Coach and Couch 2nd edition

The Psychology of Making Better Leaders

Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries, Konstantin Korotov, Elizabeth Florent-Treacy, Caroline Rook, Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries, Konstantin Korotov, Elizabeth Florent-Treacy, Caroline Rook, Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781137561596
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137561619
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Estrategia empresarial

Professor Manfred Kets de Vries and his colleagues have helped thousands of executives to increase their effectiveness in dealing with colleagues and clients, and to refocus their own professional and personal aspirations. This book is a volume of essays on leadership development topics written by academics, coaches, and change consultants. It explores how extraordinary leaders and thriving organizations are created by sharing research methodologies and insights, and by describing intervention and change techniques. Drawing upon substantial research, this book presents the essential leadership models and equips practitioners with tools for developing executive coaches and working with business leaders. This second edition includes new chapters on executive stress and coaching across the gender divide.

part I
Conceptual Frameworks

chapter 1

The Clinical Paradigm: A Primer for Personal Change

Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries and Konstantin Korotov

Many philosophers, poets, and other thinkers have posited throughout the ages that the key to growth and happiness lies in knowing and accepting oneself. A variation on this theme—that leadership development starts with an exploration of, and by, the leader—will reappear in many chapters in this book. In undertaking this kind of human adventure, we use a concise but robust framework: the clinical paradigm.¹ The clinical paradigm is based on several premises. The first is that all human behavior, even in its most odd or deviant forms, has a rational explanation. Although deceptively simple, this premise poses a huge challenge to a business school professor, an executive coach, or other professionals working with leaders; it means they will have to use the tools and methods of a “psychological detective” to uncover explanatory factors underlying the behavior they perceive. Fortunately, the leader as an executive education or coaching client can become a detective as well; the clinical paradigm, when explained, offers the coach or educator a tremendous opportunity to use the leader’s own behavior as a real-life case study, with the added advantage that this particular text is sure to be of interest to the executive concerned.

The second premise of the clinical paradigm tells us that our unconscious plays a tremendous role in determining our actions, thoughts, fantasies, hopes, and fears. The areas outside our direct rational observation and understanding are enormous, although they directly impact what happens in the so-called rational domain of our actions. Obviously, until we grasp at least some of the content of our irrational domain, it is unlikely that we can do anything with it. Moreover, the unconscious can hold executives as prisoners of their own past, not letting them get rid of things that become a hindrance to their development and growth as leaders and as human beings. Plenty of executives refuse to consider the possibility that there may be issues in their work and life that originate in the area beyond their comprehension or their immediate awareness. Faculty members and executive coaches would do well to begin by helping these individuals to understand that being afraid of looking into the unconscious may be counterproductive to one’s development. Doing so will require courage, and this is where the leadership development professional can provide help and support. As an example, in one of our executive programs we take participants to an exhibition about the life and work of Sigmund Freud. This visit comes as a surprise at the end of a long class day and before a good dinner, and many of the executives initially try to avoid the visit, or reveal their anxiety through complaints or negative comments. However, once in the museum, hearing about Freud’s cases and seeing examples of how the unconscious may affect their lives, they start to realize how making the effort to look into oneself may significantly boost career and life success.

The third premise of the clinical paradigm is that our emotions contribute to our identity and behavior. Throughout life, we acquire different ways of expressing and regulating emotion, and in parallel, our cognitive, thinking side becomes more sophisticated. Cognition and emotion together eventually determine what we do and don’t do. By exploring our emotions, we can access the more hidden parts of our identity: the type of emotion we express when doing certain things, imagining certain events, or dealing with certain people explains in part who we are. Emotional awareness also allows us to predict what kind of situations we naturally seek or avoid, and what kind of people we like or loathe; these insights therefore help explain our behavioral preferences and relationship patterns. Executive educators, coaches, and consultants may find the concept of the role of emotions important when working with people who have difficulty expressing their emotions. By helping individuals acknowledge how they feel, and how their feelings affect their behavior, leadership development professionals give their clients another lens for perceiving behavior and another key to changing it.

The fourth premise of the clinical paradigm states that human development is an interpersonal and intrapersonal process. Our past determines who we are throughout our lives. Our earliest life experiences, over which we obviously had no control, have a deep, lasting impact on our personality and the patterns of our behavior and relationships. Through early interactions with significant people in our lives, primarily our care-takers, we develop a pattern of responses to the actions, desires, and emotions of others. These responses become ingrained because they work in those early situations. Later in life the same responses may no longer be adequate or appropriate.

The Inner Theater

The clinical paradigm can be described metaphorically as a way of exploring a person’s “inner theater.”² Behind the curtain, we all have a rich tragi-comedy playing out on our inner stage, with key actors representing the people we have loved, hated, feared, and admired. Early experiences are re-enacted over and over again. Some are extremely painful, and others fill us with a sense of wellbeing. These unconscious forces affect not only love, friendship, and artistic expression, but also patterns of relationships with bosses, colleagues, and subordinates, decision-making, management styles, and many other aspects of the work-related parts of life. All executives and all employees bring their inner theater, with all its dramas and comedies, to the workplace. Dysfunctional behavior arises when we try to keep the curtain down; ultimately, the show must go on.

Our physical bodies are ruled by motivational need systems, with varying levels of sophistication.³ One system regulates our basic physiological needs, another regulates our need for sensual enjoyment and sexual excitement. Yet another causes us to respond to certain situations with antagonism or withdrawal (fight or flight). Higher-level systems deal with the need for attachment and affiliation, and exploration and assertion. A product of nature and nurture, each of these need systems increases or decreases in importance on our inner theater stage in response to innate and learned response patterns. These motivational need systems are among the rational forces behind actions, words, and behaviors that may initially seem irrational.

Another important notion in our understanding of how the inner theater operates is the “core conflictual relationship theme,” or CCRT.⁴ Our CCRT develops over time as a theme, or combination of themes, within our motivational need systems, and takes a prominent position inside us, making a fundamental contribution to who we are and the way we behave toward others. To put it another way, we can say that our basic wishes are reflected in our life scripts. CCRT adds the nuances and shading that make each of us unique. We bring our CCRT-colored behaviors and expectations to work and society, and sometimes the expectations are different from reality.

Confusion in Time and Place: The T-Factor

The four premises of the clinical paradigm provide important keys to understanding behavior and relational patterns. By exploring individuals’ inner theater, not only do we revisit their past, but we can also draw parallels between past relationships and current behavior.⁵ All of us are subject to a relational “confusion” in time and place, which gives rise to what are called transferential patterns, the act of using behavior patterns from the past to deal with situations in the present. Looking at transferential reactions can provide important insight into why executives behave in certain ways in certain situations. Consultants and educators in executive programs need to realize and accept that executives may well have a seemingly irrational reaction to some of the people they work with. In addition, it is quite likely that the executive will experience some form of transferential response to the professor or coach; these responses should be discussed as they arise.

The concept of transference is grounded in observations of how human beings develop and mature. Through interactions with parents, family members, teachers, and other authority figures we encounter, we develop behavior patterns that become the basis for specific cognitive and affective “software.” These patterns can be activated by particular cues without our awareness; we meet someone who subconsciously reminds us of a nagging older sister, and we react as if she really were that older sister. This kind of transferential trigger may occur several times a day.

To put it more precisely, transference is the process by which one person displaces onto another thoughts, ideas, or fantasies that originated with figures of authority encountered very early in an individual’s life. It is a revival or reliving of issues from the past directed toward people in the present. Executives need to understand that the phenomenon of transference is natural and ubiquitous, although we are not always capable of noticing and recognizing it.

Transference can erase the psychological boundary between past and present, causing employees and executives alike to replay the “scripts” that they have lived in the past. Followers may attribute unusual, almost mystical, powers or qualities to their leaders; this is how charismatic leaders are born in organizations. Villains are unwittingly created in a similar fashion, when issues from a dark past become attributed to the organizational leader. In all such cases, a subjective reality materializes even if people attempt to resist it. Leadership development professionals need to help executives see that the tendency to modify and distort the whole context of relationships is present in all meaningful interactions, including work-related ones. In addition, a clinically informed coach or consultant may use the phenomenon of transference as a source of clues about how the leader acts toward other significant people in his or her organization, and how he or she reacts to important events.

Obviously, leadership development professionals, faculty, and coaches are also human beings, and all of this applies to them as well. When forming a relationship with an executive, they need to be aware of counter-transference—a phenomenon in which the executive becomes an outlet for the transferential reactions of the helping professional.⁶ Coaches and educators need not only to recognize such reactions in themselves, but also to find ways of using the information about their own feelings and reactions to help the leader become more aware of the cues he or she provides to others, and the possible responses of people to those cues. A coach or educator attuned to his or her inner theater may recognize situations when his or her own transferential reactions may serve as sources of important insights in coaching or developmental relationships.

No discussion of transference in the leadership development context can be complete without a special emphasis on two subtypes of the phenomenon that are especially common in organizational settings: mirroring and idealizing.⁷ Mirroring and idealizing have their roots in our very early interactions with other people. Most would probably agree that the first mirror a baby looks into is its mother’s face. The quality of an individual’s early relationship with his or her mother (or other primary caretaker) significantly contributes to the shaping of identity and mind. Through mirroring, from individuals around us we learn who we are and how we should behave. We internalize signals from significant others, in turn dealing with the world on the basis of these behavioral “suggestions.” As children, we cope with our sense of fragility and insignificance by idealizing adults as sources of protection. We imagine them as strong and infallible. In the normal course of psychological development, we internalize the idealized parental figure, recreating an internal sense of power and security.

As authority figures, leaders fit easily into the subconscious imagery of a parental role. Followers very commonly manifest transference reactions through the idealization of their leader. This creates an equivalent to the sense of security and importance that they experienced in their early years through idealizing other significant adults. Subordinates following the unconscious psychological temptation of associating omnipotence with the leader may relinquish all responsibility and autonomy. Just as fears of fairy tale characters or of a big dog in the neighborhood could be overcome with the help of a parent, employees often hope leaders will protect them from the threats of downsizing, change, delocalization of jobs, and other such fears that modern workers face.

Obviously, leadership development professionals also have to be aware of the mirroring and idealizing processes taking place in their interactions with executives. The latter may also feel vulnerable and insecure in the illusory world of leadership described in popular books. The psychological challenges and pressure faced by today’s leaders (mentioned in the introduction to this book) make this leadership world confusing and frightening to many. As leaders look for support from coaches and executive development professionals, it should not be difficult to imagine that the latter may also become idealized protective figures for a leader dealing with his or her fears and anxieties...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: A Psychodynamic Approach to Leadership Development
• Part I Conceptual Frameworks
• Part II Coaching Program Design
• Part III The Process of Coaching
• Part IV Coaching in Organizations
• Part V Contemporary Issues in Leadership Development and Coaching
• Index