One of the most common questions leaders ask me at the start of their leadership development journey is why managing people can feel so challenging. They often describe situations with a similar underlying theme: Team members are not taking full responsibility for execution, or they seem unwilling to go the extra mile. No combination of engagement strategies, one-on-one meetings, or Friday boerewors  braais seems to move the needle in the right direction.

Yet when I engage with teams and explain the dynamics of healthy leadership, they often ask whether the same training will be provided to their managers as well. Over time,  I have realised that, despite the considerable effort invested in leadership development and engagement strategies, there is often a gap between what managers do and what team members need. This is in many ways a human pattern and becomes easier to understand when viewed through the lens of neuropsychology.

The above-/below-the-line practice is a tool I use to help leaders and teams recognise their behaviour, understand the choices available to them, and intentionally change their responses for greater impact. The ‘line’ represents fear. When we are above the line, we may still experience fear, but we can notice it, name it, and choose not to let it unconsciously  affect our behaviour. When we are below the line, fear takes control of our behaviour, often without us even realising it.

Above/below the line in practise Below the line, our behaviour typically falls into one of three roles, namely hero, villain, or victim. These roles align with psychologist Dr Stephen Karpman’s Drama Triangle, first developed in 1968. Above the line, the corresponding roles are creator, challenger, and coach, as described by David Emerald in The Power of TED (The Empowerment Dynamic).

To bring this concept to life, consider a typical workplace scenario. It is peak intake season at the grain silo. A conveyor fault has been logged three times over two weeks – each instance minor enough for production to continue, yet significant enough to warrant escalation through the maintenance team’s reporting channel. However, the issue is not escalated.

The depot manager begins checking it himself, heading straight for that conveyor every morning. He identifies the fault before it becomes a problem but says nothing to the maintenance team about the pattern because he is too busy. By week three, the conveyor fault is under control, but the fault-detection system remains broken. His maintenance team has learned, not from any instruction but from his silence, that his morning walkthrough will catch what they miss.

The hero position

This is what Dr Karpman described  as the hero position in the drama triangle. The leader absorbs the problem rather than addressing the pattern. The intention may be helpful, but the effect is that the people best placed to improve the system are never required to do so. Brené Brown’s Strong Ground framework describes this as operating below the line: a state triggered not by poor leadership intent, but by the same threat response that makes it feel easier, in the moment, to fix the issue yourself than to have a direct conversation about why it keeps happening.

To operate above the line, the leader could choose a different response. During the next walkthrough, instead of checking the conveyor, he could stop and ask the maintenance supervisor: “This fault has been logged three times without being escalated. What is getting in the way?” The focus shifts from blame to pattern recognition. The leader is challenging the pattern, not attacking the person.

He might then ask the supervisor to redesign the escalation step: “What would make it easier to detect and escalate early?” At that point, the leader is coaching. Within a month, two faults are detected and escalated without the leader’s intervention. The conveyor is no longer his responsibility in the mornings, because it never should have been.

Do not operate from fear

The critical shift is awareness – in other words, noticing, naming, and pausing before responding. When enough people begin practising this, it becomes a culture changer. In many organisational cultures, it feels more acceptable, and even safer, to express anger than to acknowledge fear, sadness, or vulnerability.

Fear often presents itself as anger, and anger can manifest in many workplace behaviours, such as sarcastic comments, scathing remarks, personal attacks, or threatening requests. This is what happens when leaders move into the villain role in the drama triangle to achieve quick results. The short-term outcome may be compliance, but the long-term cost is a breakdown of trust and a team that quietly does less to protect itself.

Another important observation is that victims are rarely recruited into teams; more often, they quietly move into that role because leaders predominantly operate from the hero position. These leaders may describe their behaviour as servant leadership, but rescuing and over-functioning are not the same as serving.

The trust issue

When leaders continually step in, they send an unintentional message – the team will not be trusted to prove what it can do. Over time, the leader stops trusting the team’s capabilities because those capabilities have never been tested.

The underlying message becomes: “I am the most competent person here, and I am the one who can be trusted to make the hard decisions”.

The result is a team that struggles to make decisions and avoids responsibility. This fuels the leader’s frustration and reinforces the belief that building a high- performance  team is difficult, when in reality, the leader may be sustaining the very dynamic they want to change.

Leading above the line is not about becoming a flawless leader or removing fear from the workplace. It’s the willingness to interrogate your thinking and intent, and to know when you operate from fear. I realise  I am below the line when I say things  like: “I’ll do it myself. I care more. I’m on my own here”. From  here,  I can say something to myself like: “I am scared out of my mind. What if it’s not perfect? Take it easy, Lizelle; you can be scary when you are scared”. Are you able to do the same?

By Lizelle Jacobs, MindAlive