Why Highly Sensitive People (HSPs) Make Great Leaders!
Heidi Winkler, colleague, author, and founder/ CEO of the Winkler Leadership Academy agrees that people who are highly sensitive, such as many of the sales reps she trains, are quicker to adapt to their customers, what their underlying motivations and needs are, and, as a result, write more business.
Naturally, I am not surprised.
In a Forbes interview in 2020, Dr. Elaine Aron, author of The Highly Sensitive Person, and pioneer in this field of work, said:
“John Hughes [HSP, successful entrepreneur, author, sponsor of the movie Sensitive–The Untold Story], wrote an article [that] describes the three specific abilities that he believed HSPs to be [that make] them uniquely effective leaders.”
According to Hughes, the first is Subtleties (“taking in environmental subtleties is an invaluable leadership ability”). The second is Processing over Action (“HSPs are better equipped to lead because they naturally fall to the background, allowing team members to freely speak and share and shine”). The last is Resonance (“Resonant leaders seem to say and do the right thing at just the right time. This isn’t luck or magic, it’s their innate ability to feel deeply, process richly, and patiently consider the right words and actions for the moment”).
Hughes, on his website, goes on to say: “We also carry a responsibility to do something with all that we create inside our minds and hearts–as if it’s not ours, but something we owe back to the world. This emotional sensitivity, deep connectedness, and rich inner life feed an HSP’s ability to lead teams in a way that others simply can’t.”
Wait!
No one is saying that HSPs can automatically lead teams, or that only HSPs are good team leaders, or that others aren’t potentially great team leaders. However, we do have innate abilities that allow us to lead, should that be our choice, in uniquely rich and profound ways. Some generalizations include:
- We’re the ones who notice when the normally chatty manager stops talking.
- We’re the ones who normally sense discomfort or tension in a room and, instead of ignoring it, look for its cause and for ways to diffuse it or address it.
- We’re the ones who listen as much as we talk because we want to hear what others have to contribute.
- We’re the ones who believe that promoting, elevating, and praising others is a significantly improved way of increasing production.
- We’re the ones who want others to succeed.
And yet . . .
Being a good leader when you’re an HSP does not always come naturally if you’ve led a life where you have felt underestimated, undervalued, and/or misunderstood. If our sensitivity to language, conversation, non-verbal cues, sound, scents, emotions, and so on, is something we have determined is a deterrent, it is unlikely we will use those traits in ways that contribute, not detract, from anything we choose to accomplish.
Withdrawing into the background will not, in most cases, bring us the attention we deserve for the work we do and will not, in most cases, reveal our invaluable leadership qualities.
We need to believe that our sensitivity is our secret weapon in whatever environment/field in which we choose to invest.
We need to believe that we are better equipped to lead because we do not have the common need to push our own agenda.
. . . And that it’s not luck that causes our success, but our inherent abilities put to use in ways that serve us and the world around us.
