Stop Autopilot, Tune Into Emotions: The Inner Work Journey to Transformational Project Leadership – interview with Susanne Madsen by Iwona Heyen

Do and run. Plan and deliver. Push harder. Relentless. This operational focus often leads to the biggest blind spot in leadership: operating on autopilot and missing the entire emotional intelligence piece. But what if the key to consistently securing deliverables and navigating the pressures of uncertainty lies not in pushing harder, but in pausing? Executive coach Susanne Madsen addresses this challenge by advocating for a gentle yet transformative journey inward — the necessary Inner Work that moves leaders beyond transactional management to become truly transformational.

Susanne, in your latest book, How to do the Inner Work, you speak of a gentle yet transformative journey inward. How can project managers, who are often under high pressure and focused on external goals, practically integrate this inner work into their hectic daily routines to become more effective leaders and better navigate uncertainty?

First of all, most project managers are externally driven, like most people are. We need to do, do, do and to run, run, run to get everything done. The trick is to begin to pause during the day and notice what is going on internally in our inner landscape. The most important person we’ll ever get to lead us ourselves. And if we don’t understand what’s going on for ourselves at a thought level, at an emotional level, and at a physical level, we will not be able to truly tune into others and lead others. A good way for project managers to begin to tune into their inner world is to reflect. Take time out during your commute to or from work to reflect a bit on how your day went. Don’t be critical and don’t beat yourself up. Just reflect on what was happening for you today for 10- 15 minutes. You can also write your reflections down in a journal if that suits you. Ask yourself questions such as: What went well for me? What happened? What upset me? And how can reflection help us to better navigate uncertainty? Well, uncertainty means that I’m worried, I’m anxious.

Maybe on behalf of my project, maybe on behalf of a change that’s happening in the business. So, ask yourself: Is there anything I can do? Can I accept this uncertainty? Can I be with this difficult emotion? That’s really what it means to do the inner work – to be able to be with my emotions. This is a big, big, topic. And that’s what project managers can do. They can begin to reflect and they can begin to accept emotional states of uncertainty that they cannot do anything about. At other times we can do something to address uncertainty. We can take action to minimise risks and issues on the project. But some uncertainty we cannot do anything about and the things that are outside of our control we need to just accept. Simply digest those emotions, let the uncertainty be there, and understand that it is normal and natural to be worried about uncertainty because we are wired in our brains for certainty and predictability.

Your work connects deeply to inner work and self-awareness with the hard realities of project management. If a project leader could integrate just one transformational practice from your teachings into their leadership style to better motivate and lead their global teams, what would it be and why?

If there was just one practise that I recommend for increased self-awareness and inner work, it would probably be to self-reflect on a regular basis, either daily or weekly. Another practice is asking for feedback, because if I ask for feedback from my managers, peers, clients, and team members, I can understand what I need to do differently in order to better lead my global teams. It is also about having an honest look at myself. I recommend 360-degree anonymous feedbacks where 10 people in the organisation provide honest feedback on me.

They’re holding up the mirror so that I can understand whether I’m too challenging, too soft, too rushed, etc.? What can I do better? How can I sharpen my saw? Asking for feedback and reflecting on my behaviours are two of the most transformational practices in leadership and in personal development that I believe every leader, and every non-leader, should engage in in order to become better at their work.

Staying with leadership. Your re-released book on project leadership, which won a PMI award, has a renewed focus on emotional intelligence. Can you share a specific example from your coaching practice where developing a project leader’s emotional intelligence was the crucial turning point for a project that was at risk of failing?

Well, I think this happens all the time. I run a leadership programme for a large corporation where we’ve trained hundreds of project managers and project leaders in my leadership philosophy. The goal of the programme is to help increase their self-awareness, leadership skills and their emotional intelligence. I lump these three things together because you cannot have one without the other. Self-awareness and emotional intelligence create better leaders.

What these people walk away with is an awareness that their actions and interactions matter. They become more self-aware, meaning, they’re not an autopilot anymore. They begin to notice other people. They begin to notice who they need to spend more time with. They get better at connecting with others and asking questions. They get better at listening and at being patient when they need to be patient. I see again and again that they simply create better relationships with team members and get better at handling conflict. For example, a project manager has a very difficult relationship with a technical lead and is frustrated because he isn’t delivering.

After they attend our leadership programme, they’re able to listen better. They’re able to empathise and they’re able to have this crucial conversation and hold the other person to account. They don’t just push and push. They learn not to be afraid of having these crucial conversations. Yes, it’s uncomfortable. Nobody loves having challenging conversations, but they’re essential in holding people to account and creating better projects.

I fully agree, challenging conversations are inevitable in project management. You’ve written that every interaction is an opportunity to increase the connection. What is the most common mistake project leaders make in these delicate situations that weakens the connection, and how can it be avoided with a mindful, coaching-oriented approach?

This is actually a really big question. What typically happens if we’re in a conflict situation is that we go on autopilot. I’ll give you an example. My team member hasn’t delivered what he promised, and I get angry. I use the emotion of anger as an example because it’s an easy emotion to understand. So, I get angry and disappointed because my team member hasn’t delivered. We end up in a conflict and I’m asking: Why did you not deliver? What happened? And my team members may or may not have a good answer. But the mistake I make as a leader is that I’m not aware of my emotion (anger in this case) and I’m not expressing my emotion. It’s that emotional intelligence piece. I’m just going on autopilot. I’m just pushing.

I’m frustrated but I’m not expressing it in a constructive way. What we need to do is to slow down. We need to notice what we’re feeling and what the other person is feeling. And we need to put words to those emotions. We need to get it on the table and express it, because the problem isn’t just the lack of delivery, but my team members behaviour, so, we need to address the behaviour. We need to really get to the root of the issue and we need to listen to people properly. Sometimes when we go on autopilot, we’re just rushed and blaming people. Instead, we need to approach the situation with curiosity, with openness and without blame because if I go into a blame mode, the other person is going to be defensive which will worsen the conflict. So, if I instead say: Listen, I’m really disappointed because we had an agreement about this deliverable and I can explain to you the consequences of you not delivering. Let’s talk about what happened so we can understand the root cause and see if there’s something we can do right now or in the future to make sure that we work better together and we don’t have this misunderstanding again.

We need to calm down our emotional response and really sit down with curiosity and explore and make the other person feel safe enough that they want to open up and explore the reason why they haven’t delivered. We need to have a deep conversation in a calm way without the emotions taking over, without us going on autopilot and just not listening or pushing or whatever we normally do. Curiosity, not blaming, asking questions, listening and being honest about our emotions are all ingredients that help us in a conflict situation. This is where the real work lies for project leaders – when things aren’t going well. That’s when we really see the difference between a transactional project manager and an emotionally intelligent project leader.

You mention a major shift in your level of thinking in 2008 that led you to become an executive coach, realizing that managers need leadership skills. In today’s fast-paced world full of distractions, what do you believe is the biggest blind spot that project managers have regarding their own leadership?

I would say the biggest blind spot is that many project managers think that project management is just about delivery, about planning, and getting people to do what I want them to do. That’s what I call “management” as opposed to “leadership”. So, the blind spot is the lack of understanding that it’s people who deliver projects. It’s not just about the plans and the transaction: I give you a salary therefore you deliver tasks for my project. No, we need to become project leaders and that’s obviously what I’m all about – teaching people how to become more transformational. As a project manager you need to really connect with the person, you want to lead. Don’t just manage them and tell them what to do. You need to find out what it is that motivates each person, how we can work better together, how we can communicate better, and how we can better deliver. That can only happen if we truly understand each other.

It’s really hard sometimes to describe the difference between transactional management and transformational leadership but it’s about each project manager using their emotional intelligence. Project management is not just about cognitive intelligence and being rational. It’s really about understanding what’s going on for each team member, understanding what’s going on for me, setting expectations, and being able to hold people to account even if it doesn’t feel good. The more self-aware we become, the better we are able to lead others. Project managers often think that they need to be the hero, that they need to tell people what to do. They miss out the whole emotional intelligence piece which is what leadership is all about.

One of your blog titles is The yin and yang of project leadership. Could you elaborate on this fascinating concept? What seemingly contradictory qualities or forces must a modern project leader balance within themselves to succeed in today’s complex world?

There are many different types of leadership and we can either lead from the front, or from behind. Leading from the front means you’re visionary, you’re telling the team Come with me, so you are leading the way. When you lead from behind it’s more like a coaching leadership style. You’re basically encouraging others to take the lead, you’re behind them, supporting them. The different leadership styles can be placed on a spectrum where some are more supportive and others are more challenging. I call those two extremes yin and yang.

Yin is this female supportive element and yang is this more masculine, demanding element. And when we map out people’s leadership styles, most people tend to be on either side. Some people are extremely supportive of their teams. It’s important to them that there is harmony in the team, they consult the team members, and don’t push them too much, because they want them to be happy. That’s a beautiful leadership style because it´s about nurturing the team and looking after them. However, that’s one extreme and if we are only yin and we are only supporting and giving, but we’re not demanding anything, then people could take advantage.

Let’s go to the other extreme, the yang, the demanding. This is more like hardball, masculine. Women can be like this too, but traditionally it’s a demanding masculine style of leadership: Do as I tell you, just get it done. A very high standard has been set and excellence is being demanded. And in the extreme case, this very yang leadership style can even be bullying. And obviously, that extreme is also not great in the long term. Most people fall on either side of this midline. What’s important for a balanced leadership style is that we can be BOTH yin and yang at the same time. Some people are afraid of being supportive and they’re afraid of being challenging, so they end up being what I call Teflon managers, they don’t do either of them, they’re just not there. What I advocate is that we are yin AND yang at the same time.  We can set a high standard and agree on a set of ambitious goals together and I can show support and help you reach those standards. That is a recipe for high performance.

That’s a recipe for really building your team up because we do need to be ambitious and we do need to support people in order to be high performing. When I run this exercise with people, it’s really a way to help them reflect on their own leadership style and understand in which situations they need to be a little more yang or a little more yin. 

You emphasize the importance of high performing teams that are able to innovate and deliver change. Beyond standard methods like setting clear goals and roles, what is your most unconventional advice for creating a strong team identity that truly unites and empowers a team?

What I always go on about is the importance of a team charter. We all know what a project charter looks like. A project charter is really about what we’re going to deliver, who’s going to deliver it, when we’re going to deliver it, why, how much it’s going to cost, etc. The team charter on the other hand is about how we are going to work together. What do we expect from each other? What are the team’s strengths and weaknesses? This goes beyond delivery.

You can do a team charter no matter what the project execution is. It’s about the team. So, as a team, we sit down and discuss a common way of working because that’s one of the biggest predictors of a high-performing team. If we don’t have a common way of working, forget it! We really cannot assume that a team is just going to magically come together and know how to work together. As project managers and project leaders we need to deliberately create that team feeling. We need to work with a team charter, meaning sitting down for a couple of hours, maybe half a day, bringing a team charter template along and then working through it. This is not about the project manager coming up with the answers. It’s about us working through these questions together as a team – for example, what’s the purpose of the team? What are the strengths of the team? What are the weaknesses of the team? What are our values? How are we going to conduct meetings? And so on.

The questions from the team charter are very practical but not necessarily easy to answer, and it’s much better to have a conversation up front. And then, after six weeks, 10 weeks, or three months, we can revisit and refine our team charter. That is really what I recommend: don’t just talk about deliverables. Talk about behaviours and what we expect from each other. Your readers can download a team charter template for free on my website on: https://www.susannemadsen.co.uk/resources.html

Your motto is Happiness Is an Inside Job! In the project world, however, success is often measured by external metrics like time, budget, and scope, which leads to immense stress. How can leaders create a culture where the team’s wellbeing is treated as a strategic priority rather than a luxury?

When it comes to this, I believe the right culture needs to be set from the very top of an organisation, because if you have executives who set unrealistic deadlines and just push, push, push, there is very little the individual teams can do to change the culture. In this case the project managers have no choice but to push their teams too. They can try to push back on the execs, but at the end of the day, the project manager is often squeezed in the middle. If we want to create teams that are thriving, not just surviving, it has to be a strategic priority from the organisation as a whole and from the executives.

Can project managers do something at their level? Yes, of course they can. They can ask teams what they need, add more yin in the mix as we talked about before. They can nurture their teams and listen to them. They can respect the timelines that the teams come back with instead of constantly trying to remove buffers, or expect people to work overtime because a client changed their mind and want to add more features to scope.

We need to respect people and we need to understand that teams who are successful are also teams who are healthy.