The Leader on the Couch

A Clinical Approach to Changing People and Organizations

Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780470030790
• eBook ISBN: 9781119995609
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Despite the proven benefits of emotional intelligence, organizational life has typically been hostile to the inner world of feeling. Rationality is deemed superior to feeling, which can contaminate judgment. But without feeling there is no passion, and no action. This book sets out to change people and organizations for the better, by revealing the 'dark side' of leadership behaviour and its impact on performance. Tapping into the startling parallels between the journey to emotional intelligence, the process of psychoanalysis, the practice of leadership coaching and the Zen journey to enlightenment, renowned thinker Manfred Kets de Vries helps executives, consultants, and coaches to peel back the layers of self-deception and reveal how inner personality – largely hard-wired since early childhood – affects the way they lead and manage others.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION: THE CLINICAL PARADIGM

What could an entirely rational being speak of with another entirely rational being?

—Emmanuel Levinas

I have yet to meet the famous Rational Economic Man theorists describe. Real people have always done inexplicable things from time to time, and they show no sign of stopping.

—Charles Sanford, Jr.

As I grow older I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.

—Andrew Carnegie

Be master of mind rather than mastered by mind.

—Zen proverb

There’s a Zen tale about a person who noticed a disturbing bump under a rug. This person tried to smooth out the rug, but every time she did so, the bump reappeared. In utter frustration, she finally lifted up the rug, and to her great surprise, out slid an angry snake.

In an organizational context, this story can be viewed as a metaphor for the occasions when, in making interventions, we deal only with the symptoms. Inevitably, despite our attempts to smooth things over, the snake beneath—the underlying cause—keeps working its mischief. Unless we pull out that snake and deal with it, it will confound our best efforts to improve organizational efficiency.

Like the woman with the rug, too many management scholars restrict themselves to a mechanical view of life in the workplace. They look at surface phenomena—bumps on the rug—rather than at deep structure. Too often, the collective unconscious of business practitioners and scholars alike subscribes to the myth that the only thing which matters is what we see and know (in other words, that which is conscious). That myth is grounded in organizational behavior concepts of an extremely rational nature—concepts based on assumptions about human beings made by economists (at worst) or behavioral psychologists (at best). The social sciences, ever desperate to gain more prestige, seem unable to stop pretending to be natural sciences; they cannot relinquish their obsession with the directly measurable ¹. For far too many people, the spirit of the economic machine appears to be alive and well and living in organizations. Although the existing repertoire of “rational” concepts has proven time and again to be insufficient to untangle the really knotty problems that trouble organizations, the myth of rationality persists.

Consequently, organizational behavior concepts used to describe processes such as individual motivation, communication, leadership, interpersonal relationships, group and intergroup processes, corporate culture, organizational structure, change, and development are based on behaviorist models, with an occasional dose of humanistic psychology thrown in for good measure. Such an approach (behind which hovers the irrepressible ghost of Frederick Taylor, the premier advocate of scientific management) guarantees a rather two-dimensional way of looking at the world of work. Many executives believe that behavior in organizations concerns only conscious, mechanistic, predictable, easy-to-understand phenomena. The more elusive processes that take place in organizations—phenomena that deserve rich description—are conveniently ignored.

That the organizational man or woman is not just a conscious, highly focused maximizing machine of pleasures and pains, but is also a person subject to many (often contradictory) wishes, fantasies, conflicts, defensive behavior, and anxieties—some conscious, others beyond consciousness—isn’t a popular perspective for most businesspeople. Neither is the idea that concepts taken from such fields as psychoanalysis, psychodynamic psychotherapy, and dynamic psychiatry might have a place in the world of work. Such concepts are generally rejected out of hand on the grounds that they’re too individually based, too focused on abnormal behavior, and in the case of the psychoanalytic method of investigation, too reliant on selfreported case studies thereby creating problems of verification.

Valid as some of these criticisms may be, the fact remains that any meaningful explanation of humanity requires different means of verification than do the so-called hard sciences. In spite of what philosophers of science like to say about this subject, no causal claim in clinical psychology (or history and economics, for that matter) can be verified in the same way as can claims in empirical sciences such as experimental physics or astronomy. When we enter the realm of a person’s inner world—seeking to understand that individual’s desires, hopes, and fears—efforts at falsification are as important as the truths they conceal.

GIVING THE UNCONSCIOUS ITS DUE

The best bridge from the certainties of the empirical sciences to the ambiguities of the human mind is what I call the “clinical paradigm”—a conceptual framework that not only recognizes but celebrates the human factor, building on psychoanalytic concepts and techniques. Though the notion that there’s more to organizational behavior than meets the eye is anathema to many management scholars, practitioners who deny the reality of unconscious phenomena—who refuse to bring those phenomena to consciousness and take them into consideration—increase the gap between rhetoric and reality. Rejecting the clinical paradigm is a mistake, plain and simple. After all, it’s individuals who make up organizations and create the units that contribute to social processes. Even en masse, however, people are subject to laws which cannot be tested by experimental physics. Moreover, like it or not, “abnormal behavior” is more “normal” than most people are prepared to admit. All of us have a neurotic side. Mental health and illness aren’t dichotomous phenomena but opposing positions on a continuum. Furthermore, whether a person is labeled normal or abnormal, exactly the same psychological processes apply.

In light of these observations, management scholars and leaders need to revisit the following questions: Is the typical executive really a logical, dependable human being? Is management really a rational task performed by rational people according to sensible organizational objectives? Given the plethora of highly destructive actions taken by business and political leaders, we shouldn’t even have to ask. It should be clear that many of those activities which are incomprehensible from a rational point of view, signal that what really goes on in organizations takes place in the intrapsychic and interpersonal world of the key players, below the surface of day-to-day behaviors. That underlying mental activity and behavior needs to be understood in terms of conflicts, defensive behaviors, tensions, and anxieties.

It’s something of a paradox that, while at a conscious level we might deny the presence of unconscious processes, at the level of behavior and action we live out such processes every day all over the world. Though we base business strategies on theoretical models derived from the “rational economic man”, we count on real people (with all their conscious and unconscious quirks) to make and implement decisions. Even the most successful organizational leaders are prone to highly irrational behavior, a reality that we ignore at our peril.

When the illusions created by the concept of homo economicus prevail over the reality of homo sapiens, people interested in what truly happens in organizations are left with a vague awareness that things that they can’t make sense of are occurring. When faced with knotty organizational situations, they feel ineffective and helpless. Far too many well-intentioned and well-constructed plans derail daily in workplaces around the world because of out-of-awareness forces that influence behavior.

Those plans include all change efforts that rely on intervention techniques which focus on the rational side of human behavior to the exclusion of the emotional side. Efforts by traditional organizational change agents—men and women burdened by the legacy of homo economicus—generally come across as overly optimistic and even naïve. Only by accepting that executives just like the rest of us aren’t paragons of rationality can we understand why such plans derail and put them back on track again—or better yet, keep them from derailing in the first place ²,³-⁴.

Experience has shown that in the case of many knotty organizational situations, the clinical paradigm can go a long way toward bringing clarity and providing long-lasting solutions. And no body of knowledge has made a more sustained and successful attempt to deal with the meaning of human events than psychoanalysis. The psychoanalytic method of investigation, which observes people longitudinally (that is, over time), offers an important window into the operation of the mind, identifying meaning in the most personal, emotional experiences. Its method of drawing inferences about meaning out of otherwise incomprehensible phenomena is more effective than what competing theories have to offer. By making sense out of executives’ deeper wishes and fantasies, and showing how these fantasies influence behavior in the world of work, the psychodynamic orientation offers a practical way of discovering how organizations really function.

TAPPING INTO PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORIES AND TECHNIQUES

The fact that a growing number of management scholars are realizing that they need to pay attention to weaker, below-the-surface signals in the organizational system is noteworthy in the context of articles in the popular press asking whether Sigmund Freud is dead. People who pose this question are usually focused exclusively on Freud’s own views from the early 20th century, forgetting that psychoanalytic theory and therapy have continued to evolve since that time. Psychoanalytic theory has become increasingly sophisticated, incorporating the findings from domains such as dynamic psychiatry, developmental psychology, anthropology, neurophysiology, cognitive theory, family systems theory, and individual and group psychotherapy. To condemn present-day psychoanalytic theory as outdated is like attacking modern physics because Newton never understood Einstein’s theory of relativity. Although various aspects of Freud’s theories are no longer valid in light of new information about the workings of the mind, fundamental components of psychoanalytic theory have been scientifically and empirically tested and verified, specifically as they relate to cognitive and emotional processes ⁵-⁶. As disappointing as it may be to some of his present-day critics, many of Freud’s ideas retain their relevance.

As an archaeologist of the mind, Freud believed that neurotic symptoms can be used to decode why people behave the way they do. As conspicuous signifiers of a person’s inner world, they can be seen, he believed, as “the royal road to an understanding of the unconscious.” I contend that this perspective can be applied, by analogy, to organizations: just as every neurotic symptom has an explanatory history, so has every organizational act; just as symptoms and dreams can be viewed as signs replete with meaning, so can specific acts, statements, and decisions in the boardroom. Likewise, the repetition of certain phenomena in the workplace suggests the existence of specific motivational configurations. The identification of cognitive and affective distortions in an organization’s leaders and followers can help executives recognize the extent to which unconscious fantasies and out-of-awareness behavior affect decision-making and management practices in their organization.

Freud himself didn’t make any direct observations about the application of his ideas to the world of work (although later in life he became interested in society at large), but several of his followers—psychoanalysts such as Melanie Klein, Wilfred Bion, and Donald Winnicott—applied aspects of his theories to the workplace. The ideas of these psychoanalysts have been further explored by a large number of clinically informed scholars of organizations ²,³-⁴; ⁷,⁸,⁹,¹⁰,¹¹,¹²,¹³,¹⁴,¹⁵-¹⁶. The work of these scholars has gone a long way toward creating a deep and rich understanding of life in organizations. Their insights have also opened the way to more effective consultation and intervention in organizations.

The clinical paradigm, with its broadly integrative psychodynamic perspective, has much to contribute to our understanding of organizations and the practice of management. A psychologically informed perspective can help us un...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• PREFACE
• Acknowledgments
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• CHAPTER 1 - INTRODUCTION: THE CLINICAL PARADIGM
• PART ONE - ENTERING THE INNER THEATER OF LEADERS
• PART TWO - CHANGING MINDSETS
• PART THREE - UNDERSTANDING THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF GROUPS AND ORGANIZATIONS
• INDEX