Here’s a hunch I’ve been following for a while now: almost every difficult behavior you encounter in a leadership context has one of two root causes. Fear or denial.
That’s it.
Defensiveness. Blame. Emotional shutdown. Anger that shows up outsized in a meeting. The leader who explodes when a hard decision is approaching, or the one who keeps postponing a conversation that clearly needs to happen.
When I trace any of those symptoms back far enough, I almost always find one of two root causes:
1️⃣ “I am scared about X.” 😬
2️⃣*”I don’t want to think about Y because it is painful or frightening.”* 😨
Even the emotions we don’t immediately label as fear (anxiety, avoidance, depression) tend to have some version of those two root causes underneath them. Fear and denial. The rest is presenting behavior.
Field Guide to Fear and Denial
The leader who micromanages every deliverable usually isn’t doing it because they enjoy it. They’re doing it because somewhere in their threat landscape, they’ve learned that if they don’t have full awareness of everything, something will go wrong and they’ll be held responsible. That’s fear driving behavior. Specifically: fear of losing control in an environment where they don’t feel safe trusting the system.
The leader who seems impatient, who cuts people off, who makes decisions before the room has finished thinking, is often someone whose nervous system has been maxed out for too long and is trying to resolve things faster than the situation actually requires. Not a personality trait. Someone operating under too much pressure for too long.
The leader who becomes hard to reach, who keeps postponing a conversation that clearly needs to happen? Avoidance. And avoidance is almost always fear or denial underneath. (This is the one I find most recognizable, by the way. I’ve seen it in myself.)
One of the most expensive mistakes organizations make is treating prolonged stress responses as permanent character traits.
Once you’ve decided someone is “controlling” or “difficult,” you’ve closed a door that probably should have stayed open. Your brain assigned the behavior to character rather than context, and stopped being curious about what’s actually driving it.
Defensiveness is data. Avoidance is data. The leader who seems difficult is often someone operating from a threat state they may not even be conscious of. That doesn’t excuse the behavior. But it completely changes how you approach the conversation.
Identifying Your Fear and Denial
Here’s the part that’s harder to sit with.
The root cause framework doesn’t just apply outward. It applies inward, too. And this is where it gets useful in a different way.
When you catch yourself postponing a conversation you know needs to happen: fear or denial?
When you smooth over feedback until there’s nothing actionable left in it: what is the thing you’re not ready to look at?
When you over-prepare for a meeting to the point where the preparation has become its own anxiety spiral: what outcome are you scared of?
I spent years showing up as the version of myself that was warm, supportive, and emotionally available, and telling myself I was doing the job well. What I had to learn the hard way is that some of what I was calling “kindness” was actually self-protection. The harmony I was maintaining was my own. The discomfort I was sparing people was the discomfort I didn’t want to hold.
When I started applying root cause analysis to my own behavior, the questions changed. Instead of “why do I keep doing that?” (which mostly produces guilt), I started asking: “What am I afraid of right now? What am I not ready to look at yet?”
Those are more useful questions.
Diagnose and Treat
The shift I’m describing isn’t about excusing difficult behavior (yours or anyone else’s). It’s about changing your intervention.
You can’t coach someone out of a personality trait. You can, with the right conditions, help someone feel safe enough that they don’t have to default to that armor as their first response. And you can build that same thing within yourself: enough self-knowledge that when fear or denial shows up, you recognize it before it drives your behavior for you.
Two questions to carry with you:
1️⃣ What is this person afraid of?
2️⃣What are they not ready to look at yet?
And then, when you turn the lens inward:
What am I afraid of right now?
That’s the root cause framework. Two questions. Two root causes. It won’t give you clean answers the way a technical problem does. People rarely do. But it will keep the right door open.
I’d love to know: when you look back at a leadership situation that felt “difficult,” does this frame change how you see it? Leave a comment, find me on Notes, or send me a message. I read everything.
See you next Tuesday,