#540 Essential Leadership in Turbulent Times: Marc Inzelstein interviewed by Niels Brabandt
Essential Leadership in Turbulent Times: Marc Inzelstein interviewed by Niels Brabandt
Article by NIels Brabandt
A conversation about leadership, love, control, coherence, and the human work of leading organisations through complexity.
Introduction: why essential leadership matters now
In this interview, Niels Brabandt speaks with Marc Inzelstein about a question that is increasingly urgent for decision-makers: what kind of leadership still works when the world becomes too volatile, anxious, non-linear, and difficult to read for conventional management reflexes? The conversation centres on Inzelstein’s book on essential leadership and his argument that leadership in turbulent times must move beyond toughness, control, and performance theatre. For Marc Inzelstein, the more demanding path is also the more effective one: leaders must learn to practise L.O.V.E., understood not as sentimentality, but as a disciplined leadership paradigm built on letting go, oneness, vision, and energy.
Niels Brabandt frames the interview by challenging a familiar corporate assumption: that leadership is mostly about toughness, direction, control, and the ability to tell others what to do. Marc Inzelstein responds with a fundamentally different position. His experience across 25 years of executive advisory work has led him to a view that will feel uncomfortable to many traditional leaders, yet increasingly necessary: excellent leadership begins with care for the human beings involved.
The motivation behind the book: leaders are performing, but many are suffering
Asked by Niels Brabandt why he wrote the book at this point in time, Marc Inzelstein explains that his motivation came from decades of working closely with leaders across large organisations, smaller companies, and start-ups. He describes a pattern that many boardrooms still underestimate: leaders may continue to perform well according to the metrics, while privately struggling under the weight of complexity, anxiety, and the erosion of personal resilience.
Inzelstein points to a shift from the once fashionable language of VUCA, volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, towards BANI, brittle, anxious, non-linear, and incomprehensible. The distinction matters. VUCA still suggests that better analysis, more strategy, and sharper management tools may restore order. BANI describes a deeper condition: systems feel fragile, people feel anxious, events do not unfold in linear patterns, and even highly educated leaders face realities for which no degree programme fully prepared them.
This is where the interview becomes particularly relevant for senior decision-makers. Inzelstein is not arguing against performance. He is arguing that organisational performance and human sustainability can no longer be separated. Burnout, anxiety, and chronic pressure are not peripheral HR issues. They are leadership issues, strategic issues, and in many organisations, risk issues.
L.O.V.E. as a leadership paradigm
When Niels Brabandt asks what readers sign up for when they engage with the book, Marc Inzelstein clarifies that L.O.V.E. is not a soft slogan. It is a practical leadership framework: L stands for letting go, O for oneness, V for vision, and E for energy. Together, these four dimensions describe what Inzelstein calls the essential leader.
This point is crucial for a business audience. Inzelstein does not present love as a replacement for competence. He presents it as a way of accessing deeper resources in leaders and organisations. In his account, essential leadership operates both internally and externally. It affects the leader’s own ability to find resilience, clarity, and coherence. It also affects how that leader shapes teams, trust, organisational energy, and performance.
For Niels Brabandt, the interview therefore surfaces a leadership challenge that cannot be solved through slogans on walls or isolated training sessions. Essential leadership requires a different relationship with people, pressure, and power.
Letting go: from the illusion of control to the discipline of coherence
The strongest part of the conversation emerges when Niels Brabandt asks Marc Inzelstein to explain the idea of letting go. Many leaders will recognise the tension immediately. They are told to let go, yet the more they try to release control, the more pressure they often feel. Inzelstein’s answer is direct: letting go begins by recognising that most leaders live inside an illusion of control.
Inzelstein argues that the management tools many leaders were trained to rely on, including strategic planning, project management, and rational analysis, remain useful only up to a point. When complexity exceeds the leader’s capacity to manage every variable, the old control reflex becomes counterproductive. The leader tries to tighten the grip, yet the system becomes more resistant, less trusting, and less energetic.
The alternative Inzelstein proposes is coherence. Coherence means that people function together in purposeful, aligned, and more harmonious ways. It does not mean passivity. It does not mean abandoning standards. It means moving away from force as the primary instrument of leadership and towards connection, clarity, trust, and human alignment.
Niels Brabandt rightly identifies the magnitude of this shift. Many leaders define their job as staying in control. Inzelstein’s position is that modern leadership requires the courage to acknowledge that control is far more limited than leaders typically believe. This is not weakness. It is strategic realism.
The leadership heartset: why humans are not objects in a system
A decisive phrase in the interview is Inzelstein’s distinction between leadership mindset and leadership heartset. Management language often treats people as resources, units, capabilities, or dependencies in a delivery plan. Inzelstein challenges that tendency. Leaders are not manipulating objects in space and time. They are working with human beings who need purpose, connection, trust, faith, coaching, and psychological grounding.
This does not make leadership less demanding. It makes it more demanding. The leader must still care about budgets, timelines, quality, and execution. Yet Inzelstein argues that when leaders attempt to force performance from people, they leak energy from the system. Resistance increases. Trust decreases. Momentum becomes expensive to maintain.
By contrast, when leaders approach people first as human beings, teams can form more naturally, trust can grow more quickly, and performance can improve because the organisation is not spending so much energy defending itself against the leader’s need for control.
Practical rather than abstract: what the book offers to leaders
Niels Brabandt also raises a practical concern that many readers will share. Marc Inzelstein has a substantial career in management consulting and executive advisory work. Some potential readers may wonder whether the book is too academic, too abstract, or too far removed from the daily reality of a team leader in a smaller business.
Inzelstein’s answer is important: the book uses research, but it is designed to be practical. He describes sections that invite the reader to pause and notice, turning ideas into personal practice. The emphasis is not on intellectual display, but on usable leadership reflection. How do you start your day? How do you respond to difficult situations? How do you access creativity and resilience? How do you create coherence inside yourself before expecting it from others?
The interview therefore positions the book not as an academic exercise, but as a practice-oriented guide for leaders who recognise that technical skill alone is no longer sufficient. The case studies and executive stories are designed to be relatable because, as Inzelstein notes, leaders often struggle with the same human themes: imposter syndrome, overcontrol, disappointment, pressure, and the fear of letting others down.
The strategic relevance for decision-makers
For senior executives, the strategic significance of this interview lies in its refusal to separate leadership effectiveness from human depth. The conversation between Marc Inzelstein and Niels Brabandt points to a reality that organisations can no longer afford to ignore: the leader’s internal condition shapes the organisation’s external performance.
A leader who is anxious, controlling, exhausted, or disconnected may still deliver short-term results. Yet the hidden cost is often paid through burnout, mistrust, talent loss, defensive communication, and slow organisational learning. Essential leadership, as Inzelstein presents it, is not a retreat from performance. It is a more mature route to sustainable performance.
This is why the interview matters for business decision-makers. It challenges the outdated assumption that harder pressure automatically creates better outcomes. In complex organisations, pressure without coherence can weaken the very system it is meant to improve. The essential leader understands that performance is not only driven by targets, dashboards, and accountability structures. It is also driven by meaning, trust, energy, and human connection.
Conclusion: the essential leader in the age of complexity
The interview between Niels Brabandt and Marc Inzelstein offers a timely message for leaders navigating turbulent markets, anxious teams, and increasingly fragile organisational systems. Essential leadership is not about becoming softer in the simplistic sense. It is about becoming more precise, more human, and more effective in the realities leaders actually face today.
Marc Inzelstein’s L.O.V.E. framework, letting go, oneness, vision, and energy, asks leaders to rethink their relationship with control. Niels Brabandt’s questions draw out the practical implications for executives, managers, and organisations that want more than performance theatre. The central insight is clear: leaders who seek coherence rather than control may be better equipped to create trust, resilience, and lasting performance.
For leaders who want to move beyond command, pressure, and exhaustion, this conversation is not merely a discussion about a book. It is an invitation to reconsider what leadership must become.
Niels Brabandt
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More on this topic in this week's videocast and podcast with Niels Brabandt: Videocast / Apple Podcasts / Spotify
For the videocast’s and podcast’s transcript, read below this article.
Is excellent leadership important to you?
Let's have a chat: NB@NB-Networks.com
Contact: Niels Brabandt on LinkedIn
Website: www.NB-Networks.biz
Podcast and Videocast Transcript
Marc Inzelstein
Leadership.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
We all know that leadership is important. However, the question is, how do you actually present? How do you perform? How do you do leadership? What is, what is the real essential leadership that we need to provide? And we have an expert on the matter with us here today. Hello and welcome, Mark Inselstein.
Marc Inzelstein
Thank you, Niels. Great to be with you.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
Thank you very much for taking the time. And we're getting straight into it. You wrote the book about essential leadership. And that is a topic in there. Because most people will say, you know, as a leader, you need to be tough, and you you need to be tough on the people and you need to tell them, do this and do that. And when I look at your book, there is a rather different take on it. You say Practicing Love, L-O-V-E, in Turbulent Times. And of course, my question here is, what was your core motivation to write this book in these times?
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
Because many people, especially today, say, when I look around, I see all of this very straightforward, deliberately extremely hard people all over the media. So what is your approach to it? But first, what was your core motivation to write this book right now?
Marc Inzelstein
Thank you, Niels. Really, really great question. So I've been doing this work of executive advisory for 25 years across the world, working with large organizations, some also some startups with a lot of different types of leaders. And I love my work and I love the people that I work with. So I do, I do. So
Marc Inzelstein
the word love, you know, the word love comes into it for me from the beginning because You can only do a great job when you really care about the people you work with. And I've watched over the last 10 years especially, but even worse since COVID the immense struggle that I see leaders facing every day. The world has just become so much more complicated, so much more difficult.
Marc Inzelstein
You know, we used to talk about VUCA, volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous. We've moved into a world now which experts refer to as BANI, brittle, anxious, non-linear, and incomprehensible. And leaders are dealing with— no one has been to school for this. You could have an MBA or a PhD, it doesn't matter. It's just we're dealing with realities that far surpass what we've been taught to handle.
Marc Inzelstein
And so watching the people I work with struggle, you know, they may be performing very well if you look at their metrics, but inside they're struggling and their health is suffering. Burnout has become a syndrome with the World Health Organization. Anxiety has become an epidemic across Europe and corporate America, across the world, in fact. And so I care about the humans. I also care about the leadership, meaning I want organizations to be successful. And I believe that they can happen together, but it has to happen differently. And so I wrote the book to explore that theme, drawing on my many years of experience and also a lot of research, speaking to a lot of people. And I believe we need to get to a different level of leadership, which I call central leadership. So that was my— core motivation to write this book, Niels.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
Excellent, excellent. So when people now say, okay, this seems to be pretty important in, in today's times, when I buy the book, The L.O.V.E., what do I sign up for? What is it that I— what is it?
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
Because many people will, will buy books to say, okay, look, I have a certain situation and I need help with that, and the question they have is, what is in it for me? So what is your 'that's in it for you' with that book?
Marc Inzelstein
Understood. A great question. So yes, of course it spells the word LOVE, but it stands for a paradigm which I've developed over the years, which I believe is a very powerful paradigm which can help us as leaders and as humans not to just be more sustainable or to be healthy, but be better, more effective, more impactful leaders.
Marc Inzelstein
So the L stands for letting go. I'll get into that, what that means if you want. The O for oneness, the V for vision, and the E for energy. And these 4 dimensions work together to create what I call the essential leader.
Marc Inzelstein
And it draws on sort of deep wellsprings of resources that are within us as human beings. We just need to know how to access those resources. And that paradigm works both at the individual level, meaning it works inside of you, but it works also in how you impact your teams and your organizations. So at a high level, that's really what we're talking about.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
Excellent. Especially when you said letting go, could you get a bit into this? Because some people say, look, I've tried so hard to let go for many, many years, but things are bothering me more and more every single day. I just start the radio, here we go. I start the TV and it continues. Basically, as soon as I get in touch with reality, things are bothering me more each day. And I try to let go so hard that actually letting go starts to bother me. So how can people actually let go?
Marc Inzelstein
It's a really, really great question. It's hard. The first thing we have to recognize is that most of us, especially those of us that have grown up sort of in the business world with— as rational thinkers and learned strategic planning, we've learned project management, we've learned all these techniques to make things work. Well, that works to a point, but when things get too complicated, it doesn't work anymore because there's an infinite number of things we can manage at any one time. And today it's more, more than ever.
Marc Inzelstein
So the first thing we have to recognize is that We mostly live in the illusion of control. We believe that we can control reality, we can control our teams, we can control organizations. That's actually no longer possible. It was possible at some point. And we all know that the, you know, those of us that have studied management, that have been working leadership, that, you know, the '60s and '70s were largely command and control organizations. And that in the '80s, '90s, up until today, we've moved to more modern types of organizations where we care about culture, we care about people, we care about connecting. But we never let go of the illusion of control.
Marc Inzelstein
So interestingly enough, in the '70s, there was a great psychologist called Ellen Langer who wrote a book, wrote a paper about that called The Illusion of Control. And she showed very empirically that control is impossible. It's an illusion. We believe we have much more impact than we actually do. And the letting go fundamentally has to happen by first recognizing we control far less than we actually believe. And so what I advise people to do is to recognize they can't control anyone or anything really. We even have trouble controlling ourselves if you come to think about that.
Marc Inzelstein
To move from control to coherence. Coherence. Coherence is a whole different, I'd say, different way of thinking about life and about leadership. Instead of using force, force, you know, in some instances, you know, you may have to use force in life.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
You get someone attacks you in the street, you may have to defend yourself, you know, something like that.
Marc Inzelstein
A little bit. But in organizations, force, I believe, today has outlived its usefulness. Coherence is about how people function together in purposeful, aligned, harmonious ways. And so when you recognize that you're aiming for coherence, that you're looking to connect at levels with it, from human being to human being, at the level of the head and the heart, you don't seek to control it. You
Marc Inzelstein
can't control or to let go anymore. It happens naturally. Because you're functioning at a much more, I would say, serene level of consciousness than when you're trying to control people and situations. And so letting go happens when you just recognize, I can't control things because that's an illusion, and I'm looking for coherence more than control. Does that make sense?
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
Absolutely. It's a massive paradigm shift for most people though, because many people think my whole job is to actually stay in control, but at the same time, they now have to acknowledge that they actually can't.
Marc Inzelstein
That's exactly right. Yeah. You know, there was an old saying that a lot of us know that, you know, management is about doing things right. Leadership is about doing the right things. And even management, we say doing things right, it feels like you have to control things. But I say even middle managers today have to, they have to manage projects well. They have to keep things on time and stay within budget.
Marc Inzelstein
That's all important, but you're dealing with humans.. And with humans, the more you exert control, the more you're gonna leak energy from the system. The more people are gonna resist, the more you're gonna lose traction, you're gonna lose trust. So you've gotta go in there with what I call the leadership heartset as much as the leadership mindset. The heartset, it's about remembering you're dealing with another human first and foremost. You're not manipulating an object in space and time to get to a result. You are actually working with someone who needs purpose, who needs connection, who needs trust, who needs faith, who needs coaching.
Marc Inzelstein
To get to that next step. And when you do that naturally, coherence starts to happen, teams start to form, trust starts to take place, and then performance starts to soar. And it can really, really transform very quickly when that happens.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
Absolutely. Two, two more questions here. One question, of course, I have to ask. Some people might now look you up as an author, and then they find like massive career management consultant partner at a large tech firm, LSE master degrees
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
Some people will say, look, I'm not much of an academic here, I'm not into these scientific reads, I don't have that massive career, I'm a team leader in a small business here, is this actually a fit for me?
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
What kind of read can people expect when they open the book?
Marc Inzelstein
That's a good question. I've tried to make it very practical. I do use scientific research, but I always bring it back to what's in it for you. And so typically at the end of most chapters, I'll have something called a moment to notice where I'll turn everything about in the chapter into something you can practice yourself.
Marc Inzelstein
Because at the end of the day, everything is going to come back to you, the human. How are you starting your day? How are you dealing with difficult situations? What are the practices you can do to find more coherence inside of you, more peace, more tranquility? And how can you access resources of creativity and resilience that are already inside of you?
Marc Inzelstein
So yes, there is research, but for people that are into that kind of stuff, I make it very practical. There are case studies of executives I've worked with where the stories, you'll find them very relatable because we all struggle with the same things, with imposter syndrome, with trying to manage stuff we can't manage, with letting people down. You know, it's a very human, basic human things, and there are ways to deal with that. And we have those resources inside of us. We just have to access them.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
Brilliant. I think these are the perfect final words. Just one last question. When people now say, hey, I think Mark would be a really good keynote speaker for our conference or a great coach or a great mentor for our organization, How can people get in touch with you? So
Marc Inzelstein
the best is on my website, which is essential-leadership.com or mark@essential-leadership.com. That's the easiest way to reach me.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
Brilliant. These are the perfect final words. You see, practicing love, L-O-V-E, might be the solution to the essential leadership issues that you are facing today. At the end of this podcast and at the end of the videocast, there's only one thing left for me to say, Mark. Thank you very much for your time.
Marc Inzelstein
Thank you. Thank you. It's good to see you, Niels. Appreciate your time.