Most of us use information we have about another party to reach agreement when negotiating.  But recent Stanford Graduate School of Business research warns that knowing our negotiation partners too well or having the wrong kind of information about them can actually produce less successful negotiating results than having no information.

Read about this interesting research on this important topic here.

Successful leaders share five traits that are more important than where they rank within their organisations, a retired McKinsey senior partner, Ian Davis, told a Stanford University MBA audience recently .

These traits, based on 30+ years of experience and observations and very briefly stated, are:

• set a clear direction
• initiate action
• follow through
• motivate workers
• lead by example.

While some leadership skills can be taught, Davis believes other traits come only through doing.

Read more about these interesting and worthwhile views here.

There is a great video of his address here.

Professor Gary Hamel, of the London Business School, reported some disturbing numbers at the recent World Business Conference in New York.

Of people at work:

•   only 14% are fully engaged,
•   62% are moderately engaged, while
•   24% are disengaged.

Some more disheartening findings – according to staff surveyed:

• just 40% of managers communicate decisions effectively

• only 38% of managers communicate openly and honestly

• a paltry 30% of managers are interested in employee wellbeing.

The leader’s job has a long way to go!

“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.

“SUCCESSFUL” WOMEN

At the outset, I should say the next post will deal with successful men, so I am not trying to be sexist here. Rather, my belief is that, while there are many similarities, there are also significant differences between men and women in how success is handled or not handled and I think these should be dealt with separately.

Characteristics of the “successful” woman

A frequent observation I have made is that outwardly successful women often show a lot of confidence and apparently high levels of self esteem as well as technical competence. In reality, these outward signs often mask significant underlying psychological problems or what colloquially might be called “hang ups”.

We must first ask ourselves is this observation muddled or does it represent some form of bias on my part? As for the bias I think not, because extensive anecdotal evidence shows that many successful women are driven by a need to get to the top, perhaps to become the CEO, to be in charge, to be in control. There is often a strong need for them to be in control. There is a definite feeling that they can match it with men, that they are as good as men, if not better, that they have had to fight through a man’s world in various ways, and in some ways this makes them even tougher than men. By developing in this way, their shadow (a concept discussed in a previous post) is that they must not show vulnerability.

Often, such women cannot and will not show any vulnerability at all. In not showing vulnerability, they experience difficulties in learning, because only through vulnerability do we learn.

Successful women often become “islands” in organisations, where other women cannot connect with them or network with them. Frequently, such women tend to not show feelings or acknowledge that certain feelings even exist. (Once again, this goes into the shadow of the organisation, especially if they are the CEO or a senior executive).

Causes of their behaviour

That seems hard to believe as women are generally credited with being far more emotional and empathetic than men. What could cause women to act in such a way where their feelings are so suppressed? Can we trace the origins of this kind of behaviour back to childhood again? (See earlier post on this subject). Yes, it does indeed go back to childhood and to what I mentioned before about the strong need to be in control.

These women were frequently not in control at all in their families or in their home situation and they learned that the way to be in control was to put one’s feelings to the side and be “tough”.

Am I really suggesting here that behaviour by women executives is a result of interactions with mothers and fathers in the past? Yes, I am suggesting that – if their parents were significant persons in their lives, as is usually the case.

Some successful women come from families where both mother and father are very powerful and true equals. This sort of successful woman usually has a very good self-esteem. Not only do they have good self- esteem but they are able to develop a male-female organisation where both men and women are equal and work well together, because they have a strong basis for a sense of equality of the sexes and do not see sexuality as a battle-ground but merely a difference.

How might a woman’s relationship with her father in childhood have had a more negative impact in later life? If the father was a tough disciplinarian who ran the household, then the daughter would have learned that that was how power was exercised and that was how to have control. She would want to mimic that sort of behaviour, that is assuming that the mother was a sensitive, caring person in the family (yes, the daughter is rejecting the way mum was or is). She would do that because she saw that her mother didn’t get anywhere in the relationship, that it wasn’t equal. She would do that because she wants to feel powerful and in control and to feel ok, not subservient and not be not in control of her relationship with her husband or partner.

If the roles of mother and father were reversed, and the mother was the dominant or controlling figure and the father was the subservient person who was basically so quiet you didn’t know he was there, then the woman could still become successful if she decided to take on the powerful role of the woman in the relationship. She could still be a very tough woman in the organisation. She would then hold the view that males were not that tough anyway and it would affect her behaviour in how she dealt with men in the organisation. She would assume that they weren’t good enough much of the time.

 The organisation suffers when vulnerability is not tolerated

Why should these issues be a concern to already successful women? By definition these women have achieved their success by behaving the way they have. They have got to where they are because of, or perhaps despite, these underlying psychological issues. Simply to suggest that, if they do not display greater vulnerability or release some greater displays of feelings, these women will not continue to enjoy success or perhaps even greater success, does not sound logical. They will, in fact, continue to build success – success measured in salary, dollars, promotions and the like. However, the organisation will not necessarily be successful in that the staff would need to not show vulnerability in the organisation, because if the top person, whether they are male or female, shows no vulnerabilities, then staff would sense that and no-one would show vulnerabilities. That sort of organisation is a much stressed one because there is no room for error – you cannot make a mistake. At the same time, because of that culture, staff will be nervous and reluctant about making a decision in case it might be wrong. Decisions will then somehow be pushed as high as possible rather than be made at the lower levels.

The female CEO who is personally unhappy

While these women may well continue to enjoy organisational success, it is likely that other forms of success, particularly in their private lives, will elude them. Difficulties in relationships are not uncommon for these women because many of the relationships they have in the organisation are power relationships meaning that their position determines who they are and how they behave. However, when that CEO robe is removed and the unadorned woman is there alone with herself, she then has to relate from the point of view of her person rather than from her position. If her self-esteem is low, which it usually is, she will not cope in relationships – she will avoid intimacy and long term relationships will prove difficult or unsustainable.

What sort of partners do these women tend to attract? There can be two extremes in the types of relationships these women form. On the one hand, they may seek out so-called “wimpish” men who will not represent any threat to the woman’s power position. But on the other hand, they could choose very powerful men who likewise prefer superficial relationships. The result is a marriage of convenience, where the partners are able to relate on an intellectual level, concentrating on task-related issues or shared experiences in organisational settings. Passion is frequently lacking in these relationships, since they are based on money (mostly) or some sort of task or status. When you have that sort of a female CEO, they generally will not have their own way of working in an organisation. They will tend to adopt ideas from outside. These ideas tend to come from “tried and true” or proven management approaches, a fad of the time, the going cultural response or some popular training theme. It is not just women who seek out role models in these situations; successful men with the same characteristics will do likewise, as we shall see when we come to look at men in the next post.

Working on your “problem behaviour”

If you are one of these successful women who can recognise some of these issues in your own behaviour, what might you do to reduce their harmful impact? If you wish to do this and, at the same time, develop your organisation into a more robust and more efficient one, you could do some self-exploring on intimate issues. Intimate issues do not involve just sexuality; there are all kinds of intimate issues about oneself.

Intimacy relates to knowing oneself, being aware of one’s outward behaviour and understanding why we behave the way we do and what our impact is on others. It involves the ability to be alone with oneself and accepting of our weaknesses and strengths.

This can be achieved through self-reflection, a mentor, a group process involving people in a similar position to you (e.g. a CEO) or a psychologist who has an understanding of organisations and who also has good counselling skills.

Let’s summarise what is involved with these approaches:

Self-reflection: This involves spending half an hour each day analysing the day you’ve just had. Here is a way to do it. Look at the content of your day as listed in your diary. Put the content to the side and use it as a reference, then try to remember your interaction or non-interaction for all those time periods. Ask yourself questions like:

•           Did I feel comfortable or not? Why?

•           Did the other party/parties feel comfortable? Why?

•           What does it sound like in my head (if you think verbally)?

•           What does it look like (if you think in pictures)?

•           Should I change anything about my behaviour in the future and why?

A Mentor: This involves speaking with a person who can and will challenge your “here and now behaviour” and offer alternatives as possibilities for you to consider, rather than giving direction necessarily. This mentor may make you feel uncomfortable and should challenge your current personal style but not necessarily cause you to change it. Usually your mentor would have had some background as a CEO and is preferably another female. (This is where your networking really comes in handy).

 A Group Process: This involves a group of women CEOs interacting about being and relating as a CEO in their organisation and following a process similar to the “Self-reflection” approach mentioned earlier.

A Psychologist: This involves speaking to a registered psychologist who has good counselling skills in an organisational context and who can analyse the full “system” that you are in and can challenge not only the “here and now” but also deal with the past. The psychologist may also make you feel uncomfortable but would also offer you support in handling that “uncomfortableness”.

Some CEOs choose to use all the above approaches while others prefer to concentrate on one or more depending on the circumstances. Be assured that these approaches always bring positive outcomes in a short space of time for both the CEO and the organisation.

Loved the cartoon on p36 of the New Yorker of 10 October 2011.

The boss is firing some employee:

“Don’t think of it as getting fired.  Think of it as finally being recognised for your incompetence”.

A new survey from Stanford University’s Rock Center and global executive search firm Heidrick and Struggles examines the pros and cons of CEOs serving as board members. Active CEOs might be “too busy” to be effective and, say the researchers, CEOs may be more tainted by ethics lapses than board directors.

Read the report here.

Whether you’re negotiating for your firm or for your position in it, you’ll do better if you avoid six common pitfalls says Margaret Neale, from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, where she is Professor of Organisational Behavior and director of two  executive education programs in negotiation.

Read what she has to say here

Please read the previous post on ‘shadows’ before reading this one.

Organisational shadow and personal shadow

I introduced in the previous post the concept of an organisational shadow. In what sense does an organisational shadow resemble, or indeed differ from, an individual shadow? An organisational shadow is the same as an individual one in the sense that it’s again the negative aspects of the organisation that we are looking at. Negative aspects might be simple things like organisational folklore that if you go away on holidays, don’t be surprised when you come back to discover that your job is not there. If a staff promotion occurs, don’t be surprised if the person selected is the popular person in the organisation or with the ‘boss’, rather than someone who might be more efficient in the role. Another example of an organisational shadow is where the organisation prefers to appoint someone from inside the organisation rather than bringing in new blood. But again, you might say that it is difficult to see how these are psychological issues when in most, if not all, cases, there could well be a simple, straight-forward explanation. There are often straight-forward explanations, but the realities are that the straight-forward explanation may not be the correct one and this is where the shadow acts. So it’s necessary to be clear as to what the real explanation is.

It might pay you to keep in mind that organisations are capable of, if not lying, misrepresenting a situation. But for what purpose? The purpose is to keep the shadow aspects of the organisation at bay or under cover. When organisations have negative aspects about them, they normally do not expose them to the outside world. Most, if not all, organisations have these negative aspects or shadows but often do not recognise them or their harmful effects. Organisations usually do not expose or manage their “shadow” as they wish to maintain the existing power culture. In other words, this is an unstated way of keeping control and keeping staff “in line”. The irony is that the organisation’s official written policy will usually state the opposite.

How does the organisational shadow arise?

It is difficult, perhaps, to comprehend how organisations can develop shadows. It is hard enough, as we saw earlier, to understand the process for individuals, but surely, you might say, organisations are incapable of developing their own persona or psychological characteristics.

The organisational shadow develops usually when a new CEO starts and sometimes can be traced back to a former CEO when certain critical events have happened. It takes a long time for these old habits or memories to die.

For example, if there has been some significant event in an organisation, such as where it has been restructured or downsized, it will have what we call “corporate memory” of this –I will have more to say on this in a later post on Culture. In other words, there will be people in the organisation who still remember this event having occurred. They will also remember the process involved as well as the outcome and if they have a negative view of the process or outcome, they will assume that, in future, the same negative part of the process will pertain with the same negative result. Consequently, they will be feeling fearful that that is what is going to happen in the future anyway.

So how does that relate to a new CEO arriving on the scene? When the new CEO arrives, they may behave in a very different way to the former one. Depending on how strong the old staff behaviours are, the new CEO’s behaviour will lead to the old ways being replaced, but only if the CEO is able to exhibit certain behaviours designed to do so. For example, if there was some form of fear of doing anything new in the organisation, so that the most senior manager needed to make a decision rather than empowering the staff to make it, then when the new CEO starts and wishes to empower the staff at the lower levels, they will resist because they are still trying to reflect the past CEO who wanted decisions made at the top. And so, it needs continual push from the new CEO, and support from his or her senior managers, to overcome this, and this takes quite an effort. But remember, that’s how a change can occur with a new CEO.

“Curing” the organisational shadow

What can an individual do to help influence, for the better, an organisational shadow? The most effective action that an individual can take is to name the shadow.

The negative behaviour which is taking place has to be named. Naming it means acknowledging that people are not prepared to say or do certain things because they are afraid that they will be ostracised or punished in some way, such as being denied a promotion. How do you name these sorts of things? You name them by saying what you are fearful of and by saying where this fear comes from. Many people will not know where the fear comes from but they will discover this from discussions in corridors with other staff members. Fear is usually transferred by staff members who have been in the organisation longer than some others and is fairly contagious. Naming, as we talk about it here, is a difficult concept to grasp. We are not talking about a staff member simply reciting some label or complaint over and over to themselves or others, or about someone fronting their CEO and engaging in some hostile debate about these issues. The concept will become clearer as we discuss the circumstances in which “naming” can best occur and how you might most productively do this.

The process of “naming”

The naming must start at the highest levels, where the senior managers “name” behaviours to the CEO. The managers below the senior executives name the behaviours to the senior managers, then the next level down, and so on, level by level by level. It is unlikely that the lowest level will engage in naming. If they do, that is great. It may still be difficult to imagine how this process could occur, because the very definition of a shadow, as we have seen, suggests something about which people feel uncomfortable and which they are not normally willing to raise. How can we reasonably expect an organisation full of individuals to act in this cohesive and focussed or purposeful way? The answer is quite simple and yet it is difficult to do. The answer can be found in the example of the senior managers who name the behaviour to the CEO. This act is then “televised”, perhaps through the grape-vine – the fact that this has happened and that the CEO has not turned around and destroyed any of those senior managers, but in fact has encouraged them to “name” the behaviours.

In other words, what the CEO has done is to expose the shadow, thereby taking its power away.

Some further examples

Alcohol or drug abuse is an issue all too frequently encountered in organisations and yet far too frequently ignored. My suggestion for dealing with this issue would be to have the CEO explicitly acknowledge that drinking or drug-taking was a problem in the organisation. This is “naming” it. The CEO needs to encourage the executive team to do likewise and to in turn have an active process of discussion in the organisation, concentrating initially on illustrating the existence of the problem, the impact it has on individual lives and on work performance and moving progressively to discussing positive measures for dealing with it. Of course, action must be taken with those who have the problem.

The way you deal with those people develops a new culture. For example, if the individuals are treated poorly, and particularly if the first few people who are uncovered are treated harshly by the organisation, then the shadow will grow and go underground (basically, the shadow is the organisation’s underground culture). But if those individuals are treated with the best possible care, with compassion, with no reprisal or loss of possible promotion (given that their work performance is improved because of their treatment), then this will go into the corporate memory in a positive way and basically destroy the shadow of the organisation having an alcohol or drug problem. There will soon be positive benefits throughout the organisation, as the new culture will be freely discussed at all levels, both formally as well as ‘in the corridors’.

Some further examples of the shadow at work in organisations are when staff are performing their work and make a mistake, and that mistake causes concern to a customer of the organisation. The way the organisation reacts to the customer is important, both in terms of some sort of acknowledgment of the problem and the action taken to resolve it, as well as in how the organisation reacts internally to the complaint. If the internal reaction is positive as well, then the shadow will be minimised. However, if the customer is told on the one hand that “we’re sorry for the mistake and we’ll fix it and everything will be fine”, and on the other hand the staff member who actually made the mistake is then castigated or treated badly, then the shadow will grow. Once again, the outward appearance is given of being a good organisation, but inwardly it’s anything but.

Shadows in groups of staff

Can shadows exist within groups of staff, such as executive management teams? They can, but a shadow within the executive team usually permeates the rest of the organisation and does not therefore remain the exclusive domain of the executive team. An example of this might be where initially the executives feel powerless to discuss issues openly and honestly with their CEO. What happens is that this behaviour then transfers all the way down the organisation and the executives may not even be aware that they have caused this to happen, because a lot of it is unconscious – that is the shadow. The shadow initially is that the executives do not confront the CEO with their concerns, but lower down, in the staff members’ case, it’s the same situation of not confronting a team leader or supervisor with “the truth”. How did this feeling get transmitted through the organisation? By both observable behaviour and also the sense one gets from a more senior person that, “oh no, we won’t discuss that, that is not important enough to be discussed”. Of course, there can be non-verbal clues that some issue shouldn’t be discussed – people look uncomfortable or nervous or “shifty” when certain subjects are raised.

Summing up

Let us recap our discussion on the shadow concept. While there are many negative aspects attached to it, at the same time it can give an organisation the power to become an excellent one. Carl Jung wrote that “mining the shadow”, as he put it, was like discovering gold, in that there was so much of benefit that one could learn and apply to aspects of daily life by examining and confronting shadow issues. What he meant by this was that there is so much negative feeling which can be reversed. While the “shininess” of the gold can blind you, it can also give you more insights; your repressed feelings can be opened up, your personal fears can be overcome, all leading to a far more healthy, happy personal life which in turn is reflected in behaviour and performance at the workplace. This, in turn, helps increase the efficiency of the organisation.

A good organisation or a healthy organisation can only develop where shadow issues are minimised. There are certainly some successful organisations where such issues are never exposed and dealt with. These organisations are populated with staff and managers who support the negative aspects of the organisation, accept that negative side and reinforce it, almost as a matter of policy. These organisations tend to enjoy medium term success before floundering for several years. They usually manage to survive, often because they are too large to liquidate.

This is a difficult concept to grasp at first and an even more difficult one to confront in individual cases. But persevere; perhaps consider reading further on the topic.

Another key psychological concept relevant to leadership is the term “shadow”. Like all the psychological concepts we are examining in this handbook, the “shadow” is very real, relevant and impactful on personal and organisational behaviour. But, just what is this “shadow”?

Definition

In terms of the individual, the shadow is the side of us we don’t want to accept about ourselves, the part we don’t like. It is sometimes referred to as the “dark” side of ourselves because we generally have difficulty acknowledging, accepting and/or understanding the negative traits of our behaviour. The term “shadow” was first used by famous Swiss psychologist Carl Jung early this century. He was interested in the way that behaviour was influenced by both conscious and unconscious beliefs held by individuals and how they determined past, present and future interactions.

The shadow’s effect on behaviour

So, is the shadow a conscious or unconscious influence on behaviour? It can be both.  There are things that we know we don’t like about ourselves and we try very hard to hide them. We do this consciously if we are aware of them and unconsciously if not.  In both cases, we are attempting to protect ourselves from being emotionally hurt. But there are other things that we don’t know about ourselves consciously and they are hidden or they come out when we least expect them.

Examples of the “shadow” effect

Giving a presentation

What are some common examples of the shadow in ordinary people? Many of us don’t like to get up and talk in front of people. For example, when making a presentation, most people are very nervous. However, some people, as part of their shadow, will avoid at all costs standing up and giving any form of presentation. This is a very difficult concept to get across because most people would say that it’s simply a case of nerves. Anyone would be apprehensive about putting themselves on display in front of a large audience, so in what sense are things like that related to what we call the shadow? They are related in the sense that the person will avoid, or do almost anything to seek to avoid, the issue. He or she might get sick on the day of the presentation; they might not even come to work. They might find another reason or they might try to put somebody else in their place. They will try almost anything to avoid being in that presentation and, if their shadow is strong enough, they will definitely not be there.

Another example might draw a clearer distinction between the shadow and nervous behaviour. The shadow is something that the person doesn’t accept about themselves. When they are nervous, they will say “I am nervous, and that’s why I couldn’t give the presentation”; they will talk about being nervous. The shadow has to do with a person not wanting to show themselves in a presentation, for fear that they might make a mistake, be ridiculed or do something silly in terms of their own perception. So they don’t want to be exposed at all to any possibility of being hurt or ridiculed in any way, so it’s more than just nerves.

Wanting to be liked

Moving away from the presentation example, what are some other areas in which the shadow can manifest itself? Take the example of a manager who really likes people and gets on well with people but who also has difficulty being firm with them, say when a decision has to be made that is not going to be popular. Now, what that manager will often do is somehow find a way to make the decision appear as if it’s not really their decision. So, what they might do is say the decision has come from higher up. The shadow here is that the person doesn’t want to be disliked or hated, and they would prefer that somebody else be seen to have made the unpopular decision. They want to be liked all the time as a result of their self-esteem being very low.

Avoiding hard decisions

Another example is that of the senior executive who has a number of staff but doesn’t like some of them. Where the executive particularly dislikes a certain staff member, they will find some way, usually through some work performance issue (often contrived or manufactured), to actually dismiss the person. Part of the problem is that the executive doesn’t want to sit down and say to that staff member: “Look, I don’t want you in this organisation, I don’t think I can work with you, I think you should go”, and so some other person is often appointed to handle the “unpleasantness”. The shadow effect means that the executive can’t confront the reality that they don’t get on with the staff member, don’t like him or her, but they can’t tell this person what they think or feel.

But in what sense is this example related to the shadow? Surely, you may not like someone simply because you don’t like them. So why is there necessarily some deeper psychological cause? There is because this example shows that the executive doesn’t have the self-esteem to confront someone directly or to confront the issue directly. What happens in such situations in an organisation is that it becomes quite apparent to other people in the organisation what has transpired, and the incident then becomes part of the shadow of the organisation, not just of the individual concerned. What I mean here is that there is common discussion in the organisation, “in the corridors” of course, about how, if the boss doesn’t like you, he will sack you but won’t tell you directly, and instead will have somebody else to do it for them.

The “shadow” as giving only good news

I will come to the organisational shadow shortly, but perhaps an example of the shadow at work outside of an organisational context might help your understanding of this concept. You often come across someone talking about all the good things about, or happening to, other people, all the wonderful things happening in their own lives, how wonderful life is, how wonderful this is and how wonderful that is and so on. Don’t you get sick of it, listening to someone tell you how wonderful everything is? They never tell you about anything not so wonderful or even plain bad. If you suggest to them that there must be something bad, they say: “No, it’s all wonderful”.

So, when you have someone giving you only good news all the time, the shadow is very strong there. There are undoubtedly things in that person’s life that are not so wonderful, but this individual is basically trying to keep their shadow under wraps – they do not wish to expose it at all.

This example is often encountered in a social environment where someone is saying only ‘nice’ things all the time and doesn’t want to talk about anything else.

Does the shadow come into play in relationships, for example with partners or with children? Yes it does. It comes in to play with relationships in the sense that there are things we don’t like about our partner, but we are too nervous to tell them, or we are too scared to tell them. Eventually, if these things add up over the years, what happens is that they actually become barriers. So the shadow is a shadow because you can’t touch it, but eventually it is real enough to destroy a marriage or a relationship, where there has been no discussion or resolution about these negative aspects or shadow issues.

Exposing the ‘shadow” through discussion

When these negative aspects of the relationship are exposed by discussion, the shadow is no longer a shadow, it becomes real and part of the relationship.

In the same way in an organisation, when the shadow is exposed, it can no longer do harm because it is exposed for what it is; it’s just behaviour. The shadow can be present in relations with children too. Say you get angry with your child, who might only be five. You become controlled; you don’t want to show anger towards the child. What you are doing is suppressing the shadow – the fact that you do have negative feelings towards this child and that you feel guilty about your anger because you do love the child. Far better to say to the child: “I am very angry with you for doing this, because…” and to then discuss it, since that immediately eliminates the shadow.

The “shadow” as “dirty linen”

The term “shadow”, on the one hand, implies something real, something tangible, something that can be seen or touched or understood. On the other hand, it seems to represent some general passing conscious or subconscious feeling that cannot be seized and directly grappled with. How can this dilemma be clarified? It can only be clarified by looking at what sometimes is called in organisations “the dirty linen” as well. One way of understanding this is to ask yourself if you have ever seen an annual report that has had negative things in it. All annual reports present the organisation in a very positive light, and make it look fantastic, look beautiful, look great. The negative aspects of an organisation are never presented in an annual report. The reality is that that’s what annual reports are really all about – presenting the organisation in a positive light.

However, there is one significant side of the organisation, the shadow of the organisation, which is not mentioned in the annual report. It’s the “dirty linen” – the “real stuff” that is going on, that is negative or unflattering and not necessarily seen by the public.

However, the members of the organisation know that it’s there and how harmful it can be.

The concept of the shadow can be difficult to absorb. It may help your understanding if we consider how shadows (plainly there is more than one shadow for each individual) come about. Do they, for example, have their origins in childhood experiences, as we discussed in Chapter 4? They often do. For example, a father might talk to his son and be very abusive towards him, such that the son has no choice but to do what the father says. There has been no discussion and no listening on the part of the father, and the son basically has to do what he is told. In this very simple example, the son later becomes a CEO and actually does the same thing to his staff.

A shadow might even originate in a new relationship, say where an individual has their first sexual experience with a member of the opposite sex, and that sexual experience has been one of almost total domination, perhaps even close to rape, where enormous power has been exercised. It could be that when the person who was the victim of that power joins an organisation, they begin to behave as if they are going to be a victim of any power relationship. The realities are that this person is, and will continue be, the “victim”. Their shadow is that they always need to be a victim, because if they are not, they become uncomfortable becoming empowered, perhaps because they do not know how. In other words, their shadow is a fear of being powerful, and yet, they also fear the powerful person. Logic would say that the individual should “fight it”, but, in reality, the person doesn’t. They actually become the victim, and remain the victim, in most relationships in (and beyond) the organisation.

Shadows often originate when there are significant events that have occurred in childhood, but these significant events are the perception of that individual. They may not be significant to us, but they will be to that individual, perhaps only to that individual.

An example that might assist here could be an individual whose parents have died while that person was quite young. That person may well, indeed generally does, suffer a feeling of rejection or abandonment, because they have been denied close, loving relationships. In turn, as they grow older, they exhibit the same kind of behaviour by not becoming close with other people, lest they too reject or abandon him or her. The shadow for this person, therefore, has a number of parts – the fear of rejection, the fear of abandonment and the fear that if close relationships develop, they will die, they simply won’t work.

Dealing with personal “shadows”

The importance (again) of discussion

At this stage it would be appropriate to consider how one can effectively deal with personal shadows, which might at first seem a daunting challenge, particularly given we have been attempting to point out they can cover such a wide multitude of types and causes. Here are some general tips for recognising and dealing with shadow issues in your personal situation:

• In your personal relationship with your partner, do you feel you can say all the negative things that you feel toward your partner? Now, if the answer is yes, there is no shadow there. If the answer is no, then there is a shadow issue which needs to be discussed.
• Do you feel happy within yourself? What are the things that you are not happy with? Is it a fear of being alone? Is it a fear of not having close friends? If you answer “yes” to any of these questions (and they are simply some suggestions – there are many others), then the shadow is part of you and you need to confront these issues. You do this by discussing, perhaps with yourself, or with a close friend or anyone else you trust, your fear of being on your own, and what that means, or whatever your fear may be.

But surely such a discussion is not some simple “aspirin-type” cure? No, but the problem will be rectified by continual discussion – by continual discussion with another person, by being aware that, in any relationship, such issues need to be discussed – not “beating them to death”, but certainly discussed. By recognising that your behaviour will be guided and determined by this part of your shadow, and understanding why you tend to avoid intimate relationships and why you might prefer superficial type relationships.

Getting help

Recognising your shadows is one thing; dealing with them may be something entirely different. On occasions, you may need to recognise that the issue is something beyond your own capacity to deal with. Sometimes, simply talking to friends may not adequately deal with the underlying issue. In situations where you feel “bogged down” and not able to move forward, you may need to consider engaging professional assistance, e.g. try a suitably qualified psychologist who specialises in long term psychotherapy and with whom you can develop a relationship so that your self esteem increases. You will need to feel comfortable with the psychologist when you first meet them. Trust your instincts.

Self esteem and the “shadow”

I mentioned self esteem again above, a topic covered in more depth in previous posts.  What is the connection between self-esteem and the shadow? The connection (which most people and most books neglect to talk about) is that the more shadow we have in us, the lower our self-esteem is – in other words, there is a direct connection. When we deal with the negative aspects of our makeup, personality or whatever you like to call it, we deal with our shadow by exposing it and we actually grow from the experience. By growing, we mean we learn to deal with and cope with the negative aspects of ourselves. Learning to deal with the negative aspects of ourselves and exposing the shadow so that it cannot harm us any more, actually develops and increases our self-esteem. As the shadow is minimised, our self-esteem is increased. Or conversely, as we work on boosting our self- esteem, shadow issues should subside.

More on organisational shadows in the next post…