Hurdles, Pitfalls and the Leadership Habits That Get Us Through

Dr Jed Moore
Teaching Fellow - Department of Work, Employment & Organisation
Strathclyde Business School

"You will achieve greatness not because of the deeds and acts that you did but because you set an environment where the people around you... they’ve achieved greatness.” – David Marquet

Introduction

Business leaders today are confronted with manifold issues; the challenges organisations face have become increasingly complex, interconnected, and resistant to traditional solutions. These "wicked problems," as Rittel and Webber (1973) first described them, cannot be solved through individual command or brilliance alone. They require collaborative sense-making, distributed intelligence, and the courage to work with uncertainty. Yet many organisations remain trapped in leadership models designed for a more predictable world, where leaders had answers and followers implemented them. This article explores the real challenges of transitioning toward more participative leadership approaches, not through abstract theory, but through the practical hurdles you'll need to jump, the pitfalls that can trip you up, and the habits that sustain meaningful change.

Hurdles

These are aspects you can't avoid; you're just going to have to jump them! The path toward more participative leadership inevitably encounters structural and psychological barriers that have been decades in the making. Understanding these as hurdles, rather than roadblocks, helps us maintain momentum while acknowledging the genuine difficulty of organisational change.

Learned Helplessness – You need to empower people, rather than dropping work on them and expecting them to thrive. I think a lot about learned helplessness when I talk to students about leadership. Learned helplessness, as Seligman (1975) demonstrated in his foundational research, refers to the trained response to shut down when faced with challenges, obstacles or discomfort, and it essentially stems from the tendency in people (and animals) to reproduce the behaviours learned in prior experience. Maier and Seligman (2016) later refined this understanding, showing how learned helplessness particularly emerges in environments where people perceive they lack control over outcomes. If a person is consistently disempowered and given no authority, they may struggle to meaningfully engage when offered this initially. How do you overcome what might be decades of conditioning which pushes employees to be disengaged, reactive and risk-averse?

Tensions with Hierarchy – Trying to build a supportive culture might bring you into conflict with the existing hierarchy of the business. Don't overthink it! Laloux's (2014) exploration of "Teal" organisations reveals how evolutionary structures can coexist with traditional hierarchies during transition periods, creating pockets of self-management within broader systems. If management wants a single point of contact for accountability, this doesn't mean you can't lead together around these moments of punctuation where we connect with other parts of the business.

Internal Resistance – Your staff might push back against new ways of working. Pay attention! Not all resistance is rooted in an unwillingness to change, staff may have rational concerns, or they may be signalling that the benefits, dynamics or necessity of the change has not been made clear to them. Bartunek and Woodman (2015) argue that employee resistance often signals important organisational dynamics that change agents should engage with rather than overcome. Resistance is also communication, make sure you're looking for the message or the lesson.

Pitfalls

These are aspects which can trip you up if you aren't looking out for them. Unlike hurdles, which are visible and expected, pitfalls catch us unaware, often precisely when we think we're making progress. They emerge from our own assumptions and blind spots about what good leadership looks like.

Making it About You – Leadership is about coming together and finding new paths, solving wicked, ambiguous problems, or building a sense of direction when we don't know where to go. The danger lies in what Tourish (2019) calls "leadership fetishism," where individual leaders become so central that they actually impede collective problem-solving and create dependency rather than capability. If coming together and having meaningful conversations is at the core of effective leadership, we must work hard to de-centre ourselves and make leadership activity about what we can achieve together, rather than what you can do as an individual.

Under-communicating – As you reflect on how to lead more effectively, it's easy to push on with transformation once you have a clear vision. We must resist the temptation to act without bringing staff into a genuine understanding of where we're heading, why this change matters, and crucially, what it means for their daily work and future development. Without this shared understanding, people can't meaningfully contribute to shaping the direction of travel. Scharmer's (2018) Theory U calls this "presencing," connecting to the future that wants to emerge through collective sensing and dialogue, where teams co-create intentions and boundaries together rather than having them handed down from above.

Under-acting – Alongside communicating the principles, we have to actually embody the practice of leadership. It may be a cliché to say, but it rings true, especially in the leadership space, that talk is cheap and that actions speak louder than words. The critique of "leaderism" in healthcare contexts (O'Reilly and Reed, 2010; Martin and Learmonth, 2012) reveals how rhetorical commitments to distributed leadership often mask continued hierarchical practices, highlighting the gap between espoused values and enacted behaviours that undermines transformational efforts.

Habits That Get Us Through

These are some key habits which can form a strong foundation for leadership practice. They're practical ways of working that, when practiced consistently, help create the conditions where collaborative leadership can flourish.

Reflecting Together – Building a community of practice, where we get to talk openly about what is working and what isn't, how else we might approach work, and the major wins and losses of our past day/week/month is crucial for forming and sustaining a high-performing culture. Barrett (2012) highlights how jazz musicians create communities of practice through mutual listening and responsive adaptation, where expertise develops not through individual mastery but through collective learning in and after the moment of performance. This is the space where we can begin to really decide "who we are" as a team and to identify what gives life and energy to our work.

Celebrating support – If we want a culture where leadership is everywhere and people take responsibility for their work, it is ironic that we must learn to celebrate and value followership alongside leadership as an equally vital practice. Followership gives leadership activity force and impact; if it is not valued, staff will not be incentivised to truly collaborate. When Uhl-Bien and Carsten (2018) reconceptualise followership and leadership as co-produced through relational processes, they're making a crucial point: stop looking for leaders and followers as types of people and start noticing leading and following as things we all do, moment to moment, in response to each other. This means celebrating the person who asks the clarifying question, who platforms others and puts them in the spotlight, who supports someone else's plan rather than pushing their own, these are all acts of following that make leadership possible, and they deserve recognition equal to any leadership initiative.

Encouraging growth mindsets – Praise process, not product! We need people to grow and to see they have the potential to grow further. Recent applications of Dweck's mindset theory in organisational contexts (Murphy and Dweck, 2016; Canning et al., 2020) show that cultures emphasising learning and development, rather than fixed talent, foster greater innovation and inclusivity. Praising the process or the effort put in here is so much more important than the results of that effort, as it emphasises the space for improvement and de-stigmatises failure.

Conclusion

The journey toward more participative, adaptive leadership isn't a straight path. It's messy, uncertain, and often uncomfortable. Yet the alternative, clinging to command-and-control models in an increasingly complex world, is no longer viable. By anticipating the hurdles, watching out for pitfalls, and cultivating sustaining habits, we create conditions where leadership can emerge from anywhere in the organisation. This isn't about abandoning structure or accountability, but about recognising that in facing today's challenges, the collective intelligence, creativity, and commitment of our teams represent our greatest resource. The question isn't whether to make this shift, but how thoughtfully and persistently we're willing to work through the inevitable difficulties along the way.

References

Barrett, F.J., 2012. Yes to the mess: Surprising leadership lessons from jazz. Harvard Business Press.

Bartunek, J.M. and Woodman, R.W. (2015) 'Beyond Lewin: Toward a temporal approximation of organization development and change', Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 2, pp. 157-182.

Canning, E.A., Murphy, M.C., Emerson, K.T.U., Chatman, J.A., Dweck, C.S. and Kray, L.J. (2020) 'Cultures of genius at work: Organizational mindsets predict cultural norms, trust, and commitment', Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 46(4), pp. 626-642.

Laloux, F. (2014) Reinventing Organizations, Nelson Parker, Brussels.

Maier, S.F. and Seligman, M.E.P. (2016) 'Learned helplessness at fifty: Insights from neuroscience', Psychological Review, 123(4), pp. 349-367.

Martin, G.P. and Learmonth, M. (2012) 'A critical account of the rise and spread of "leadership": The case of UK healthcare', Social Science & Medicine, 74(3), pp. 281-288.

Murphy, M.C. and Dweck, C.S. (2016) 'Mindsets shape consumer behavior', Journal of Consumer Psychology, 26(1), pp. 127-136.

O'Reilly, D. and Reed, M. (2010) '"Leaderism": An evolution of managerialism in UK public service reform', Public Administration, 88(4), pp. 960-978.

Rittel, H.W.J. and Webber, M.M. (1973) 'Dilemmas in a general theory of planning', Policy Sciences, 4(2), pp. 155-169.

Scharmer, O. (2018) The Essentials of Theory U: Core Principles and Applications, Berrett-Koehler, Oakland.

Seligman, M.E.P. (1975) Helplessness: On Depression, Development, and Death, W.H. Freeman, San Francisco.

Tourish, D. (2019) Management Studies in Crisis: Fraud, Deception and Meaningless Research, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Uhl-Bien, M. and Carsten, M., 2018. Reversing the lens in leadership: Positioning followership in the leadership construct. In Leadership now: Reflections on the legacy of Boas Shamir (pp. 195-222). Emerald Publishing Limited.