therapist, supervisor, and executive coach.
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