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Early in my forensic training, I found myself in a room I should not have been in alone.
The angle was wrong. The emergency bracelet on my wrist β standard protocol in that setting β would not transmit a signal from where I was sitting. I stayed anyway.
The man across from me was composed, articulate, cooperative. Then a question went too close to something he kept carefully hidden β and what followed was not unpredictable. It was completely predictable, once you understood what had been touched.
The mask had slipped. And when the mask slips, what comes through is not just what was hidden. It is everything the mask was built to contain.
I have thought about that room many times since β sitting across from founders, CEOs, and executives who are, by every visible measure, completely fine. The mechanism is the same. The setting is different. Psychology is not.
The Misread Nobody Names
A frustration I hear with growing frequency β from advisers, owners, and executives alike β is that management thinking has not evolved. For decades it did not need to: growth meant doing more of the same, better, and the environment cooperated. It no longer does. Management systems still optimize for the same outputs: performance, reliability, results.
I see the consequence in executive work: they reach out to me burned out, depleted, sometimes already breaking β almost always late, when the performed self has carried them as far as it can. The work can still succeed, but a cost has already been paid. The real question is how to change organizations so that reaching out is not the last resort.
Gallup puts a number on the scale of the problem: its 2026 State of the Global Workplace report finds only about one in five employees worldwide engaged at work, a level of low engagement it estimates costs the world economy some ten trillion dollars a year. Disengagement is psychological as well as structural.
The Performed Self and the Actual One
Every high-functioning professional has developed a self that performs well under professional conditions. It is real. It produces results. It is also a construction β and like all constructions, it has limits.
Beneath it sits the actual individual: a specific psychological architecture, with drives, fears, and relational patterns that operate whether or not the person is aware of them. Organizations almost never meet this person. They meet the performance β until the pressure reaches a threshold the performance was not built to hold, and a trigger is hit that the organization never knew existed.
Operating From Pain vs. Integrating It
Working with high performers, I encounter the same pattern often enough to call it a finding: exceptional performance is frequently built not despite significant psychological pain, but because of it. The hunger that builds companies, the discipline that sustains impossible workloads, the control that holds everything together β these have origins. Unexamined, they do not disappear. They operate.
The distinction that matters is not between those who carry significant pain and those who do not β almost universally, they do. It is between operating from that pain and having integrated it. Someone operating from unintegrated pain performs, often brilliantly, until a specific trigger is activated. Then they rigidify, withdraw, or collapse β not from weakness, but as the predictable consequence of material that was never processed, only overridden.
Integration is neither recovery nor a resilience workshop. It is the developed capacity to be in contact with one’s own psychological material without being unconsciously driven by it β what allows leaders to hold pressure without transmitting it downward, and what most executive development programs are not designed to offer.
Knowing Who You Are Actually Dealing With
Profiling starts from a simple premise: you cannot work with what you do not understand. With consent and clear professional boundaries, understanding a person means going beyond what they present β mapping what genuinely motivates them beneath stated goals, and knowing the conditions under which their functioning narrows or breaks down. A superficial read of a high performer will either idealize or pathologize. Both are misreadings of the same configuration.
The organization commissions the work. What surfaces inside it stays with the individual. That is not a limit on the depth β it is the condition for it.
In my experience, when this work is neglected, the cost eventually falls either on the individual or on the organization around them. The second is the one that goes unnamed β a leader whose unexamined interior shapes culture and decisions, absorbed quietly into how the company operates. Why lose a great mind when early support could have kept both intact?
How This Changes
Conventional thinking remains organized around the corporation: adjust the structure and the incentives, and the people will follow. But no one has ever gone to work to fulfil a corporate objective β people go to work to fulfil personal objectives through a corporate route. If the individual does not change, the corporation will not change.
Part of the obstacle is structural. Understanding individuals takes time before it shows a result, and a model built on shareholder value and quarterly reporting penalizes exactly that investment. So organizations treat their people as a homogeneous mass β and a homogeneous mass, by definition, does not innovate.
Drucker’s warning in Managing in the Next Society (2002) was that the large organization has to learn to innovate or it will not survive. What he did not have to spell out then is where the innovation comes from. Not from the structure. From individuals, one at a time.
This is where the ingenuity problem sits. The ingenuity an organization needs is usually already present; it gets filtered out before it surfaces β not only by process, but by people holding themselves so tightly that the part of them capable of original thought never arrives at work. A homogeneous mass does not innovate. Neither does a person governed by a self they have never met.
Some movement is visible: companies increasingly contract online therapy and coaching platforms, and that is progress. But standardized support is built for the many, not the few on whom everything depends. And much of it is overseen by people with no clinical training β HR functions asked to identify burnout, personality structure, trauma responses, and relational dynamics they were never equipped to recognize. Access to support is not the same as the capacity to read what it uncovers. The deeper work only has to start with that handful β mapped with the rigor already applied to financial due diligence, and supported by coaching with genuine clinical depth behind it, before the trigger is hit.
This is most urgent in founder-led companies and family enterprises, where the psychological functioning of a few people shapes the stability of the entire structure. A founder’s unprocessed fear can become corporate strategy; a succession conflict can destabilize both a family and a company. Understanding the individual is not a wellbeing initiative β it is part of protecting the system on which significant value and human lives depend.
About the Author:
Zoya Mesaric, Mag. a. pth., is a psychoanalyst and executive coach working internationally with founders, executives, and family enterprises on the psychological patterns that shape leadership, performance, and decision-making under pressure.