Mentalizing means “imagining” what your team must be thinking and feeling as they communicate with you.
Mentalizing is the essential ingredient for Creating a Secure Base for Your Team.
It’s quite common I hear Leaders react to a junior’s email / call as annoying. They reactively assume the junior has some Intent to get in their way and slow down an otherwise efficient process.
However, the best leaders arrest their judgmental reaction and instead Mentalize:
What must be happening in the mind of this junior that is causing them to raise this issue with me?
Status Quo and An Alternative
For example, a group head recently related to me “I got a request from a junior to have another call with an underperforming PortCo, and my instinct was to say ‘No’ as I felt it a waste of time and unnecessary.” (SCENARIO 1)
I asked my client to Mentalize what mind state could have motivated the junior to raise this request to him. The Group Head reflected “perhaps he’s worried that he underwrote the deal and — with it not performing to plan, if he doesn’t have good color for IC — that he will look dumb and unprepared and IC will form a negative view of him.” (perfectly reasonable concern)
Then I asked, how he could use this working model of his junior’s mental state to acknowledge the junior’s concern and work through it with him? He said, “I could reply ‘Thanks for raising this. I can imagine why this is important to you. Let’s talk about the right time to have this call.” (SCENARIO 2)
Relative Results: Scenario 2 for the Win
Finally I asked how the junior would likely feel towards him in Scenario 1 versus Scenario 2:
Scenario 1: “He’d likely feel unmotivated and resentful of me that I didn’t acknowledge or help him with his concern.”
VS
Scenario 2: He’d feel like I took care of him and helped him with his problem. He will do his best for me and feel motivated to work on my team. They will probably prioritize my work over a Partner who makes them feel like Scenario 1.
Mentalizing is not purely altruistic.
To win the game of Leadership, one must power up their unique human ability to imagine (Mentalize) what someone else might be thinking and feeling.
As a Leader, how can you arrest your reactions to seemingly irksome inbounds? Unfortunately, you’re survival system is wired to automatically screen out what it perceives as noise.
And instead challenge yourself to Mentalize ‘what state of mind must the other person be in to be approaching me this way?’
Self-Awareness: Your Parents Might Not Have Modeled Good Mentalization
Psychological researchers theorize that kids learn to Mentalize in their early attachment relationships with their parents (see Fonagy under Additional Reading below).
But many high achievers had parents who countered their emotional bids with a categorical “I don’t care, you’re going to the school / game / camp. You will do it and be excellent.” A ‘performance’ culture.
While many high achieving kids obeyed the ‘performance’ mandate and learned to hide their emotional objections (for fear repeated objections could threaten their attachment bond), they may have learned that their emotions — and the emotional concerns of others — don’t matter and are a waste of time.
So it’s important to realize that if you’re a high achiever, it’s possible what got you here, may also prevent you from Winning the Game of Leadership.
It’s your choice:
Challenge yourself to Mentalize your team’s mind states when they approach you, Win the Game of Leadership, and inspire people to want to work for you,
Or you can stay rooted in your (unconscious) default state of non-Mentalizing and Lose because the team feels unconnected to you and not safe with you.
Related Private Equity Insights With JD Pieces
The Most Successful Investment Partners Created a “Secure Base” for Their Teams
Managing Your Juniors Is All About Your Own Energy And Approach
Additional Reading
A Secure Base, by John Bowlby (1988).
The Mentalization-Focused Approach to Social Development, by Peter Fonagy (2006).
We assume the capacity to mentalize is a key determinant of self-organization, along with affect regulation and attention control mechanisms, and that mentalizing capacity is acquired in the context of early attachment relationships.
Mentalizing is imaginative because we have to imagine what other people might be thinking or feeling; an important indicator of high quality mentalization is the awareness that we do no and cannot know absolutely what is in someone else’s mind.The Adult Attachment Interview, Handbook of Attachment, Mary Main (1985).