“SUCCESSFUL” MEN
If any of our male readers have not already read the previous post on successful women, I suggest you read that first, as many of the issues discussed there also apply to men. There are, however, some significant differences between the way men and women achieve and deal with success. This postdeals particularly with men suffering from a lack of balance in their approach to their organisational lives, often as the result of childhood conditioning.
Where a male child has been fortunate to have had two parents who were equal partners in the relationship, he too, like the female child mentioned in the previous post, will generally exhibit behaviours which suggest an organisation that has both male and female people of equal power. You may find the executive team has a balance of both men and women. The women are not “token women” and the men are not “token men”.
“Father of the Organisation” – Childhood Experiences Repeated
A common characteristic of successful men, men for example at the CEO level, is that anecdotal evidence suggests that they have very poor relationships with their families. They have usually been the provider for the family and as a father they have been more focussed on the provider role, rather than having a deep relationship with their partner or, commonly, with their children. These men have often come from families where their own father was not there physically or emotionally but basically was the provider (see earlier post on Childhood Experiences which discusses the “copy what we have seen” syndrome). Many of these men try to become the “father of the organisation”. In some ways, this is because they themselves can’t be or haven’t been a father to their own family or they haven’t had a good relationship with their own father as well. They will do everything in the world possible for that organisation, to be a ‘good dad’.
For example, successful CEOs such as this might introduce “helpful” activities like mentoring and various management-related programs where staff can go and learn about all the different aspects of being a good manager. Considerable effort might be expended by this CEO to ensure that his staff receive as much knowledge and information as possible because that CEO himself didn’t have a lot of this. Unfortunately, the way human behaviour works is that it often works in the opposite way too. The same CEO could decide, instead, to give nothing to his staff and be purely a hard-nosed CEO who is only interested in the present, the money coming in and nothing else. So we can have both – at opposite ends of the spectrum – on the one hand, a successful, nurturing CEO, on the other hand, a successful, tough, firm CEO.
Do men suffer the same effects as women from the way they interact with their mother and father as children? They do generally. For example, a male child with a dominant father will tend to take on the characteristics of the father because he sees it as a way of being in control and being powerful, just as a successful woman does. If his mother is subservient, he will then expect women in the organisation to be like that also. On the other hand, if the child has a very good relationship with his mother, then in later life he will usually be sympathetic to women who are “subservient” in the organisation. That would be part of his make-up even though he might come across as tough as his father did. If the father is domineering, however, and perhaps often absent from the home, then they themselves will become absent from the home (even though that’s the very last thing they want to happen) and will develop a very strong organisational life – e.g. excessive hours, workaholism etc. So, you get a situation where a son grows up with an absent father and becomes an absent father himself, while definitely being ‘present’ as a CEO as seen by the organisation. The shadow in this male CEO is “how to be both a present father and a present CEO”.
Why so few women in executive ranks?
Is there perhaps some clue here as to why more women are not found in male dominated executive ranks? A common explanation is that there is a shortage of women to fill these positions (some people even say that women have tried positions of authority / power and have preferred to give them up). But I suspect that there is another equally valid explanation. Many senior men are, for the various reasons I have described, afflicted in terms of their relationships with women because of their childhood experiences and therefore may seek to avoid creating further perceived opportunities for such conflict from introducing more women into their organisational milieu.
You will sometimes encounter situations where men are somewhat reluctant to work for women. Sometimes this can be explained by cultural differences where, for example, some Sri Lankan or Greek men, for cultural reasons, find it difficult to be subservient, as they perceive it, to women. These cultural differences can, as I have shown, be attributed to childhood experiences in those countries when men act as the dominant party in relationships and boys and girls are trained accordingly. It is important to understand these cultural differences, rather than adopt a “can do” approach to try to change them.
The “personal life” of the successful male CEO
It is not uncommon to find successful men who have experienced more than one failed personal relationship. This is generally because, on their logical side, they are too busy working, while from their relationship or emotional side, they haven’t spent as much time working on their own self in terms of their relationship with their particular partner.
I have also encountered situations where senior male executives could even be described as being “petrified” of dealing with women. What would cause such strong feelings in such men? Again, the usual connection is that their childhood experiences may well have been that they had a very powerful mother and an absent father, or a father who was physically home but you wouldn’t know he was home in an emotional or relationship sense. That connection may not be quite clear at first – just because these men have been dominated by a woman as a child, why should they be afraid of other women? Is it because they fear that a woman will become another mother who will exert negative power over them as happened in their childhood? The answer is ‘yes’, this is precisely what happens, because there is what is known psychologically as a form of transference.
“Transference”
Transference is where you look at a given relationship situation and there is an immediate flashback to a past situation. The two situations are not separated in the mind but become mixed together or blurred and therefore there is an immediate perception that the woman is going to become powerful because as a child they were influenced by a very powerful woman who happened to be their mother. Our society is now seeing, and will continue to see, the results over the next ten years of a society where there are almost no fathers at home and the mother usually raises the boys as well as the girls; but certainly where the mother alone raises the boys.
We will see more and more male CEOs being reluctant and nervous about having strong contributions from female senior executives.
In this age of “political correctness”, the unfortunate result will be that we will tend to have more female executives selected purely from a token point of view – to “make up the numbers” – unless the CEO concerned is very self-aware and has insight into his shadow (which generally won’t be the case).
Correcting “negative” male behaviour towards female colleagues
What can men do to help recognise these traits in their own behaviour and then deal with them in an effective manner to minimise their negative or harmful impact? The answer is essentially the same as we gave in the previous topic on successful women.
We would recommend that men in such situations seek the services of a psychologist, but take care to select one who is very experienced in relationship work. They might also identify a mentor – a colleague at the same level as them and preferably a male (because relating to a male means that you are relating to someone of the same sex and there are no issues of power or the like).
Let me be clear as to why a successful male executive should not seek advice from a female counterpart. There is nothing wrong in seeking advice from a female counterpart; it is more to do with the nature of mentoring. The assistance ought to be from a male because of the way men behave, which is very different to how women behave. Men and women are different, after all! This suggests a very poor attitude or behaviour on the part of men if they cannot relate openly to a female colleague of “equal” status. There is, in fact, nothing wrong with these men’s ability to relate to them; however, from a mentoring point of view, it is probably better that it is a male mentor because they will learn to have more respect for themselves as a male, and in doing that they will then learn to have more respect for females. We learn respect for females through respect for ourselves, just as a female learns respect for a male through respect for the same sex. It does not work the other way.
Common sense might suggest that if a male doesn’t respect a female he should go and see a strong or dominant or confrontational female counsellor who will “sort him out”. The reason that common sense does not work in this instance – why it is best for that male to see another male to confront the issues of women and respect for women, in the same way that a female who hasn’t got respect for men ought to see a female mentor or counsellor to confront the same issues – is because we understand about another person’s sexuality through our own sex. Respect for our own sex and our own self then leads to respect for others. This all happens because our mentor and / or significant friend / counsellor acts as a role model for our own sex.
