Thinking in Layers: A Leadership Framework for Navigating Complexity

When your team is struggling, the problem is rarely who you think it is. Here's how thinking in layers (individual, team, organizational, environmental) helps leaders find the real leverage point.

A few weeks ago, I joined a small group of painters on the island where I live. We are meeting a couple of afternoons a week to paint "plein air" this summer.

I have never taken an art class. I cannot draw. I honestly wasn't entirely sure what "plein air" meant when I agreed to go after a friend invited me. (It means outdoors, from life.)

And I am completely hooked. This is the most fun I've had in a while.

So naturally, I'm going down a rabbit hole. I'm reading Watercolor Painting by Tom Hoffman, and there's a line that caught my attention:

"The skills involved in recognizing what is essential and what is optional are awareness skills."

Tom goes on to explain that in watercolor, you don't paint everything at once, you work in layers. First, the lights - these are the palest washes and sometimes just the white of the paper preserved. Then the mid-tones, and finally, the darks (which provide definition and depth).

(For two stunning examples of how much a painting can say with just a few essential marks, search John Yardley's "My New Shoes" (2011) or Torgeir Schjølberg's "Fjøsvegg" (2005).)

What I've learned in just a short amount of time is that if you try to do it all at once, you get mud. Or sometimes chaos from trying to add too much detail.

This is the exact same thing I was talking to a client about this week in a coaching session. Turns out that when we are feeling overwhelmed or aren't sure what to do next, it is possible that the operating environment is so complex that we can't discern what is essential and what is optional.

Let me show you what I mean. Here are some things that leaders actually say to me when something isn't working:

"I can't seem to make traction with this team." "She has a bad attitude." "He's a bottleneck. How do I get him to move faster?" "I can't get any real energy or motivation around this goal." "I don't know why I'm struggling so much in this environment."

Every one of those comments points at an individual. And it may be true that one person is jamming things up for you, but it's rarely the whole picture.

It seems like we are increasingly moving too fast (by design or habit?), and it's limiting our ability to see and act effectively.

Thursday one of my clients came into our session ready to tell her boss: "I can't do this anymore." She had cried three times from overwhelm that week. She was reading the situation as a personal failure, or at best, an impossible job.

By the end of our session, she had a completely different conversation planned. Not because her situation had changed, but because she could finally see what was actually generating the burnout.

The individual layer was real - she was exhausted, recently married, running on empty. But the leverage point was elsewhere: no defined notion of success, a culture of saying yes to everything, no one checking what the team could actually deliver before new ideas landed on their plate. Her team was being treated like an infinite well. Of course she was burning out!

Seeing it as structural helped her take the ego out of it.

When I'm coaching, one of the most useful things I can do is help tease apart the layers:

• Individual: What behaviors are we actually seeing? What might be driving them?

• Team: What are the interpersonal dynamics? Where's the friction, the unspoken tension, the breakdown in trust?

• Organizational: How is the structure, culture, or reward system contributing to what we're seeing?

• Operating environment: What's happening externally (politically, economically, in the sector) that's shaping the pressure people are under?

Most leaders skip straight to the individual layer. Organizations are especially prone to this: hire someone, fire someone, hire a consultant, send the team to a workshop... Sometimes that's the right move. But often, the individual behavior is just the most visible layer, and the real leverage point is somewhere else entirely.

(You might recognize this as a cousin to systems thinking's iceberg - the visible event is never the whole story.)

Think of a challenge you're sitting with right now. What layer are you treating it as? What if that's not the full picture? What other layers might be at play here?

Once you can see the layers, the next question is what your own vantage point might be obscuring, filtering out, or making invisible. More on that in my next article.

This piece originally appeared on LinkedIn.