The Art of Being Touched: What Individual Psychology Adds to Resonant Leadership
Building on Céline Schillinger's "Many Voices Together: The Leadership of Resonance"
Reading Céline Schillinger's thoughtful exploration of resonant leadership, I found myself nodding throughout - particularly at her insight that "leadership is a collective capacity that emerges from a diverse, connected, and purposeful group." What excites me is how thinkers like Rosa and Céline are creating contemporary language for fundamental insights about the human condition that Adler was exploring over a century ago: how we flourish through genuine connection.
But one observation in her analysis stopped me short and deserves deeper exploration.
The Mystery of Being Touched: Why Rosa's First Moment Matters
Céline beautifully describes the conditions for resonant leadership: building bridges, fostering relatedness, creating spaces for shared meaning. But buried in Rosa's four moments of resonance is something crucial that can't be manufactured: Berührung — being touched or affected by someone or something.
Rosa emphasizes that resonance begins with something speaking to us, reaching us, before we can respond or transform. This isn't something we do: it happens to us. We cannot put “being moved” on our to-do list.
This raises the essential question for organizational life: if resonance must begin with genuine affection, how do we cultivate openness to being touched by our work, our colleagues, our shared challenges?
Here Rosa's concept of Unverfügbarkeit (uncontrollability) becomes crucial. True resonance cannot be manufactured or forced: it emerges from conditions but cannot be guaranteed. This is perhaps where Céline's otherwise excellent analysis needs deepening: we can create the conditions for resonance, but we cannot control its emergence.
In Individual Psychology, we call this capacity encouragement — not cheerleading, but the deeper willingness to be genuinely interested in and moved by another person's experience. Encouragement, like resonance, cannot be faked or forced. It's what makes all other organizational interventions possible.
When Self-Efficacy Becomes Mute
Céline's analysis of “twisted self-efficacy” connects powerfully with something I've observed repeatedly in organizations. She quotes Rosa: “The error of modernity lies in the confusion of a mute, results-oriented concept of self-efficacy geared toward domination and control with the experience of a resonant, influential, process-oriented form of self-efficacy.”
I've encountered many well-intentioned, highly capable people in organizations who genuinely wanted to create positive change. They were active, enthusiastic, and skilled. Yet somehow they remained what I came to think of as “window dressers” — beautifying the storefront while deeper structures remained unchanged.
These are people shaped by what Adler called Gemeinschaftsgefühl: they genuinely experience their effectiveness as inherently meaningful within a larger community. But they found themselves trapped in systems that operated on what Rosa describes as “mute, results-oriented self-efficacy geared toward domination and control.”
The tragedy is that organizations often neutralize precisely the people who could help them become more resonant. When systems reward individual performance over collective flourishing, even those with deep community feeling get channelled into cosmetic improvements rather than systemic transformation. As someone once put it, riffing on Adorno: “There's no right way to stretch out in the wrong bathtub.”
Beyond Individual + Individual = Collective
Céline rightly emphasizes that individual self-efficacy needs to be “resonant” rather than “mute.” But there's a crucial step that transforms individual capability into collective capacity: the shift from seeing others as resources for my success to experiencing genuine interest in their flourishing.
I've worked with teams where highly self-efficacious individuals remained relationally isolated: the brilliant programmer who won't share knowledge, the successful salesperson who guards their methods. This is particularly pronounced at leadership levels: the sharp executive who makes quick decisions without consulting others, leaving teams feeling excluded from processes they're expected to implement. What seems to unlock collective capacity is when people discover that their individual excellence becomes more meaningful when it serves shared outcomes.
Stories We Tell, Stories We Live
Céline's emphasis on “amplifying every voice and weaving compelling collective stories” touches something central to Individual Psychology: everyone arrives at work with a lifestyle — an often unconscious narrative about themselves and their place in the world, shaped by their personal goals and the “what for” behind their actions.
In Individual Psychology, we understand that all behaviour is purposeful, directed toward some goal, even when that goal isn't conscious. People don't just have stories about who they are; they have stories about what they're trying to achieve: “I need to prove I'm valuable,” “I must avoid being exposed as incompetent,” “I have to maintain control to feel safe.” These goal-directed narratives form what we call their “private logic”: the unconscious personal rules about how the world works and what they need to do to succeed or survive in it.
This understanding transforms how we think about Céline's insight that leaders have to become “curators and witnesses” rather than “sole storytellers.” Every team, every department develops its own organizational lifestyle, shared, often unconscious assumptions about “how we do things here,” “what success looks like for us,” and “what we need to do to survive in this organization.”
The art of resonant leadership lies in helping groups surface and examine their collective lifestyle: Are we organized around defensiveness or openness? Do we operate from scarcity or abundance? Is our unstated goal to avoid blame or to create value? When teams become conscious of their collective patterns, they can choose whether these serve both individual fulfilment and organizational resonance.
The “Therapeutic” Dimension
One thing that emerges from this Individual Psychology perspective is how inherently healing resonant leadership can be. When Céline describes the devastating effects of “atomized and monadic experience” at work, she's identifying something beyond job dissatisfaction: it's a form of social injury.
Individual Psychology has always recognized that isolation is pathogenic while genuine community participation is therapeutic. This suggests that resonant leaders serve not just managerial but restorative functions, helping people move from discouraged isolation toward encouraged participation.
This isn't therapy in the workplace, but recognizing that conditions for human flourishing are also conditions for organizational effectiveness.
Questions for Practice
Rather than conclusions, Céline's work leaves me with practical questions that Rosa's concept of Unverfügbarkeit makes even more complex:
How do we distinguish between genuine encouragement and subtle manipulation? How do we honour the fundamental “uncontrollability” of resonance while still taking responsibility for creating conditions where it might emerge? How do we lead when we cannot control the very thing we're trying to foster?
How do we integrate structure with openness, accountability with trust? How do we practice what Céline calls “relational leadership” in organizations that still need clear standards and reliable processes?
These aren't problems to be solved but ongoing creative tensions to be navigated. Céline's work, combined with Rosa's insights and Individual Psychology's practical methods, gives us valuable frameworks for this navigation.
A Practical Beginning
What I find particularly compelling about the convergence between Rosa's resonance theory, Céline's leadership insights, and Individual Psychology is how they point toward something both fundamental and practical. The recognition that humans flourish through genuine connection isn't ancient wisdom: it's how we're constituted as social beings.
Céline shows us what's possible: organizations where work genuinely “sings” and human creativity can flourish. Individual Psychology offers some practical pathways for getting there - not through grand transformations, but through patient, skilful cultivation of the encouragement and Gemeinschaftsgefühl that make resonance possible.
The future of leadership may indeed lie in what Céline calls “collective capacity.” But perhaps it begins with something simpler: the willingness to be genuinely moved by each other's experience, and to let that movement guide our response.
PS: Adler's concept of Gemeinschaftsgefühl is typically translated as either “social interest” or “community feeling” in English - two renderings that illuminate different facets of this rich concept. “Social interest” emphasizes the active orientation toward the welfare of others and society, while “community feeling” captures the emotional sense of belonging and connectedness. Both dimensions are essential to understanding how resonance emerges in human relationships.
