Watch out! When you are drunk, tired, or stressed, your unconscious may have unexpected plans for you!

You’ve seen it happen. A leader, normally composed, becomes irritable and defensive under the pressure of a looming deadline. A stressful negotiation brings out an unexpected rigidity. As leadership expert Hélène Smit notes, it’s when you are ‘drunk, stressed, or tired’ that your hidden drivers tend to take the wheel. These moments of poor judgment aren’t just random failures of character; they are symptoms of the unconscious at work, and they can erode trust, derail projects, and poison team culture.

On the plus side, our unconscious mind houses untapped intelligence and creativity. The solution, therefore, isn't to work longer hours or develop more surface-level skills, but to make friends with the unconscious mind.

Dr Smit, who teaches at Henley Business School, argues that the next frontier in effective leadership requires going deeper. Based on four decades of work in business schools and a PhD from Stellenbosch Business School, her new book, Depth Leadership, published by De Gruyter, is the culmination of a profound personal and professional journey to give people the tools to meet this emerging self constructively, fostering what she calls ‘psychological literacy.’

The high cost of hidden drivers

The idea of an “unconscious” may sound more suited to a therapist’s couch than a boardroom, having as it does its origins in the work of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, but its impact on business is concrete. ‘Unexamined biases, unresolved personal conflicts, and buried insecurities don’t stay hidden,’ she comments. ‘They are not sealed in a vault. They emerge in flawed decision-making, an inability to foster psychological safety, and dysfunctional team dynamics.’

‘We all carry a lifetime of programming from our upbringing and culture. In order to succeed and fit in, we learn to suppress parts of ourselves – perhaps our creativity, our vulnerability, or our assertiveness. But that buried potential doesn't vanish. It remains active under the surface and can undermine our best-laid plans, especially when our conscious defences are low.’

The leader who can’t understand hidden drivers may be perpetually unable to fully understand what’s driving them or their team, she emphasises.

A pragmatic framework for leading at a deeper level

Depth Leadership moves beyond abstract theory and formulaic advice to offer a clear, actionable model for navigating this inner terrain. Dr Smit proposes that today’s most effective leaders learn to operate across three critical dimensions: Beneath, Between, and Beyond.

1. Leading Beneath: This is about mastering your own inner world. It requires the courage to look below the surface of your conscious, rational mind. By understanding your own patterns, triggers, and hidden potential, you build the self-awareness and resilience needed to lead with integrity, especially under pressure. It’s the foundational work required to become a secure base for your team.
2. Leading Between: This dimension focuses on decoding the complex, often unspoken, dynamics within your team. A leader skilled at working “between” can sense the undercurrents in a room, recognise how unconscious biases are shaping conversation, and build the trust required for candid communication. They can diagnose why a team is stuck, foster the conditions for genuine collaboration and unleash buried potential.
3. Leading Beyond: This expands the leader’s focus from the team to the entire ecosystem. It involves recognising your organisation’s role within broader systems of governance, community, and the natural environment. This perspective moves leadership from a purely operational function to one of systemic responsibility,

The book is both academically rigorous and a deeply practical. Dr Smit masterfully synthesises centuries of theory into a non-partisan foundation, focusing on what all schools of thought agree on: the existence of the unconscious, our use of defence mechanisms, and the role of anxiety. The book is filled with accessible theoretical insights and an ‘multiple tools and ways of actually working with groups and teams and yourself.’

Her path to becoming a leading voice in this field was not forged in an ivory tower alone. It has its own ‘very personal and messy back story’ – the subject of a forthcoming memoir – which ignited a lifelong quest to understand the powerful undercurrents of the human psyche. In particular, she’s been driven by a desire to translate the often-impenetrable jargon of depth psychology into a practical language that anyone could use to access their untapped potential.

‘I’ve always loved the idea that, as Jung suggested, human-beings are brimming with potential, and there is nothing more exciting really than working with people to allow them to access and bring out this latent potential,’ she says. ‘What if our greatest strengths, our deepest creativity, and our most authentic power lie dormant in the very territory we’ve learned to ignore?’

While this framework has been forged and refined in the halls of business schools and in coaching sessions with executives, its principles are universally applicable. Dr Smit explains how she’s also had the privilege of working with these ideas in a school the small South African Karoo town of Prince Albert. The school, which she founded seven years ago, caters to children who have dropped out of the formal education system, many grappling with deep trauma and drug use. The same principles of integrity and psychological integration taught in boardrooms are being used to help them recover, find their footing, and become functional citizens. It's a powerful demonstration that this is not just a business theory, but a human one.

‘In my work I’ve seen over and over again that true integrity and effective leadership depend on psychological wholeness. An unexamined unconscious will always find a way to cause mischief and undermine’ our best intentions.’

‘This book is a crucial guide for our time, an invitation to stop being tripped up by our inner selves and instead learn to lead with a depth and authenticity that can transform our work, our lives, and the world we share.’

To order a copy of Depth Leadership click here .