The Superpower That Got Misdiagnosed - What I Learnt From The Growth Animals

Why knowing what you are is only half the story, and why I am glad I met Growth Animals.

I was once told I was a sycophant.

Not knowing the exact meaning of the word, I assumed someone gave me a feedback that I am a 'psycho', and the rest of the word must be something similar to an 'ele-phant'. So a 'psycho-phant' must be something like a "gigantic psycho" or may be I was perceived as a 'psycho-animal with a trunk'. Turned out I was wrong.

This label was given to me during my 360 feedback by someone who thought they were being helpful. I had spent years being culturally hardwired to respect teachers, elders, and people generally perceived to be more knowledgeable than me, to listen before speaking, to disagree through questions rather than declarations. Where I come from, that is not weakness, that is wisdom but Western colleagues read it differently. They saw sweetness where there was strategy, deference where there was discernment. They labelled me and moved on. Nobody stopped to ask why I was doing what I was doing.

That is the problem with labels. They are fast, they are satisfying, and they are almost always incomplete.

The conversation that changed my thinking on this started at the Engage Employee Summit in Battersea where I went to visit a few months ago here in London. Chris Thornhill, co-founder of Growth Animals, was one of those people you notice before they speak, warm, genuinely curious, the kind of person who asks a question and actually waits for the answer. In a room full of people performing confidence, that is rarer than it should be. Two conversations later, and a good read of what Growth Animals is building, the fit became obvious.

Let me explain.

Chris has spoken openly about what his mentor Tim Brooks helped him see: that what managers had labelled as "lazy brightness" was actually his greatest strength, the ability to see the big picture with clarity and priority that others simply could not match. His co-founder Jen Melbert puts it differently. She talks about people spending their careers cataloguing deficits rather than compounding strengths. Both of them have built an entire consultancy around the idea that the diagnostic matters enormously. Get it wrong and you spend years treating a feature as a fault.

Shrinking starts with silence and a poker face.

I have watched it happen in boardrooms, operations teams, and cohorts across 22 years. Someone brilliant goes quiet, someone capable starts hedging someone eclectic starts imitating. They have been handed a label and begun to inhabit it, because that is what labels do. They are sticky. They convince you that the box they arrived in is the room you have to live in.

Growth Animals built the Animal Instincts quiz to challenge exactly this. Grounded in Carl Jung's personality theory and designed to be playful rather than clinical, it gives people a language for their strengths that does not feel like a verdict. For the secondary school students and business school cohorts we work with at Eclectic Leadership, that entry point matters. You cannot ask someone to lead eclectically if they have never been given permission to know themselves honestly. Do you see what I mean?

Let me be straight about something, because transparency is a practice at Eclectic Leadership, not just a statement on a website.

Frameworks like Animal Instincts are a sharp starting point. What I admire about Growth Animals is that they are deeply intentional about this. They are not selling you a label and sending you home. They are asking who you are, what your kryptonite is, how your brand can reflect your actual operating truth rather than a polished version of someone else's. That is careful, considered work.

And yet, the journey we are trying to take people on at Eclectic Leadership goes a step further. The most complete picture of a leader is not found in what they are, or even how they are, but in what they are actively doing in the world and why. Not a noun, not even an adjective but a verb - a purpose in motion. Someone whose identity is expressed through discovering other people's potential, or setting the discourse for an entire industry, or developing their own wisdom in service of others.

We are not there yet as a leadership method. The honest answer is that we do not have the brand infrastructure, the diagnostic tools, or the people development expertise to take leaders from self-awareness to activated eclectic identity on our own. That is precisely why Growth Animals matter to what we are building, and precisely why I want them as a guide in this journey.

Their B Corp certification is worth pausing on, because it is easy to write "values-led" on a website. It costs nothing. B Corp certification means an independent body examined how they actually operate and confirmed that it matches what they say. That kind of verified integrity is rare in consulting, and it aligns directly with how Eclectic Leadership approaches everything. We do not want partners who perform purpose. We want partners who practise it.

What Chris and Jen have built is a consultancy that starts where most others stop. They are not just asking what your brand says. They are asking whether your people believe it, live it, and grow inside it, and that is a leadership question dressed in brand language. Eclectic practitioners will recognise it immediately. Right?

So here is what we are working towards together.

Eclectic Leadership is about activating the eclectic identity in each of us, not discovering it as a fixed thing, but building it, testing it, and earning it through practice. Growth Animals helps leaders understand who they are and how to express that with clarity and courage. Eclectic Leadership asks what that person is now called to do in the world, and gives them the wisdom infrastructure to do it.

Guide and guide's guide. Both are necessary, neither is sufficient alone.

We are exploring what a shared programme might look like, one that takes the playfulness and brand intelligence of Animal Instincts and runs it alongside the ABCDE of Eclectic Leadership, so that leaders leave not just knowing their superpower but knowing how to deploy it across cultures, contexts, and competing demands. Early days but with real intention.

If you are a leader who has ever been handed a label that feels like a ceiling rather than a door, this is the work we are doing and we are doing it together.

Eclectically yours,

Shehzaad

London, UK

15th July, 2026

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How do I learn well? How do I lead well? How do I leave well?

Find your purpose first to get the answers. 25 questions, 5 minutes, free, your own report to show if you are ready to be eclectic.

Start at www.eclecticleadership.online

To explore what Growth Animals is building, visit growthanimals.com

Connect with Chris.

Connect with Jen.

Chaos. Confusion. Conflicts. The solution is to be Eclectic.

PS. The image of the pink elephant is collected from the internet. No real elephant was painted pink by myself or harmed otherwise while writing this article. Any resemblance is purely coincidental.