The most challenging thing about leadership is that doing it poorly often looks the same as doing it well.

Confidence can rally the troops—unless it’s just covering up problems nobody has the nerve to discuss. Group activities can get you buy-in and cohesion—unless they’re just hollow gestures of ceremony and ritual. And expressions of vulnerability can truly humanize your organization—unless you’re avoiding what’s really making you anxious.

That anxiety, and the struggle to address it, can do some real harm to organizations. Writing in the MIT Sloan Management Review in a piece titled “How Leadership Anxiety Derails Transformation,” a pair of scholars from the business school Insead call this response “defensive organizing,” noting that it can hobble a team’s performance and even lead to failure.

The two lay out a variety of ways that defensive organizing shows up in organizations, but they all effectively reduce to one pattern: leaders lying to themselves about what’s really happening. Leaders might feel anxious about a financial trend line but avoids discussing it for fear of seeming weak; they devise narratives to put the best face on things; they introduce team-building activities that seem to just about everybody as busywork.

Those sorts of challenges are more acute when there’s an immediate challenge that requires attention. But I suspect the problem is more common in associations around long-simmering issues. The flailing and unnecessary program that plods along, zombie-like, because a key stakeholder is its champion. The membership and dues tiers that have long needed revising. The region-based board structure that no longer reflects the association. All matters that require attention, but which stoke conflict when you do.

As a response, the article authors propose, first, developing some emotional distance from these predicaments. “Reframing anxiety from a personal failing or a dire prediction to a simple signal that requires attention and interpretation, like all other data, makes it easier to demonstrate courage,” they write. Moreover, inviting others to discuss an obvious but unspoken problem can make it less of a source of stress. 

And those leaders, they say, should be more comfortable about verbalizing their concerns, and letting others do the same. “Leaders who can acknowledge and investigate their own anxiety are likely to realize that others feel it too,” they write. This isn’t weakness, just a way to acknowledge vulnerabilities as a first step toward addressing them sensibly. As they put it: “The courage to be the first to say what everyone else is thinking is the antidote to idealization.”

Thomas Hardy was a poet and novelist, not a management expert, but he summarized this leadership challenge as well as any of them when he wrote, “If way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst.” Difficulties are abundant, and only the rosiest staffers, members, and volunteers would be surprised to hear that from a leader. Successful leaders will know the difference between a response to those difficulties that’s authentic and considerate, and one that’s just covering up.