Leading Beyond the Playbook—HR Leaders: If Your Managers Are Struggling, It’s Not Just Skill Gaps
- David Cicerchi
- 4 hours ago
- 5 min read
A Leadership Aperture Coaching series for HR leaders navigating the current leadership context
If you’re an HR leader watching your managers and directors strain under the pace of change—more volatility, more ambiguity, more pressure—you’re not imagining it. Many leaders are trying to meet a “new world” with an “old operating system.” And that gap is showing up everywhere: slower decisions, brittle cultures, rising conflict avoidance, and a growing sense that leaders are “in over their heads.”
One of the simplest ways to name what’s happening (and give leaders a path forward) is Leadership Aperture—a model developed by the telos institute that helps leaders build the capacity to widen and narrow their perception—consciously—depending on what the moment requires.
What “Leadership Aperture” actually means (and what it’s not)
Leadership Aperture is not a quick hack. It’s not a one-time technique or a “do this in a meeting and you’re done” tool.
It’s the leader’s capacity to adjust their aperture of perception—like a camera lens:
Narrow aperture: takes in less information; focuses on the immediate and tactical
Wide aperture: takes in more information; expands time horizon; integrates multiple perspectives, and includes more of the leader’s internal data (body, emotion, intuition, history, future implications)
Most leaders have a default setting, a center of gravity. Under stress, they often snap back into it. And when leaders get stuck in a single aperture—too narrow or too wide—leadership starts failing in predictable ways.
Range and wisdom: the two capacities HR can help develop
In the Leadership Aperture approach, development focuses on two outcomes:
1) Range — the “muscle” of being able to go narrow → medium → wide.
2) Wisdom — knowing which aperture to use in this situation, and being able to shift as the situation evolves.
HR translation: you’re not just building skills; you’re building adaptive capacity for a world that constantly changes.
A concrete example: Decision-making across apertures
Think of leadership aperture as a series of muscle groups. In order to develop all around balanced strength and stability, you need to develop multiple muscle groups. We call these muscle groups "intelligences" Here’s a simple example from the Decision-making intelligence:
Narrow: Decisive — “Boom. Here’s the decision. We’re doing it.”
Medium: Deliberate — structured process, defined stakeholders, clear sequencing.
Wide: Curious — “This is too complex to make quick decisions; we can’t know everything yet; we decide as we learn.”
None of these is “right” in general. Aperture Wisdom is the ability to match the aperture to the needs of the situation.
The practice that makes this real: self-observation → intention → experiment
HR leaders can model this and invite their leaders to do it themselves. The core developmental move is surprisingly simple:
1) Self-observe (retroactively at first) Have leaders review the day’s key meetings and interactions:
What aperture was I in—narrow, medium, wide?
What result did it produce?
2) Set intention (before the meeting) Before a meeting, leaders take 3–5 minutes:
What aperture do I think is needed here?
What do I expect it will produce?
What aperture to I plan to deploy?
3) Experiment (in the meeting) They practice deploying the intended aperture, then adjusting based on what’s actually happening.
This is how the capacity becomes conscious. The more leaders do it retroactively, the more they can do it in the moment.
The “meta-moment” under pressure: centering is the on-ramp
Everyone knows the experience: you plan to show up intentionally, then stress hits and the plan evaporates without anything better in its place. You get stuck in a narrow aperture—toxic conflict ensues, you forget to talk about something important, you obsess over a detail.
A practical bridge from “autopilot” to “choice”—from narrow to wide aperture— is centering. Even something as small as three breaths with attention to the body can go a long way to unfreezing your aperture.
From an HR leader’s view, this matters because you’re not just training behavior. A leaders behavior is fueled by their state. If leaders can’t access a centered state, they can’t reliably choose their aperture.
Two common aperture failure modes (and what HR should watch for)
Too narrow for too long
A leader in an airline context faced an emergency that had to be solved within eight hours. In retrospect, the deeper issue wasn’t the emergency itself; it was that earlier, trust hadn’t been built across team members. Conflict avoidance and low trust set the conditions for the crisis. If leaders would have had a wide aperture, they would have seen this coming and proactively built trust.
HR translation: if leaders only operate tactically, culture debt accumulates—and you pay it later with interest. Leaders are wise to practice widening their aperture to rebuild trust / surface root causes.
Too wide, too often
In another organization, the culture defaulted to “get everyone’s perspective” for nearly every decision. Perspective-taking can be crucial—especially in conflict—but as a daily default it becomes analysis paralysis, time costs, missed milestones, and budget impacts.
HR translation: wide aperture practices can look like inclusion, but function like drift if they are not grounded in narrow aperture practices at the right time. Leaders are wise to practice narrowing to make a call, define “good enough,” and execute.
Why this matters right now: VUCA is not an idea—it’s people’s daily experience
Leaders can’t rely on old playbooks. They also can’t rely on personal preference (“this is how I like to lead”) because conditions are shifting too fast.
All Aperture Leadership capacity allows leaders to:
make sense of a changing environment
take multiple perspectives without losing forward motion
hold short-, medium-, and long-term impacts at once
decide when to preserve tradition vs embrace change
become “comfortable with discomfort” as a core leadership requirement
Leadership Development that targets Range and Wisdom is not a nice-to-have. It's essential for companies that want to win the future and stay in business.
Where this goes deeper: vertical development as the long game
Leadership Aperture isn’t just skill-building; it’s a vertical development process—meaning it takes time and support to upgrade how leaders make meaning, hold complexity, and respond under pressure.
That’s why telos' The Vertical Frontier program provides a catalytic holding environment: one that includes support, challenge, and iterative practice over a 6 month period. This is the only way leaders can build range and wisdom over time; otherwise otherwise it becomes yet another fancy concept leaders can’t operationalize under pressure.
If you’re an HR leader building leadership capacity for what’s coming next, Leadership Aperture Coaching offers a clean frame and a practical path: less autopilot, more choice—at the level where company success and longevity is made.
Watch the podcast interview from Josh Seldin that inspired this blog post:
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