The company that Fiona works for has a high performance management course onto which aspiring MDs are 'invited'. They progress through a series of workshops that focus on the softer skills of leadership, typically lasting ten months, before being offered a role in a different part of the business as a deputy MD. It's a well established programme and most of the current generation of MDs and above have 'graduated' through it. At key stages throughout, including on their assignment as a Deputy MD, the individuals have a coach working alongside them.
Fiona found the programme particularly challenging. The feedback that she received suggested that it was her own lack of empathy that was holding her back. She was angry at this, as she felt that people used her far too often as a sounding board for their emotional stuff, bringing issues to work that weren't appropriate, expecting her to listen and solve their problems when it wasn't part of her job to do that, and yet she always gave them time, tried to help, and allowed them a lot of 'slack' in which to sort themselves out.
Walking around the grounds of a hotel in Windsor that early summer afternoon, we discussed her anger and tried to identify other situations where 'meta' emotions might affect her. [Meta-emotions are essentially where we feel an emotional response to other people's emotional state - so, for instance, you feeling fearful might make me feel sad.] In the course of the afternoon, we identified several instances where other people's emotional states left Fiona with a sense of anger. It was, as if, her only response was anger. Even when her sister had announced that she was pregnant after many months of agonizing, Fiona felt anger.
We didn't try to unravel the 'why' she felt this way. Instead, we agreed that she would keep a simple notebook in her briefcase, and when she felt angry at anything, she would make a note of the date and circumstances. I rather laboured the point because I was concerned that her enthusiasm to address this would wane after a few days. When we met for our first conversation after the workshop, Fiona pulled out her notebook almost with relish. It was full of incidents. We took a few of these and talked through them, in each case looking at how other people might have responded differently. Nothing complex; using the simple mnemonic - SID's GAF (Sad, Interested, Disgusted, Glad, Angry, and Fearful). We wrote the mnemonic on the inside front cover of the note book and introduced the idea that Fiona would carry on exactly as before, but also ask herself the question each time... "On average, which emotion do I think other people might have in this situation?"
Pressure of work meant that we didn't meet again for six weeks. When we did, Fiona dug into her bag and pulled out an email from the Group HR Director. I must admit I took it with a little trepidation. The message was pretty clear... "Since the MD programme workshop, six weeks ago, I (and Martyn [the CEO]) have witnessed a transformation in your relationships with staff and peers. We are absolutely delighted. I do not know when the next appropriate opportunity for a transfer to a Deputy MD role will happen, but I wanted you to know that it will do so very soon."
Having finished reading, I looked up at her and saw that she was crying. After a couple of minutes, she calmed herself and explained that she couldn't remember the last time she had cried. They were tears of sadness - brought on by the warmth she felt at being 'seen through' for the first time in a very long time - that someone, some people, really saw her, appreciated her, and wanted her to succeed.
A lot of people, especially in the world of work, feel that they have to build a hard protective shell around themselves, but for a few this is a form of protection that is far more deeply ingrained. Life is complex and we need a wider repertoire of responses and we need to be flexible in the ones that we use, but we don't get that from a mnemonic, or a textbook, or even a training course, we get it by being interested in ourselves and our own emotions. What Fiona had done was to begin to develop a curiosity in her own emotions that allowed her to be curious about other people's and it was this that had opened her up to a whole new way of relating.
She spent 12 months in her new role, leading a business expansion into SE Asia, before returning to the UK as VP Operations.
Anyone who works with people in groups needs to understand the ways in which the individuals in that group will be handling the emotional dynamics of it. Emotions always enter into groups, no matter what the subject matter is. And, as human beings, we have a lot of ways of handling them. Not all emotions are particularly problematic, of course - provided we are aware of them and engage with them. The trouble is where we are unaware of them, where they are in the unconscious, yet they (or our way of dealing with them) impact on the group and on our individual or collective decision making.
It is so uncommon to be in a group where the emotions are all positive that I shalln't even try to go there. Even when it looks as though this is the case, almost always someone (and, more likely, several members) is experiencing the group in a negative way. Even the most innocuous of settings where there is absolutely nothing to be gained by it, can be a place where some people will allow the worst of their passions to find expression. Most of these negative experiences of groups then, revolve around a sense of being 'threatened'. The group leader who tries to set an environment that is 'supportive', 'open', 'nurturing' and so on, will by this very means alone, threaten some people. So understanding how people deal with the feeling of being threatened is crucial to working with groups.
Practitioners of psychodynamics talk about a set of tools which the mind uses to allow it to cope when it is threatened. These threats fall into three types - REAL WORLD ones, situations where we INSTINCTIVELY feel anxious (said to relate to the "Id"), and where we are anxious because of our CONSCIENCE (related to the "Super-ego").
These tools were originally known as "defence mechanisms", though today they are often refered to as "coping strategies". This is an important difference and understanding why can help us understand an important aspect of psychodynamics generally.
According to Freud, the defences were necessary because they allowed the Ego to 'survive' against the three threats I've mentioned above. 'Survival' is an unfortunate choice of word, because most people associate it with death and the 'death' of the ego isn't death in the physical sense. As I mentioned in my earlier blog (A very quick introduction to Psychodynamics), the Ego is the part of our mind responsible for common sense and rational thought. If it is 'overwhelmed', which is the term I personally prefer, then we begin to develop 'neuroses' or, at least, to display 'neurotic symptoms'.
The popular interpretation of 'neurotic symptoms' is a kind of nervy, anxious, highly strung, or tense behaviour. This isn't a million miles from the psychoanalytic definition, which is a bit broader: behaviour that isn't normal, that isn't caused by some physical problem, isn't psychotic (a mental health illness where someone is potentially rendered incapable of rational thought and action - non compos mentis) and can be explained in psychological terms. (In other words, it's a bit of a 'collect all' term for problems that leave someone sane but suffering!)
So, the 'defence mechanisms' are the tools used by the mind to protect our ability to think rationally, to apply common sense. To spot their occasional failure, we look for neurotic symptoms. It was Freud's daughter, Anna, who published one of the earliest and most comprehensive lists of the 'defences' in 1937. There are twelve of them and I'm going to list them, and give a quick definition, because I think they are really useful behaviours to watch out for. The problem with this list is that, while the mechanisms are good at allowing us to cope with an overwhelming of our common sense, a few of them actually make the neurotic symptoms worse, making us appear less 'normal' rather than more so. That is why people like myself, who work largely with 'normal' people, prefer the term 'coping strategy' to 'defence mechanism'.
I shall, almost certainly, write separately about some of these 'coping strategies', but here's a quick round up of them...
Regression: reverting to earlier (usually infantile) ways of behaving. A classic example in a business context would be the regression of intellectual curiosity to greed.
Repression: where an unacceptable idea is only accessed in the unconscious. For example, someone feeling 'attacked' at work might dream (in quite extreme ways) about revenge.
Reaction-formation: where the opposite to an unacceptable impulse is exaggerated. People who appear to be excessively 'nice', 'polite', and 'interested in others', for example, might actually be harbouring beneath the surface aggressive, critical and self-obsessed desires. To have such wishes is perfectly normal, so their absence is disturbing.
Isolation: where the individual who has experienced an 'attack' goes quiet, doesn't interact, shuts down their emotional responses, before starting again as if nothing had happened. Importantly, they don't deny what happened, but they have isolated it so it has limited effect. I've come across managers who use this frequently, shutting themselves into their office for a few minutes after an emotional encounter, and then emerge 'as if nothing had happened', while everyone else is feeling the tension.
Undoing: happens when someone tries to reverse the threat they felt - almost 'washing it away' or even 'flushing' it away. Often, 'undoing' is associated with a ritual behaviour - a particularly systematic way of repeatedly doing things. A situation that I sometimes (tentatively) interpret as 'undoing' because of its 'ritual' nature is where a management team are going through a significant emotion-laden process and yet insist on dealing with all the steps in their normal meeting agenda, before reaching the last item in 'any other business' to which the real issue has been relegated. It is as if they hope that by putting it off, putting it in its place, it will go away or cease to be an issue by the time they get there.
Projection: is where our own (usually unacceptable) wishes for someone else are transferred onto a third party, or (in reverse projection) onto them. Teenage girls can often be heard saying; "I don't fancy him, but YYY does!" when, of course, they they are experiencing an intensity of passion that they have never experienced before and feels so threatening that they couldn't possibly acknowledge it. Thus, at work, accusing someone else of being angry is usually a mask for our own anger, especially if the cues that made us think this way were limited or subjective. It can be made even more powerful if we are perceived by others as normally having a persona of being 'all caring' (see 'reaction-formation', above).
Introjection: is a normal aspect of development, where aspects of someone (or something) else are taken inside ourselves, to be used as if they were a part of us. In normal development, this will be aspects of the behaviour of our parents. Problems arise with this coping mechanism when the introject (such as our father's way of responding to situations) is inappropriate to the circumstances. I remember being asked to observe a Board meeting at an insurance company in the City. The new Chairman was struggling to work effectively with the management team. What I saw was a man in his late 40s, unconsciously adopting behaviours that he had seen his father demonstrate when he was a child, and which were similar to those of the previous incumbent - a man closer to his father's generation than to his own. The difference in circumstances wasn't merely one of age or generation - the whole nature of the industry had changed along with radical shifts in the dynamics of Boards.
Turning against the self: Described by some as a kind of 'moral masochism', where we take pleasure in punishing ourselves for our unconscious wicked thoughts. A little too easily confused with depression, or with passivity generally, the difference is that the individual using this experiences pain. Because eroticism doesn't often emerge openly in work environments this isn't always the easiest to detect. One situation that I've come across a few times that might reflect this kind of defence, is where someone puts themself into a position where there is a strong chance that they will be punished by others for something that they have done. When we look at what they did, it seems either pointless or irrational given their circumstances. Thus we might interpret the behaviour of the chief executive, who is under threat for the limited performance of their organisation, and who then embarks on a series of sexual indiscretions or harassments that were bound to be challenged publicly.
Reversal: is the more general phenomenon of which reaction-formation is a specific example. It happens where the unconscious thoughts can be reversed, so what we see exhibited is the opposite of the thought. The 'nurturing' boss, for example, who is actually keeping potential competitors for their position at bay. The 'facilitator' who is unconsciously seeking to control might be another.
Sublimation: occurs where the individual channels energy into a socially acceptable activity when their unconscious desires are for less acceptable things to happen (more 'base' and usually related to sexual or aggressive urges). The drive behind some corporate social responsibility agendas might be interpreted this way, but it is usually witnessed at the individual level. The ambitious young executive who devotes themself to working out every night at the gym might be a good example. Paintballing as an executive release is a little worrying on this score! Excessive working hours among middle aged men, for whom the frequency and quality of their sex lives has diminished, could well be related. I sometimes wonder whether the historical tolerance of bullying behaviour in some organisations, whereby aggressive behaviour was not seen as so socially unacceptable as it should have been, was related to the sublimation defence?
Splitting: Both projection and denial depend on splitting as a mechanism overall, but one aspect of this way of coping that frightens me when I encounter it is where the individual appears to have two different personalities - one for the public space of work, and the other for the private space of home. Of course, they don't. In practice, they are experiencing (albeit unconsciously) the same desires all the time. The Canadian government recognised this and used it in a series of powerful TV advertisements...
Denial: on the face of it, is the least robust of all ways of coping. Personally, I think that it is dealing with threats that are almost, or will soon be, conscious. The person who tries to keep doing things the way they always have, when they know that they are not effective, is said to be in denial. It is a significant step in the overall grieving process associated with organisational change. The important aspect is not denial of behaviour but of feelings. I remember a situation a few years ago where a female director was often highly confrontational with the Chief Executive. Her behaviour was quite aggressive and, as HR director I was asked to intervene. Even though I could describe the situations fully, with the words she used and other people's reactions, she flatly denied that she had any kind of aggressive tendency towards the CEO. In practice, her unconscious 'desires' emerged 6 months later, when she became pregnant by him.
So that's a quick whizz through a few of the things that are almost certainly going on under the surface of most of the minds around the table at your next team meeting!
The following abstract illustrates typical situations that arise in the course of my work with leaders - it should go without saying that permission to quote has been given, names have been changed, and a few details tweaked to preserve confidentiality.
Wake up calls can happen at all kinds of times of our lives. Evan's came one summer Sunday. He'd driven back from holiday that morning, and the kids and his wife were unpacking the car. He'd sat on the patio recovering with a beer after the long drive from the ferry from France. It had been a great holiday. But as he sat there, he felt a dread rising in him. Instead of looking forward to going in to work the next day, he was thinking of all the problems he just knew he was going to encounter. Over the last fortnight, there'd been a few messages on his Blackberry, but they weren't too problematic, but now he was beginning to worry that his team had been shielding him from the bad stuff until he got back. He knew this wasn't right, but he simply didn't know how to shift it.
Evan's PA is a star. She really does manage his world for him. He'd been a bit reluctant to take her on initially. Whereas most of the people put forward by the recruiters were young, vibrant, and positive, Ellie was far older, had been working for a senior civil servant beforehand, was more serious, but projected the personality of someone who was completely unflappable. When he'd gone off two weeks before, protocol meant he had to leave the 'reins' to the FD but, actually, he'd got far more confidence in Ellie.
It really felt as though he had to drag himself into work on the Monday. By mid-morning he was seething. The FD had managed to avoid dealing with some extraordinary shenanigans between two of the divisional MDs and as a consequence one major customer was seriously angry, two significant bids had folded, and one of the Deputy MDs had left a sealed envelope for him tendering her resignation. Ellie went into his office and shut the door. "Look, I know this probably seems the wrong time, but I really think this would be a good one to think about yourself and what's right for you before you get involved and try to sort everything single-handed. You're having lunch with someone, he's been recommended by my old boss. He's not exactly a coach; he's not a consultant; he's not a shrink; he's sort of bits of each of those." It was an interesting introduction!
That lunchtime, Evan discovered a different side to himself. That afternoon his two MDs discovered a different side too. Strangely, to some, they have found a new appetite for the business. The new Deputy FD has transformed the focus of the Finance Department and she is clearly on a fast path to becoming a great all-round Chief Executive. Evan has elevated his own playing field. He's now got the time he needed to engage with his industry on a wider platform, and has already led one successful take-over of a niche competitor.
Wake up calls happen to us all from time-to-time. Too often we try to battle on. Sometimes, a friend, member of staff, or one of our family, spot the issue before we do. The need though is to act on them when they do happen, to really understand what they are telling us, and to find ways of acting appropriately.
I thought it might be helpful to produce a few short notes that describe the background to the work I do. Whereas there are many 'coaches' who work in the field of personal development, there are only a handful of people working as confidants to people of power and who deal primarily with the psychodynamics of organisations. To begin with, I wanted to describe the basics of psychodynamics.
Psychodynamics is the study of the flow of energy created by, and largely contained within, the unconscious* mind but which substantially affects all that we do and feel. It was originally postulated, in the last half of the 1800s, by Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke, a Professor of Physiology in Berlin, who happened to be one of Sigmund Freud's lecturers as an undergraduate, and it was Freud who developed the ideas into the form that is largely still applied today. Subsequent workers have generally added to our understanding of the detail and yet, remarkably perhaps, the theories themselves have largely stood the test of a century of further work.
Psychodynamics assumes that in the unconscious there are ongoing conflicts between different parts of our 'psyche', and our behaviour in given circumstances depends on the state of these conflicts. Part of us wants to do one thing, and another part wants us to do another. The stronger one wins out and that determines how we will behave.
Freud put forward a theory, still in use today, that there were four forces involved, three being parts of the mind, and one being the outside world. Most immediately affected by external events is the EGO. The ego is the part of our psyche that represents common sense and rational argument. For it to be effective at influencing our behaviour it needs to be quite well organized - tidy. The contrast is the part of our psyche known as the ID. This is the nasty, dark part of our personality. It is primitive and disorganized. It seeks only its own gratification or, more accurately, it is always trying to avoid pain of any kind. The third area of the psyche, is actually a part of the EGO and is known as the SUPER-EGO. It is where we stored the lessons our parents taught us when we were young children to observe, reflect, and critique our own behaviour.
For a senior manager in an organisation to work effectively, they usually need to be making things happen. If it's a commercial environment this means they need to be making more money than they spend. In a government setting, perhaps the emphasis is on having one ideology, or one set of initiatives, adopted above another. In the academic sphere, it is key to have one's own ideas accepted. The ID is at play all the time trying to make sure that these things happen. Of course, sometimes deals go wrong, initiatives fail or ideas don't work. It is at this time, that the EGO tries to make sense of what has happened and change the situation or improve the idea etc so that a positive outcome is achieved. But, if this isn't possible, then the SUPEREGO kicks in (and may have been playing all along) and 'tells' the senior manager how to cope emotionally. Many people have wholly negative scripts playing "You stupid boy!", "You'll never be any good", "You're so naive" and so on. If they don't have robust ways of coping with this unconscious self-criticism, then they are likely to be depressed and unlikely to have reached the position they have. So, our senior manager may well have these scripts playing, but they've developed complicated ways of making themselves feel justified, right all along, or to compensate.
I'll discuss some of these ways of coping in another blog, but let's take one as an example. A very common mechanism, in my experience, used by senior managers to 'cope' with threats to their EGO from the SUPEREGO is known as denial. This doesn't mean denying that the 'failure' happened, but denying that one is upset by it. "Oh, you win some; you lose some!" is fine WHEN the person also says, from time-to-time, that they are upset, angry, sad, or whatever, but when it becomes their mantra - "Always look on the bright side!", "Never take these things personally!", "I am proud to be a positive person!", "Things are no different now to when we started - we just need to win one good contract" and so on, then there's a danger that unconscious denial of their emotional conflict is at work. Does this matter? Well yes, it does. Taken to extreme like this it is indicative of what psychotherapists define as a manic mood - the contrast being a depressive mood. When the person discovers that their defence mechanism no longer works, then they are likely to find themselves suffering from depression.
A lot of people find these models, and the need to dwell on them, hard to understand, but one way to make sense of it is to consider how rarely people's behaviour is strictly rational. So much of what people do at work, in their home lives, at school, socially - in fact almost everywhere - is ineffective and inefficient and therefore generally irrational. Psychodynamics theory is simply a set of models that help us to make sense of the irrationality of most behaviour. There are other models, followed by academics from other disciplines, such as evolutionary biology and ethology, but psychodynamics is the one that is most popular among the medical and psychological communities.
Psychodynamics and the individual
Freud believed that there were two types of thinking - primary and secondary. Secondary is conscious and tends to be rational. Primary is unconscious and suspends many of the constraints imposed by 'logic'. When we are awake, we use secondary thinking, whereas when we are asleep we are more likely to use primary thinking.
Dreams are one of the windows that we have on the unconscious, and are said to have two components - the manifest (the story as it appeared in the dream) and the latent (the story that can be interpreted). A great deal of effort has gone into understanding the nature of dreams and the psychological processes at play when we have them.
The primary process of dreams involves, at least, three things - condensation, displacement and symbolism. It is these that the 'analyst' will help the dreamer interpret. As rational thought is suspended in dreams, they are said to allow the unconstrained 'id' to fulfil its wishes.
In my work as a confidant, we don't often interpret dreams, but we do use other 'windows' and, certainly, we work with the idea of an unconscious phantasy and what it is that prevents it from being realised. We also often work with the 'scripts' that we have acquired from our parents and how they influence our aspirations and behaviour in the wider world.
* The term 'subconscious' is only used by laymen; those involved in psychodynamics professionally only ever refer to the conscious (abbreviated Cs) and unconscious (abbreviated UnCs).
In order to network effectively we need to be able to both empathize with others and to receive human kindness from them. People of power often struggle to do either but once they can they are able to exceed even the heights they have already achieved.
The mantra of social media networks, such as Ecademy and Facebook, is that you should give, give, give and then in subtle ways you will receive.
For some users, bent on using these networks to promote their businesses, this can prove tough. Indeed, it is probably one of the commonest reasons why they find that social media networking doesn't work for them. It isn't that it doesn't work for them, it is that it doesn't work that way.
Of course, the idea that those who are the most generous with their time and energy helping others will benefit in the long-term isn't new. Most Faiths have it embedded in their doctrine somewhere. In fact, you could interpret the Golden Rule (the one tenet of life that appears in the holy writings of every mainstream Faith) - that you should do unto others as you would have them do unto you - as meaning just that.
One of the most important qualities for any leader to have is the ability to empathise. Undoubtedly, some are very good at it. Others struggle and, quite often, I find myself working with highly successful, very powerful people, who have reached their pinnacle through hard work and dedication rather than their people skills. They are often frustrated because they feel they have reached a plateau and don't realise that is their lack of empathic qualities that is holding them back. A few are so extremely uncomfortable socially that, had it been identified at school, they would probably have been told that they were somewhere on the scale towards autism.
Now, if you take someone who finds it hard to empathise, and ask them to network in person, they will struggle. But expect them to manage a social media network and they will generally find it very hard because few of the clues they need to tell them how the other person is feeling will be available to them.
They may be nagged, cajoled, parodied, mocked, or simply receive aggresive responses from fellow networkers because their approach is seen to be shallow, naive, and especially, selfish. This is often the kind of response that they have had to endure throughout school, in their family, at college or university and then at work. It reinforces their sense that they have to do things by themselves and fuels their determination.
Often the turning point for someone in this position is when something happens that they didn't expect, and someone, who they didn't know, does something for them that is beyond anything they would do for anyone else. It is receiving this simple act of human kindness that awakens them to a whole world of emotion that had been denied for so long.
This might seem a little strange to some people reading this, but you might be surprised how seeing ME cry in response to one of their experiences can open up a new dimension to them.
For the last few weeks, the Dalai Lama has been experimenting with Social Media. The other day I wrote about another of his entries on Facebook. Well this article was prompted by another of his messages, posted today...
Dalai Lama: "Alongside our natural ability to empathize with others, we also have a need for others’ kindness, which runs like a thread throughout our whole life. It is most apparent when we are young and when we are old, but we have only to fall ill to be reminded how important it is to be loved and cared about, even in our prime ...years."
Social Media networking isn't just about give, give, give.... it is also about receive, receive, receive - once you can do that you will really reap the rewards.
