Inside the Mind of a Troubled Leader

And a proposed solution called “existential confidence”

It is not easy to be a leader of any business.

Leader Challenges: CEOs are challenged by various factors including the governance structure and board composition, as well as the four factors pointed out by McKinsey senior partner Richard Dobbs and his colleagues: the rise of emerging markets, the accelerating impact of technology on the natural forces of market competition, an aging world population, and accelerating flows of trade, capital, people, and data.

Mindset Challenges: Given these challenges, the mind of a company leader is often overrun with self-doubt, fluctuating confidence, uncertainty and fears.

Traditional Approaches: Traditionally, we think of helping leaders by understanding and addressing the factors underlying these emotional states, but there are several problems with this approach: (1) There are too many possible “causes” of these emotional states. We do not really understand the mechanisms behind our emotions at any given time; (2) Getting leaders to talk about their emotions usually does nothing and may actually worsen the trauma that a CEO is experiencing. For example, among police officers who responded to a civilian plane crash, those who underwent debriefing exhibited significantly more…