Undivided Leadership
The Timeless Lesson from Henrik Ibsen's "Brand"
Great literature illuminates our most pressing leadership challenges. Last evening, while watching Henrik Ibsen's "Brand" at the theater with my youth, I encountered a quote that perfectly captures the central struggle of modern leadership. Ibsen, the influential Norwegian playwright and one of theater's great masters, writes:
Be not to-day, to-morrow, one,
Another when a year is gone;
Be -what you are with all your heart,
And not by pieces and in part.
These words strike directly at our contemporary leadership crisis:
the fundamental disconnect between stated principles and lived practices.
The Fragmentation of Leadership
Modern organizations pull leaders in contradictory directions. We champion autonomy while maintaining control systems. We promote psychological safety while pushing for aggressive targets. We advocate for innovation while punishing failure.
This fragmentation creates what might be called "synchronized swimming" in the organizational context - the appearance of coordination masking a fundamental disconnect. Organizations move in unison but without true alignment, creating a troubling pattern:
Leaders declare teams "autonomous" while maintaining rigid approval hierarchies;
They celebrate learning while rewarding only successes;
They promote transparency while filtering difficult truths.
Ibsen's character Brand would recognize this immediately as the cardinal sin of modern leadership:
being "by pieces and in part" rather than "what you are with all your heart."
The Cost of Contradiction
Leadership inconsistency exacts a tremendous toll. When leaders say one thing but embody another, they create environments where:
Trust erodes as words and actions misalign
Decision-making becomes political rather than principled
"Functional stupidity" flourishes as people learn to suppress their critical thinking
Innovation stalls because the stated values of experimentation clash with the lived reality of punishment for failur
Most damaging of all, these contradictions create what psychologists call "competing contingencies" - situations where the stated goal conflicts with the actual reinforcement pattern. The "Reinforcement Paradox" emerges: behaviors that receive immediate, consistent reinforcement will always prevail over those merely praised in mission statements.
For example, when organizations claim to value innovation but consistently punish failed experiments, they create a reinforcement pattern that teaches teams to avoid risks despite all rhetoric to the contrary. What gets rewarded becomes what gets repeated, regardless of what gets proclaimed.
Being Whole: Integration over Fragmentation
Ibsen's admonition to be "what you are with all your heart" rather than "by pieces and in part" offers a powerful alternative. What might integrated leadership look like in practice?
Another crucial insight from Brand resonates here:
Will alone that mars or makes,
Will, that no distraction scatters.
This captures an essential truth about integrated leadership:
alignment between words and actions must be powered by genuine will and intention.
Without this internal commitment, external consistency becomes mere performance, a sophisticated form of fragmentation that eventually collapses under pressure.
True integration begins with what philosopher Daniel Dennett calls "reasoning up from the data and down from the theory" - creating a continuous dialogue between observations and explanations. This approach ensures our principles remain grounded in reality rather than wishful thinking. By continually testing our leadership theories against actual outcomes and adjusting accordingly, we maintain integrity between what we believe and what we practice.
Integrated leaders demonstrate what they truly value through consistent reinforcement patterns, anchored in genuine will. If they claim to value innovation, they reinforce experimentation and learning, even when initial outcomes disappoint. If they champion autonomy, they create structures that genuinely enable independent decision-making rather than mere coordination.
This integrity manifests as coherence between words, actions, measurements, and rewards. Not perfectly—we remain human—but consistently enough that people trust underlying principles beyond immediate incentives.
Finding Wholeness Through Reflection
Moving toward integrated leadership requires deliberate reflection through four direct challenges:
Identify where your values betray your actions. Name a specific recent decision where you contradicted a principle you publicly champion. What would true alignment have demanded of you?
Examine what you actually reinforce. Document your immediate reactions when teams deliver bad news, question assumptions, or act without permission. These reactions—not your vision statements—reveal your true priorities.
Close the gap between words and actions. Either align your behavior with your principles or honestly revise your principles to match sustainable behavior. Either path exceeds the cost of maintaining contradiction.
Confront your true will as a leader. As Ibsen reminds us, "Will alone that mars or makes"—the will ultimately determines our leadership impact. Without examining your deepest intentions, any alignment remains superficial and crumbles when tested. The will that makes rather than mars commits to authentic integration, not merely the appearance of consistency.
The Courage to Be Complete
Brand's tragic flaw is his inability to temper principles with compassion—he becomes so rigid in consistency that he loses his humanity. This carries a crucial lesson:
true integration means thoughtful coherence, not unbending rigidity.
The goal isn't perfect consistency but authentic wholeness. Leaders need the courage to examine contradictions honestly, recognize when systems undermine stated values, and intentionally align what they say with what they reinforce. This requires will—the same will that Ibsen identified as that which "mars or makes" in leadership.
When leaders demonstrate this courage, they create environments where trust flourishes, principles guide decisions rather than politics, and people engage their full intelligence rather than playing fragmented roles in an organizational theater.
The Wholeness Imperative
Ibsen's wisdom cuts to the core of leadership:
power comes not from what we claim to be, but from what we consistently demonstrate through actions, powered by genuine will.
In a fragmented world, leaders who align words, decisions, and reinforcement patterns create islands of sanity where people bring their whole selves to work.
The will that makes rather than mars is the will toward wholeness—the courage to be what you are with all your heart, consistently through time and challenges.
Perhaps Brand's most profound insight comes in another of Ibsen's haunting paradoxes:
Eternally owned is but what's lost!
This enigmatic truth reveals the ultimate challenge of undivided leadership. What we must "lose"—our comfortable contradictions, expedient inconsistencies, familiar fragmentation—becomes what we truly and eternally possess: authentic integrity.
The leader who surrenders the safety of ambiguity gains clarity of purpose. The one who relinquishes the convenience of saying one thing while doing another inherits the power of trustworthiness. What appears as loss—the comfort of unexamined contradictions—becomes eternal gain:
leadership that creates lasting impact rather than temporary compliance.
This represents the essence of undivided leadership—not merely alignment between words and actions, but the willingness, powered by genuine will, to lose what is temporary to gain what is lasting. In this surrender, we create the foundation for more authentic, sustainable, and ultimately more human ways of working together. What we courageously let go of for the sake of integrity becomes, paradoxically, what we eternally own.