Grit Isn't Enough: What Leaders Miss About Their Own Capacity
Partway through the conversation, Rachel Taylor turns the interview around and asks Chris Turkington what happens to him when his tank runs empty. He says he loses his sense of humour, gets shorter with people and has less tolerance for things he would normally laugh off. Rachel then asks whether anyone in his life notices before he does. He says he notices pretty quickly, but his wife notices too and calls him out on it, and colleagues will tell him he has lost his humour for the day.
Rachel, a geneticist and biochemist who co-founded Taylored Health, asked because of what happened when she put the same question to the leaders she interviewed:
eight out of ten said other people notice I'm depleted or snappy before I do.
It is tempting to file that under self-awareness. Rachel puts it down to the body.
Why the leader is last to know
Rachel says the leaders she interviewed listed the people at home, and she is concerned about what lands on them:
the ones that are dealing with the fallout of your stress and anxiety when they're the least qualified to do so.
She also found that awareness and depletion move in opposite directions:
the magnitude of how depleted you are is inversely associated with how much you can notice you are.
If the faculties doing the checking are the ones wearing down, self-assessment is weaker than it looks. The reliable signal sits outside the leader's own head, in what colleagues and family are seeing. So the decision worth making early is who has permission to tell you, and whether you have made it safe for them to do it.
Her explanation starts with threat detection. People run a constant check on whether they are safe and whether they belong, and phones, news and workloads keep that system firing. The body cannot tell one source of threat from another:
your body does not have hashtags on a threat.
Under threat, she says, vision contracts and all you see is what is in front of you. In practice the deadline fills the view, and the team and the family drop out of it without anyone deciding they should.
The instrument matters
Rachel says society has taught us to read struggle as a grit or resilience problem. She allows that this is sometimes true, then adds the part she thinks is missing:
no matter how much of a brilliant pianist you are, if your piano is not tuned well, you'll still sound like crap.
The practical risk is misdiagnosis. A leader who reads a dip caused by biology as a character flaw is likely to respond with more effort, which leaves the underlying problem where it was.
A wheel that turns backwards by default
Rachel's model has four connected factors. Biology is the chemistry of the body and how well it is running. Leadership is judgement and the ability to comprehend, calculate and strategise. Behaviour is what you actually do with what you know. Environment is where you work, who you are around and what home is like.
The downward spin goes like this. A poor environment sets default behaviours, poor behaviours erode judgement, and fatigue and bad calls degrade biology. A leader in that state then shapes the environment further. Left alone, she says, the wheel drifts backwards. Run the other way, clear thinking supports better calls and better habits, and a workplace that trusts your judgement and a home that feels lighter put something back into biology.
What a leader can change today
Genetics is largely fixed, and nobody can absorb a decade of leadership experience in the moment. That leaves behaviour and environment as her levers. Her example:
don't have alcohol in the cupboard. That's a decision that directly influences environment.
The decision gets made once, on a calm day, and after that the environment does the work.
Rachel says she is not a medical doctor, and that anyone curious about their own genetics needs a proper clinical test rather than an ancestry kit. She illustrates it with an executive who kept waking at 2 a.m., which the episode covers in full.
Aegis works with leaders on decision-making under pressure, and Rachel's model describes the conditions those decisions get made in. The hardest calls often arrive when a leader is already stretched, so what gets arranged beforehand matters: who is asked to challenge the decision, and which choices are settled before the pressure builds.
Organisations treat it as a personal matter
Rachel compares it with a thoroughbred racehorse. An owner picks the horse for its pedigree, then pays for the jockey, the feed and the recovery support. She can't square that with how founders and executives are treated.
She described a founder, unnamed, whose start-up she calls one of the biggest funded of the past decade. The funding was celebrated as the pinnacle, and he was then largely left to work out for himself how to carry what came with it.
When she asked a chief product officer she interviewed what he thought about a leader's capacity to show up and lead, he answered:
Well that's a well being problem and that's their personal problem, that's not mine.
Rachel says she was speechless, though she doesn't judge him and puts the view down to the culture around wellbeing. She sees it differently:
it's a leader infrastructure problem. It's a business risk problem.
She proposes a snapshot of where a leader is at, which does not have to be shared with the business, and which gives busy people fewer, better-targeted things to do.
When Chris asked her to condense it all into one message, this was her answer:
I don't think the future of leadership is about asking more of leaders. I think it's about helping them get more information about themselves and the tools to help them naturally become capable of more without pushing.
Rachel Taylor is a geneticist, biochemist, and co-founder and CEO of Taylored Health. She joined Chris Turkington on the Fireside Leadership Podcast.
The article covers the argument. The full episode has Rachel walking through the wheel in her own words, and the 2 a.m. case behind her genetics point. Watch on YouTube or listen on Spotify.
This article is general information only and is not medical advice.
Comments