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If you have ever worked as part of a team in an organization, whether it is a corporation, small business, or even a volunteer-run non-profit, you may have noticed that sometimes, things get dirty. Drama erupts, accusations fly, or a silent rift grows between people due to unresolved personal problems.

These problems harm the culture and disrupt the overall effectiveness of the organization profoundly and in ways that are either completely missed by its leadership, delegated to HR to (not really) deal with, or scapegoated onto a sacrificial “bad employee” only to resurface again in other forms. For lack of knowing what to do about it, many good leaders will choose to stay focused on the mission, minimizing attention to these problems so as to not get pulled into the drama themselves.

That’s understandable, given that our modern workplace culture likes to draw a clear line between the personal and the professional. Given that all drama clearly has a personal quality to it, these problems may appear to further confirm our existing bias that personal matters should be left at home and a more transactional, impersonal culture should be maintained in the workplace. As a result of this logic, many of us are prone to think that the best leaders are those who most perfectly characterize and model this mindset, keeping things strictly professional while preventing things from ever getting too personal.

As it turns out, this ultimately fails. At best, all that is accomplished is to sweep the whole topic of shadow work itself under the carpet, denying ourselves the opportunity to receive the gifts of necessary shadow work while turning our workplace culture into a robotically impersonal environment. Our work relationships align purely based on a transactional necessity of economic function, and we end up with machine-like organizations that fail to provide the deeper sense of vocational fulfillment and purpose-driven community that we all long to be a part of. Considering that we spend a huge portion of our lives at work, this is a truly devastating loss. How far are we willing to let this go before admitting that something profoundly important is missing?

I tip my hat to those leaders who have had the courage to really sit with the complexity that such questions bring to the surface. We are in a time when such questions are increasingly difficult to face, yet increasingly necessary to ask. We are quickly running out of roadway to kick the can down, so what is a noble leader to do when they still don’t have answers to the questions that led us down this road in the first place?

To discover a new possibility, one must see with new eyes. One way to cultivate new perception is by asking new questions that derive new meaning to replace our old stories.

What if all that workplace drama we tried to get rid of was actually just a shadow expression of the longing for community and belonging which we placed into the category of “too personal for the workplace”? 

What if the healthy expressions of the personal aspect of our humanity are the perfect natural antidote for its unhealthy expressions, and by creating a workplace culture that is strictly professional, we attracted the very problem of toxic workplace drama that community and belonging would prevent? 

What if it was never drama that was the problem, but our ignorance of how to leverage it for our own growth and evolution that was the problem? 

The fascinating thing that I see again and again with my leadership coaching clients is that part of them already knows there’s an element of truth in this. It is just fear that is the obstacle. Isn’t it true that our loyalty to the dictates of fear is always where shadow gets its power? If we did not believe that what we fear could harm us, we would never become slaves to the dictates of our fear in the first place. What’s fascinating is how such fear operates collectively in organizations, spreading itself like a virus. The more influence you have, the greater the fear tends to be, and also the greater the responsibility you carry for bringing love into the equation.

In a culture that has become puritanically secular, it may not occur to us that ye old battle between between good and evil is still going on as it always has, right here in the workplace where supposedly the only thing going on is business as usual. It is truly amazing to witness what becomes possible when leaders recognize this, learn to do their own shadow work, and begin to shine where it’s needed most.