From Overwhelm to Influence: Expanding Leaders’ Capacity to Navigate Complex Relationships

Leading in a Tangle of Relationships

Bumped up two weeks, Engineering insists on another sprint, and HR reports that yesterday’s hybrid-work tweak is already eroding trust. Green-light one request and you alienate another group; stall, and everyone wonders whether you have a backbone at all. Modern leadership, it turns out, is less about choosing a direction and more about threading a path through overlapping loyalties, clashing incentives, and complex relationships.

Pause for a moment: how many times have you had to decide whose expectations to meet—and whose to disappoint? If your answer is “too often,” the real question becomes: Do I have the internal capabilities to handle these situations without fraying trust?

In the content that follows, I’ll share novel ideas from my recent Business Horizons article, “Navigating Complex Environments Requires Complex Leaders” (coauthored with Bret Crane), that might alter or improve your strategy for developing the internal capabilities needed to navigate relationship complexities.

Navigating Complex Relationships Requires Complex Leaders

Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety states that System 1 cannot control or regulate System 2 unless System 1 is equal to or greater in complexity than System 2. Following this law, leaders must recognize that if they want to effectively navigate complexity, they must seek to expand their own personal complexity.

There are two forms of personal complexity that leaders need to understand and grow: self-complexity and cognitive complexity. These are perceptual abilities, distinct from personality or cognitive intelligence.

Self-Complexity

What it is. Self-complexity is the breadth of roles and abilities you see in yourself (differentiation), held together by a coherent thread of values (integration).

Why it matters. Leaders with richer, integrated identities switch hats faster, regulate emotions better, and stay resilient under stress. They move from analyst to coach to challenger without seeming inauthentic, so conversations feel tailored rather than transactional.

Why it matters for relationships. When leaders expand their self-complexity, they show up in more multifaceted ways—as mentor, analyst, challenger, or peacemaker on demand—without feeling fake. That flexibility lowers emotional reactivity, allowing a tough comment from Finance not to spill into their next one-on-one with Design. Direct reports experience self-complex leaders as “the leader who always seems to speak my language,” while peers see a partner who can step back from personal turf and lean into the bigger goal. Over time, that multifaceted presence builds trust faster and cushions relationships when inevitable trade-offs leave one faction disappointed.

Cognitive Complexity

What it is. Cognitive complexity is the ability to slice a knotty issue into fine shades (differentiation) and then weave those shades into a workable picture (integration).

Why it matters, generally. Research shows that leaders high on this dimension generate more options, reduce bias, and outperform peers in messy conditions—across banking, tech, healthcare, and S&P 1500 firms. They can hold “cost control and innovation,” “short-term hit and long-term health,” modeling both-and thinking for their teams.

Why it matters for relationships. When leaders must negotiate, cognitive complexity enables them to see broader perspectives and surface non-obvious integrative options to meet the needs of multiple stakeholders. This allows them to craft solutions that preserve relationships while moving the business forward—a pattern linked to superior performance in turbulent markets.

Evaluate & Elevate

The good news: leaders can grow their complexity. Both self-complexity and cognitive complexity are trainable. Start by identifying the relationships that routinely tangle you up—those are clues to your complexity gaps. Then pick one self-complexity practice (e.g., identity mapping journal, narrative-identity share-out) and one cognitive complexity practice (e.g., weekly systems map, decision matrix), and try them for 30 days. Track your progress: Did difficult conversations get shorter? Did options widen? Did trust nudge upward?

Peter Drucker once warned: “There is a point of complexity beyond which a business is no longer manageable.” Whether you cross that point depends less on the chaos around you than on the complexity within you. Strengthen your self- and cognitive complexity today, and the next time the storm hits, you’ll reach for more than a single instrument—you’ll pilot with a full cockpit.