Leadership – Childhood Experiences – The Baggage We Carry – Part 1

It may seem strange that a post on childhood experiences would be included in a blog on leadership. In my experience in running and advising large organisations, a great deal of behaviour, even that displayed by so called mature adults in their 40’s and 50’s and beyond, is influenced, often surprisingly deeply, by early childhood experiences.

Many of you will recall the words of Saint Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit religious order – “give me a child till they are seven and I have them for life”. This quotation sums up a truism in psychological theory – i.e. that many of the things that happen to us as adults, or many behaviours which we exhibit as adults, can be directly traced back to our childhood experiences, conditioning or upbringing. The reason for this is that the first seven to eight years or so (everyone is different) of a person’s development tends to fashion their life forever. That doesn’t mean that everything is “set in concrete” and people can’t change. It means that many of our experiences which are significant to us in the first seven years go on to play a part in our behaviour as adults. Unfortunately, many people can’t or won’t change and so their childhood experiences are even more determinative of their future behaviours, certainly in a personal sense, but also in an organisational
sense.

What sort of experiences are we talking about?

Let us examine some of these experiences before we consider how they can impact in later life. Firstly, there are what we would call the sex link experiences. Say you are a male, (let’s be stereotypic for a moment), and say your dad works all day and perhaps doesn’t have much contact with you. As the male child, you come to learn about the “absent father”. Many books have been written about the absent father. We can even go back into Greek mythology where the absent father was always talked about – the god Zeus was the absent father who would seduce women and leave them with a child to bring up alone. There are many examples of that in mythology which are still relevant to what is happening today. We still talk about the “absent father” – he is always working and is out “earning a living” while the mother
has to do most of the rearing.

Many of our male readers might wonder about the relevance of that experience in terms of their leadership in the new millennium. How might this example impact in later life? An example drawn from my own experiences in organisations is that when a male becomes a CEO, and his dad has been “absent”, then this CEO will tend to behave in such a way that he too will be “absent”. What I mean by that is that he will certainly be “in charge”, act the leader and he will let everyone know that he is in charge, similar to the way Zeus was “in charge”. However, when he is needed to nurture and develop his staff, he will have difficulty because he cannot “get close” to people to discuss such issues. By the way, both men and women will notice that this CEO can’t get close to his staff. The staff impression of this CEO will be that he is distant, lives in his “ivory tower” and never gets out of his office.

I have also experienced these sorts of behaviourswith many CEOs who have often had quite stable backgrounds, where they have had a close connection with their dads. In such cases, these male CEOs usually recall their childhood experiences with their “dads” as being emotionally positive and strong in bonding. Unfortunately, later negative male CEO role modelling overtakes the childhood experiences.

Another example of childhood experiences setting us up for later life is where a child attempts to learn to ride a bicycle and gets on his training wheels with mum and dad watching. It doesn’t matter whether it is a male or female child in this instance. The child develops a reasonable mastery of riding the bicycle on the training wheels, then mum or dad or both say, “ok, your training wheels are off now”, and the child tries to ride the bike, falls over and hurts herself. The child cries and runs to mum or dad. Then mum or dad or both say “you stupid child, you are better than that, you should have handled it”. It could be that mother and father are genuinely trying to encourage the child this way. However, the child doesn’t take their encouragement on board as encouragement, and it affects the child’s confidence in trying new things, with the result that the child becomes very risk-averse. Later, when the child grows up and enters a career (I am simplifying this a little because there are other experiences that add to the child’s make-up), the grown-up child, who has learned to become risk- averse, will not take risks in case they might “fall off their bike” and hurt themselves in the organisation. In other words,
an executive may refrain from doing something a little different in the organisation for fear that it won’t succeed and that he will then be berated in some way. That is certainly a simplified example, but is does give you a taste of how attitudes to risk-taking and risk-averse behaviour can develop.

A further example to illustrate this point is where a female child is growing up and her dad is distant or absent and her mother is very involved in rearing the family. In fact, frequently, the mother tends to become extremely involved not only with her daughter but also with a career, while dad is in the distance, working away externally but not really having much input to his daughter’s upbringing. So daughter is brought up with these sorts of parents, who are not at all “bad” and who just want the best for their child. What happens later in life is that the daughter not only learns about mum being achievement and goal oriented, but learns that dad is always in the distance and far away. The daughter develops a need for male approval and a need to find a male who is successful, but at the same time believing that no male could be successful since her father was not ‘successful’ with her. Because they were never able to get close to the most significant
male in their life, in this world of male-dominated CEOs and senior managers, many women in senior management have difficulties connecting with a male CEO, and therefore tend to become subservient to them. They become subservient by not challenging them, as they have learned to not connect or relate to the male in that way. In other words, they have learned to relate to a distant male and have learned to relate to the “hard working” female and connect with women in this way only. When these sorts of experiences occur, you often
have the situation that you never get any “managing upwards” by the woman. This is significant as it results in senior women managers not challenging the male CEO, hence the organisation cannot grow fully by not having that female input. The female members merely “go along for the ride”. Of course, in an image sense, this type of organisation looks good on paper as it has senior executives who are women.