Everything you communicate (without realising it)
Desmond Tutu, a South African priest, small in stature but huge in spirit, once opened a lecture with a long silence. As the seconds ticked by, the room grew restless. People started to giggle nervously and mutter to each other. After a full minute, he finally spoke, slowly, one line at a time:
A person
Is only a person
In relation to other persons
His wrinkled face broke into a wide smile, and the room burst into applause. Because everyone instantly understood what he meant: we only become visible as human beings in relation to each other.
You don’t see who you are as a leader in the mirror. You see it in contact with your team. It’s the contact that makes things flow or grind, that creates magic or misunderstanding. There’s important information hidden in that contact with your team. That’s where the patterns are hiding. The art of leadership is learning to recognise them.
A quick word from Freud…
To understand how people work, we need to travel back 150 years, to where our thinking about the human mind began: Freud’s brain. According to Freud, our personality is made up of three parts: the id, the ego and the superego.
The id (no typo there) is your primal brain: hunger, thirst, anger, NOW. It wants instant gratification, the so-called pleasure principle. Don’t give it what it wants, and you get that classic supermarket scene: a screaming kid on the floor.
The superego is your inner strict parent: what’s proper, what’s allowed, what should happen. It measures your behaviour against the ideals and norms you picked up at home, or from your culture.
The ego tries to make sense of the two of them in the real world. It’s the mediator, working from the reality principle: what do I want, what’s possible, and what’s wise?
These three voices are in a constant tug-of-war. Give the id too much room, and you become impulsive, unrestrained, sometimes even reckless. Let the superego take over, and you become strict, moralistic, or just plain unbearable. The ego has to work hard to hold it all together. When it manages, you’re in balance: relaxed, alert, open to feedback. But the moment tension rises, that balance slips. And then the id or the superego “wins”, and you turn into a moral crusader, a loose cannon, or somehow both, in a single meeting.
Three little voices in your head
Sound familiar? Psychiatrist Eric Berne thought so too. In the 1950s, he built on Freud’s ideas but made them a lot more practical. Berne translated the inner conflict between id, ego and superego into three recognisable roles we all carry inside us: Parent, Adult and Child. Three ego states we think, feel and react from.
Here’s an example.
You’re in a meeting. Someone on your team asks a pointed question about your proposal. You feel something prickle, first in your gut, then in your chest. You just about manage to say, “Good question,” but inside, your inner microphone is already blaring:
Your Child feels rejected (They don’t think I’m smart enough), your Parent rolls its eyes (They just don’t get it!), and your Adult scrambles to hide all those insecure, angry little voices so you can still come across as professional. It mostly works. Until the meeting ends, and you spend the next hour grumbling to yourself. And lie awake that night, replaying everything you wish you’d said differently.
The undercurrent, surfaced
Transactional Analysis (TA), Berne’s model, maps out exactly these kinds of communication patterns. Not just at the level of behaviour, but right where things tend to go wrong: in the undercurrent. TA shows you why a conversation derails. Why your team won’t take ownership. Why you struggle to delegate, or why you can’t seem to hold your boundaries. You might think it’s about what was said. But often, it’s really about the position someone was speaking from.
Say you’re in a meeting thinking, Why doesn’t anyone here take responsibility? But you don’t stop to consider that you might be the one who’s always grabbed everything for themselves. Maybe you find it hard to truly let go, or to let things fail. So you’d rather fix it yourself. Like the parent who’s been tying their child’s shoelaces for years (because, well, we’re in a hurry), and is then surprised that at age eight, the kid still just sticks out a foot and says, “Well, go on then!”
TA helps you see patterns like these. It shows you what behaviour you’ve (unknowingly) brought with you from home, and how it plays out in your leadership, especially when things get tense. As Johan Cruyff once said: “You’ll only see it once you get it.” That’s especially true for TA. Because once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
The three positions in TA: Parent, Adult, Child
TA rests on a few key principles:
• People generally act with good intentions (so you have to learn to look past each other’s stuff a little).
• Everyone is equal (your position gives you more responsibility, but it doesn’t make you “more human” than anyone else).
• Everyone is responsible for their own behaviour (your reflexes are understandable, but they’re not a free pass).
• Everyone can change (you can decide to let go of old patterns and develop new ones).
TA assumes each of us carries three positions inside: Parent, Adult and Child. They all show up in our everyday behaviour, even when you think you’re just “being yourself.” These positions aren’t fixed types. They’re temporary places you think, feel and react from, often without realising it. Sometimes you’ll even jump from one position to another and back again, all within a single conversation.
Here’s how to recognise these positions, in yourself and in others.
The Parent
The Parent is the voice in you that you’ve taken on from your parents or other parent figures. It comes in two flavours, the Critical Parent and the Nurturing Parent, each with a healthy side and an over-the-top side.
Critical Parent
In its healthy form, the Critical Parent gives direction, sets boundaries and guards quality: “Let’s just get this organised properly.” Push it too far, and it turns bossy, moralistic or controlling: “Seriously, is this all you’ve got?”
Nurturing Parent
The Nurturing Parent offers support, creates safety and shows genuine care: “I noticed you were quiet in the meeting, how are you doing?” The pitfall here is fussing over people, playing rescuer, or keeping others small: “Never mind, I’ll just handle it for you.”
The Adult
The Adult responds to what’s happening in the here and now: present, open, reflective and without judgement. “What’s actually going on here, and what do we need?” The Adult asks, listens, and is open, honest and realistic.
The Adult position has no over-the-top side, you can’t be “too Adult.” But the moment emotions rise, the Adult is usually the first to disappear into the background, letting the Parent or Child take the wheel.
The Child
The Child in you is made up of behaviour, thoughts and feelings you once developed in response to your environment. Here too, there are two sides: the Adapted Child and the Free Child.
Adapted Child
In its healthy form, the Adapted Child is sensitive, accommodating and focused on harmony: “I’ll just see if I can sort it out, without anyone feeling attacked.” But push too far, and you start swallowing things, complaining, withdrawing, or slipping into passive resistance. Sometimes your rebellious streak takes over: “I’m just completely checked out right now.”
Free Child
The Free Child is a source of creativity, courage and fresh ideas: “What if we did this completely differently?” But there’s a pitfall here too: tipping into unpredictable, impulsive behaviour that makes you hard to reach: “I’m just doing my own thing, thanks.”
You’ll probably recognise these positions not just in yourself, but also in that colleague who always takes over, or the one who always checks out. What you’re projecting is felt, even when you say nothing at all. People pick up, with striking accuracy, whether you’re standing above them, crouching below them, or simply standing beside them. And they respond accordingly.
One notorious TA pattern is the so-called Drama Triangle. Say you see someone struggling and think, I’ll just help them out. Lovely, nothing wrong with that. But before you know it, you’re fixing everything and the other person has leaned back and stopped trying. You’re the Nurturing Parent, they’re the Adapted Child. And then, suddenly: bam! Criticism arrives, that you’re too controlling, that you leave no room, that you call all the shots. The other person slips into the Persecutor role, and you, who only wanted to help, suddenly feel like the Victim: This is so unfair! You’ll see this pattern not just between two people, but at the organisational level too: senior management thinks team leaders don’t take enough responsibility, while the team leaders think their bosses are micromanagers.
Why this lens makes you a better leader
As a leader, it’s essential to recognise when you’re slipping into a Parent or Child position, or when you’re pushing someone else into one. A leader who speaks from the Critical Parent (I expected more from you) often triggers a Child position in the other person: someone shuts down, snaps back, or checks out entirely. And an employee who stays stuck in a dependent Child position keeps you trapped in the Parent role right back.
The key lies in the Adult-to-Adult transaction: asking questions instead of filling in the blanks, showing yourself instead of hiding behind your authority. Making real contact. And tolerating that this is sometimes uncomfortable.
That doesn’t mean, by the way, that you should never sit in the Parent position as a leader. Sometimes your team genuinely needs direction, decisiveness or care. And the Child deserves its place too, when you’re moved by something, find something exciting, or just feel like dancing on the table at the team outing (usually much appreciated). As long as you know which position you’re in, and why.
The real power of TA isn’t in the theory, it’s in what you can see with it. Leaders who put on this lens spot faster why something’s stuck. They see: this isn’t a “difficult employee,” this is an old pattern repeating itself. And so they can try something different, sooner. They communicate with less noise, because they know better what’s theirs and what belongs to the other person. They react less on autopilot, and more from genuine choice. They give their team members room to take an Adult position, because they’re taking it themselves too.
And maybe most importantly: they know their own triggers. They stay available. And that’s what makes them effective: they know when they’ve become part of the pattern themselves. TA teaches you what you see, and what’s underneath it. And above all, how to shift the pattern from your own Adult place.
Ten insights for anyone who wants to lead and build real connection
Here they are:
• You learn the difference between empathy and rescuing. Caring is valuable, but if you do it from the Nurturing Parent, you unintentionally undermine the other person.
• You discover when feedback is really a judgement in disguise. What you mean as “helpful feedback” only lands when it comes Adult to Adult.
• You realise that “saying nothing” says something too. Avoidance, irony, controlling through structure, these are all transactions with an effect.
• You become aware of your own need to be needed. Sometimes you stay stuck in Parent-Child patterns because they make you feel important.
• You get tools to repair a conversation. Not with a trick, but by examining your own position and speaking up again. Tricks don’t help.
• You recognise when your leadership is disguised as control. Giving direction is different from steering out of fear.
• You discover why your allergies to certain behaviour run so deep. Maybe you’re reacting to something old in yourself, not just to the other person.
• You see when your team slips into the Child role, and how you (unintentionally) cause it. Complaining, checking out, rebelling, it says something about your way of communicating too.
• You learn to sit with tension without reacting on reflex. No drama. No fixing. Just contact.
• You gain more command over your own inner voice. TA makes you aware of your own reflexes, and once you know them, you have something to choose from.