Why Leadership Selection Matters More Than Leadership Training
After over 20 years as a management consultant, I have arrived at a surprisingly simple observation: most teams are either islands of happiness or islands of toxicity. The deciding factor is almost always the leader.
Some leaders create environments where people collaborate, resolve conflicts constructively, and extend genuine goodwill to colleagues. Others preside over cultures defined by politics, defensiveness, fear, and emotional volatility. This led me to a deeper question: how much of it is nature versus nurture?
Attachment Theory as a Leadership Lens
The work of attachment theorists John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth offers a compelling framework for understanding.[1,2] Their research demonstrated that early caregiving relationships shape enduring internal models of how we relate to trust, authority, intimacy, and emotional safety. These patterns — broadly described as secure or insecure — persist into adulthood and influence how people respond under stress, particularly in high-stakes relationships.
Individuals with a secure attachment style generally regulate their emotions effectively, refrain from personalising disagreements, maintain healthy relational boundaries, extend positive intent to others, and remain collaborative even under pressure.[3]
Insecurely attached individuals, by contrast, are more likely to become reactive under stress — oscillating between anxious over-involvement and avoidant withdrawal, or adopting controlling, aggressive, or conflict-seeking behaviours. Interactions frequently become organised around self-protection and zero-sum dynamics.
Power Amplifies Psychology
Organisations are not merely economic systems; they are also power systems. And power amplifies psychology.
Insecurely attached individuals can absolutely succeed in business. Many do. Anxiety, hypervigilance, a fear of failure, and the compulsive need to guard against adverse outcomes can produce extraordinary drive and resilience. But these same dynamics sabotage people’s core psychological needs for safety, belonging, agency, and recognition.
Research on psychological safety consistently shows that team effectiveness depends heavily on whether members feel safe speaking up, taking risks, and admitting mistakes.[3] A leader's relational functioning is a primary determinant of whether that safety exists at all.
Under sustained stress and positional power, leaders tend to revert to their deeper relational patterns. Teams then adapt to the leader's emotional system. This is how cultures of fear, political manoeuvring, burnout, or genuine psychological safety emerge — not from strategy documents, but from the relational field created by the person at the top.
Culture is not what an organisation says about itself. It is the emotional and relational residue of the people who hold power within it.
The Rare Combination
Over time, I have come to believe that highly effective leaders combine two distinct qualities: secure relational functioning (secure attachment style) and strategic and political competence. That combination is actually quite rare — and it points to an uncomfortable implication for organisations.
Leadership selection ultimately matters far more than leadership training.
As attachment patterns are relatively stable across the lifespan, training can improve skills, sharpen communication, and expand self-awareness. But short-term leadership training cannot compensate for deeply ingrained insecure attachment structures. While people can and do change, behavioural change can’t be willed; it takes significant corrective experiences, reflective practice, and/or sustained therapeutic work, and this is typically a long-term process.
As important as leadership training is, the quality of a workplace depends disproportionately on whether power is entrusted to individuals who combine secure relational functioning with genuine strategic competence. How we select these leaders will greatly determine the long-term culture, organisational functioning and business success.
References
Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss, Vol. 1: Attachment. Basic Books.
Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of Attachment: A Psychological Study of the Strange Situation. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.