Reflections on Leadership and Career Development

On the Couch with Manfred Kets de Vries

Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9780470742464
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781119965923
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Views from the interface of psychoanalysis and organizational life

In the books in this series Manfred Kets de Vries—failed engineer, entrepreneur manqué, reluctant economist, international management guru, psychoanalyst, wit, and outdoorsman—offers an overview of his work spanning four decades, a period in which he has established himself as the leading figure in the clinical study of organizational leadership.

At a key point in his career, working as he puts it, "in the twilight zone of economics, management, and psychoanalysis," he decided to strike out on a little-trodden path and "bring the person back into the organization." Now Kets de Vries occupies a unique position in the academic business world, putting leaders and companies of the couch and working at the often intimate interface where the inner theater of the individual meets the outer world of the organization.

The second book in this series, Reflections on Leadership and Career Development, takes different perspectives on the intimate connection between the personality or "inner theater" of individuals and the organizational context in which they work—how different personality types, in positions of leadership or as members of management teams, affect the functioning and success of organizations. Kets de Vries looks at the way basic psychological processes operate on individual and corporate performance and analyzes them in the context of case studies of leaders and organizations. He examines narcissism, dysfunctional collusion between leaders and followers, some new leadership archetypes, and the roles that "organizational therapists" (coaches or consultants) can play in their interventions. The book includes a lengthy study of Vladimir Putin, as "CEO of Russia, Inc.," an assessment of the former Russian president's performance as an organizational leader. The final part of the book examines the career life cycle and how executives cope (or fail to cope) with rites de passage like succession and retirement.

"For the first time this book provides a glimpse of Manfred Kets de Vries' own 'inner theater' as the wellspring of his success as psychoanalyst, mentor and inspiration to a generation of leaders. Reflections on Leadership and Career Development offers a rare opportunity to observe Manfred on his own legendary couch, a personal perspective not to be missed."
Paul McMorran, HR Director, TNK-BP

PART 1:
THE ORIGINS OF LEADERSHIP

INTRODUCTION

The search for the origins of leadership seems to preoccupy a lot of us. There are over five million entries for ‘origins of leadership’ in Google, so plenty of people have obviously tried hard to identify them. In their most basic form, the origins of leadership, like so many other aspects of human nature, are probably to be found in our fundamental needs systems. These in turn are a function of our earliest experiences, which determine the roles we will play in our human drama. Some of us are marked out as leaders, others as followers, and our success in either of these roles depends on our finding the right position on this stage.

The first chapter in this book is about narcissism—an inescapable aspect of human nature—and leadership. Everyone knows the myth of Narcissus, the beautiful boy who rejected all his would-be lovers only to lose his heart to his own reflection, and pine away to death, grieving over the impossibility of consummating his passion. But the real hero of the story is the prophet Tiresias. When he was born, Narcissus’ mother, fearful that her son was too beautiful to live, consulted Tiresias about the boy’s future. The seer first prophesized a long life for Narcissus. But his prophecy carried a warning: ‘If Narcissus ever truly knows himself, he will die.’ In making this prophecy, Tiresias set the scene for the dramatization of one of our greatest challenges as human beings: for our psychological health we have to outgrow our childhood narcissism, which puts us at the center of everyone’s existence. If we do not, we will sentence ourselves to a lifetime of isolation and illusion. Narcissus’ inability to separate himself from the object of his own affection brought him an early death. Even as he was rowed over the Styx to Hell, he couldn’t resist taking a last glimpse of himself in the river. The myth ends with Narcissus’ metamorphosis into a spring flower—the ultimate symbol of the transience of beauty and existence.

Leaders, not surprisingly, tend to have a large dose of narcissism—but as I explain in the opening chapter of this book, narcissism has generally had a bad press. There is such a thing as a healthy dose and it lies somewhere on a wide spectrum that ranges from grandiosity and showmanship to denigration and coldness. My successive ‘couches’ have been well warmed by narcissistic leaders and from my observations, I have identified three main types of narcissistic orientation that operate in leadership situations, all of which have their origins in early childhood experiences and relationships. I term these various forms reactive, self-deceptive and constructive narcissism and in the second part of this chapter, I examine how these different orientations work within organizations. All will be recognizable: but how can their narcissism be managed? What measures can be taken to control their behavior and to protect the people with whom they work?

In Chapter 2, I take a closer look at ‘the influence game.’ We all think we know a leader when we see one, but what characteristics and qualities do effective leaders have? What is it leaders do, to make people want to be part of their team? Without digressing too far into the psychology of followership, I take the examples of some formidable, more ‘heroic’ types of leader in the worlds of politics and business (including Charles de Gaulle, General MacArthur, Winston Churchill, Henry Ford and Walt Disney) and examine how their leadership behavior puts them at the top of the influence game. As well as their more intangible skills—their ability to provide focus, their gift for empathy, their appreciation and manipulation of symbolism, their sense-making—their effectiveness largely derives from their capacity for sheer hard graft. They need to know their stuff, and they need the stamina to persevere in getting what they want. Churchill’s public rhetoric was universally inspirational but his personal motto was much more prosaic: Keep Buggering On. Perhaps more than anything, however, effective leaders possess the kinds of qualities actors have—but actors who are directing their own script as they go along. For them, authenticity, consistency of character and performance is critical: one false step and it could be a company or an entire country, not just a performance, which is brought to a standstill.

At its best, organizational play is lively, playful and mutually beneficial: when it goes wrong, it shades into collusion, what I term ‘a neurotic form of collaboration.’ I extend the metaphor of the organizational theater in Chapter 3 but the approach I take to what goes on in the leader-follower relationship is drawn from a very different field of study—couple therapy, which I have discovered is eminently applicable to work settings. The organizational leader is an actor-director, selecting members of the cast and assigning roles. This requires a substantial quantity of integrity and trustworthiness. It is very easy to typecast some people and put them in roles where they will give what you want rather than perform their part creatively. Once the insidious and largely unconscious process of projective identification—pushing our personal shortfalls onto others—takes hold, a huge amount of psychic energy is generated and wasted. Leaders and followers locked in collusive relationships experience high levels of stress, not least from the mutual need to maintain the equilibrium of a dysfunctional relationship. Chapter 3 offers some typical dysfunctional scenarios within organizations, tracing them to their roots in childhood development, and makes some initial recommendations about how individuals and ‘organizational detectives’—consultants and professional counselors—can intercept and reveal these processes, allowing repair work to be done.

One of these is encouraging the ability to pick up on subliminal and non-verbal forms of communication, by ‘listening with the third ear,’ which I describe in detail in Chapter 4 as one of the key skills the therapist, leadership coach, and consultant bring to individual and organizational interventions. I wrote this chapter from the perspective of a management consultant or leadership coach who has some clinical training. My approach to my work with organizations is the application of a clinical paradigm of intervention, drawn not only from psychotherapy but also from cognitive theory, family systems theory, group dynamics, motivational interviewing, neuropsychiatry, and developmental psychology. In this chapter I look at a key element of all psychotherapeutic interventions—countertransference. In Book 1 in this series (Reflections on Character and Leadership) I wrote about transference, a process first identified by Sigmund Freud, who became aware that patients were transferring archaic feelings for others to him during interventions. Transference is an inappropriate repetition, in the present, of a relationship that was important in a person’s childhood. All human relationships are mixtures of realistic and transference reactions.

Freud initially considered transference a nuisance, then realized that it provided a tool to deep understanding for both patient and therapist—indeed, we all transfer these archaic feelings to significant people and situations throughout our lives. The other side of this particular coin is countertransference, where the response of the consultant or therapist to the client is informed by the archaic feelings the patient evokes in the therapist. Countertransference is a useful tool for the therapist to uncover deep meaning and significance in an individual’s inner theater—and incidentally, one reason why all would-be therapists would do well to undergo therapy themselves.

Part 1 ends on this analytical note and in Part 2, I put some leaders ‘on the couch,’ illustrating the many ways leadership personality works within organizations.

CHAPTER 1
NARCISSISM AND LEADERSHIP¹

If each of us were to confess his most secret desire, the one that inspires all his deeds and signs, he would say, ‘I want to be praised.’ Yet none will bring himself to do so, for it is less dishonorable to commit a crime than to announce such a pitiful and humiliating weakness arising from a sense of loneliness and insecurity, a feeling that afflicts both the fortunate and the unfortunate with equal intensity. No one is sure of who he is, or certain of what he does. Full as we may be of our own worth, we are gnawed by anxiety and, to overcome it, ask only to be mistaken in our doubt, to receive approval from no matter where or no matter whom

—Corian, Désir et honneur de la gloire

Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.

—Sigmund Freud

LEADERS AND FOLLOWERS

We still know little about what makes a good leader, though not for any lack of research on the subject. The late scholar of leadership, Ralph Stogdill, made the discouraging statement that ‘there are almost as many definitions of leadership as there are persons who have attempted to define the concept’ (Bass, 1981, p. 7). In his classic Handbook of Leadership, Stogdill reviewed 72 definitions proposed by scholars between 1902 and 1967. The proliferation of literature on leadership is reflected by the increase in the number of articles listed in the Handbook: in the 1974 edition of the Handbook 3000 studies were referred to but seven years later, the number exceeded 5000. And the latest count will not be the end of it.

Thus competing theories clearly abound. We find Great Man theories, trait theories, environmental theories, person-situation theories, interaction-expectation theories, humanistic theories, exchange theories, behavioral theories, and perceptual and cognitive theories. This confused state of affairs caused some scholars to abandon the subject altogether and focus on more specific problems such as power or motivation. Other researchers, however, are less pessimistic, anticipating that the wealth of results constitutes some basis for a cogent theory of leadership. They attempt to escape the labyrinth of contradictory findings and theories of leadership by proposing a contingency paradigm (House and Baetz, 1979). Some try to explain the discrepancies in the research, noting that ‘leadership has an effect under some conditions and not under others and also that the causal relationships between leader behavior and commonly accepted criteria of organizational performance are two-way’ (House and Baetz, 1979, p. 348).

Despite the quantity of material on leadership we would argue that far richer characterizations of leadership are still needed: those taking into consideration both its cognitive and affective dimensions. Such characterizations are suggested by the psychoanalytic and psychiatric literature. Using these orientations to analysis, the inner world of leaders can be analyzed and their personalities and characters related to their behavior and situation. Research that aims to decipher intrapsychic thought processes and resulting actions thus involves the study of ‘psycho-political drama’ (Zaleznik and Kets de Vries, 1975; Kets de Vries, 2001, 2006), which relates managerial personality both to role behavior and to administrative setting.

In my view what most leaders seem to have in common is the ability to reawaken primitive emotions in their followers. When under the spell of certain types of leader, their followers often feel powerfully grandiose and proud, or helpless and acutely dependent. Max Weber (1947) used the term charisma to elucidate the strange influence of some leaders over followers which, for him, consisted of:

a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are such as are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them, the individual concerned is treated as a leader (pp. 358–359).

We might not want to go so far as Weber, but whatever strange quality leaders possess, some have the power to induce regressive behavior among their followers by exploiting (not necessarily in full awareness) unconscious feelings of their subordinates. In this process, some followers may try to embrace an idealized, omnipotent leader, one who will fulfill their dependency needs, which may lead to the destructive suspension of their own rational faculties.

In spite of the regressive potential of some leaders, there are, however, others who are prepared to transcend their personal agenda, who are able to create a climate of constructiveness, involvement, and care, who engender initiative, and spur creative endeavors. This is the kind of person Zaleznik (1977) had in mind when he wrote:

One often hears leaders referred to in adjectives rich in emotional content. Leaders attract strong feelings of identity and difference, or of love and hate. Human relations in leader-dominated structures often appear turbulent, intense, and at times even disorganized. Such an atmosphere...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Editor
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• INTRODUCTION
• ABOUT THIS BOOK
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• PART 1: THE ORIGINS OF LEADERSHIP
• PART 2: LEADERSHIP AND PERSONALITY
• PART 3: LEADERSHIP AND CAREER DEVELOPMENT
• CONCLUSION: THE TWICE-BORN EXPERIENCE
• REFERENCES
• INDEX
• END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT