Practicing at the Intersections - The Art and Science of Leadership

On Practice, Presence and Growth

The last three essays traced the ground of my practice. The first followed my formation, the encounters, and the intellectual influences that informed how I construct leadership development in my mind. The second went into the depth-oriented traditions, the psychoanalytic thinking, and what attending to the inner world asks of the person. The third brought in the evidence-based traditions, the research on change, and the discipline of grounding claims beyond intuition alone. Together they made the argument that the practice of leadership development lives at the intersection of art and science, of evidence and depth, of the objective and the subjective. A constant and demanding thread that is present throughout is what remains unknown; not-knowing, held as an epistemological stance rather than a competency gap.

This essay concludes the trilogy by asking what holding all of that simultaneously demands in practice. It attends to the epistemological, the structural, the relational, and the human, from the first conversation with an organisation through to the developmental encounter itself, whether with an individual or a team.

The Widening Frame

An earlier essay situated leadership coaching in organisational change. Leadership development, seeking some sort of change and betterment for individuals, exists inside organisations that are in constant change themselves. These leaders inhabit histories that precede them, both personal and institutional, and contexts that outlast them. They are temporary holders of roles, with someone before and after them in the role, and yet with an opportunity to bring their unique fingerprint to that role. Beyond performance or capability, developmental interventions attend to the whole person in the role and how they navigate change, in the midst of organisational, technological, and geopolitical disruptions that further complicate the picture.

The first conversations with organisations commissioning development work are around the purpose and objectives of the intervention. The framing, and what might be missing from it, is the earliest data about the organisation and the broader system. These include questions such as whether the developmental need sits with the individual, the team, or something their manager has to communicate, and whether coaching is the right intervention at all. Practicing from the intersection demands asking these uncomfortable questions and directly impacts how the boundaries of the engagement are established—clarity on goals, process, and confidentiality, among other areas.

These questions continue into the coaching relationship itself. In coaching, the chemistry meeting is where the intersection becomes most visible. On the surface it is an assessment about fit and yet, it carries epistemological and ethical undertones. The practitioner is asking, in real time, whether what she offers matches what this person needs, in this organisation, at this particular point in time. The postmodern gaze runs through that question as there is no universally good practitioner or universally right approach. The developmental intervention for a leader in a highly regulated financial institution is designed differently from one navigating a rapid-growth environment.

What Practice Produces

Over time, practicing with this intersection in mind produces something harder to name than a framework: a quality of attention, discernment, and in-the-moment awareness. A feel for when to highlight something and when not to, when to name and when to hold it. Critical insights and breakthroughs often arrive sideways, in the most non-directed moments. Present and in charge, not driven by anxiety.

In coaching leaders, I have come to understand this as an attunement, mirrored in their daily leadership, encountered almost unconsciously. When I ask how they made a particular decision or reached a conclusion, they will often say something did not sit right, or that they followed their instinct, or that they followed their intuition. This is after weeks of data gathering and careful analysis. The coaching relationship works with the same dynamic. What Polanyi (1966) called tacit knowing, what Schön (1983) named knowing-in-action, and what Bollas (1987) identified as the unthought known are all captured here.

Each leader’s process for such knowing and the way it is expressed is often unique and unseen. In Goffman’s terms (1959), it is the backstage of practice, the preparation that makes the front-stage possible. Coaching, as a developmental intervention, inverts that frame. The front-stage of the leader, the performed, managed, organisational version of the self, is exactly what coaching moves away from. The work is to create the conditions for the client’s backstage to become accessible, through contact with their own inner life and as a way to understand and re-frame the front-stage performance in their role.

The practitioner brings their own unseen ground to this. The traditions, the praxis-informed epistemology, the discipline, the inner work, not as a performance but as what makes genuine psychological safety and trust possible. An engagement moves across this terrain unpredictably, between depth and practicality, between action planning and psychologically dense inner territory, without imposing a hierarchy on what matters most.

In the end, all change, organisational or individual, eventually becomes personal. It lands in the person and in who they are in the process of becoming.

Seeing and Being Seen in the Process of Becoming

The traditions, frameworks, and disciplines of attention ultimately serve one thing - the capacity to truly see another person. In this process, the lens turns inward on the practitioner too. Through this work, I have come to see my own developmental arc. The messiness, the mistakes, and everything in between, as integral parts of a process that does not move in a straight line.

In the midst of the challenging inner work, something settles into a way of living and leading that is genuinely one’s own. Acting from agency and authorship, the moments of delight becoming more frequent, the lightness of being more available. The experience of being fully human, with all of it, the struggle and the joy, stops feeling like a contradiction and starts feeling like the point.

There is an aesthetic and an ethical dimension to this work. The aesthetic lives in the precision and grace of human change. It is beautiful in its unfolding and humbling in what it reveals. The ethical lives in the attention to boundaries and containment that allows both to unfold, and in the responsibility and discipline that holding a person’s inner material with care demands.

Coming to be is not a state arrived at. It is universal and singular at the same time. A process always underway, it asks of the practitioner and the client alike a deep compassion and commitment to what that demands. It is both ordinary in its constancy, such that one almost does not notice it, and extraordinary in what the human spirit does with it.

The work done between practitioner and client continues outside the room, often in ways neither party anticipated and situated in a bigger and broader life lived. This keeps the client’s agency at the centre. It is their narrative to define, to hold, and to carry forward. The practitioner accompanies. They do not author.

The intersection, at its deepest, is not between traditions or frameworks. It is where the practitioner and the client meet, each carrying their own becoming through the encounter.

Further Reading

Bollas, C. (1987). The shadow of the object: Psychoanalysis of the unthought known. London: Free Association Books.

Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday

Polanyi, M. (1966). The tacit dimension. New York: Doubleday.

Schön, D. A. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. New York: Basic Books.

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