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Daniel Chastenet de Géry / CCC Wave 11

Thesis subject

“Confrontation in the workplace through clinical lens.”

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Executive summary

It is widely accepted in the work environment and leadership literature that a good leader

must be consensual and that he is to create a culture of consensus and alignment around

him and in the whole organization which should, therefore, evacuate confrontation and, all

the more, conflict.

However, recent literature and research highlight how the “don’t rock the boat syndrome”

can be one of the silent killers of modern corporations and cases like Enron, Tyco or

Worldcom are clear examples of how catastrophic the outcome may be when silence

prevails over confrontation. The “silent spiral” often leads to groupthink or to “Abilene”, to

mental or physical suffering, or to unethical, immoral or even, sometimes, inhuman

behaviors.

Why the known-to-be rational, MBA trained leaders or executives are neither able to

properly diagnose the problem nor capable of finding the concrete antidote to what is

recognized as a common plague in today’s business?

And what if it had nothing to do with being rational but, on the contrary, with being

irrational?

We will look in this paper at the lack of confrontation “symptom” in the workplace through

the clinical “lens”. The clinical paradigm builds on psychoanalytic concepts and techniques

made available to leaders, management teams or executives to help them decipher,

confront and then manage the unknown, the unconscious, the irrational in individual and

groups’ behaviors.

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The clinical lens allows the individual to confront the inner theater, blind spots and defense

mechanisms (like, for example, key ones such as repression, projection or transference)

preventing him and/or others to find his or their “true self”. The clinical paradigm teaches

us that the ability to confront or not, to avoid conflict or fight, may find its origin in an

individual’s early years of childhood (as emphasized by Freud, Winnicott, Bowlby and Miller

to name a few).

The way people confront Reality and Phantasy is key to determine their personalities and it

is therefore vital to know and understand the most common personalities to be found in the

workplace in order to better confront and manage them for the sake of business

performance. Narcissist, schizoid, avoidant, depressive, hypomanic or alexithymia

personalities abound in the workplace, especially at the top and it is thus vital to be able to

decipher their behaviors in order to better confront them.

What can be done in the workplace, at the leader, management or organization levels, to

prevent if not to cure the symptom?

Business and leadership literature is flourishing with books and published articles on conflict

and confrontation which list the “dos and don’ts” in managing confrontation and conflicts.

But our hypothesis is that the most important “dos” in establishing a culture of sound

confrontation in the workplace, bearing in mind the clinical paradigm, are the following : set

up purpose, create a safe environment, build up a culture of courageous dialogue and deep

listening, look for the bad news, seek diversity and cherish the “deviants”, be provocative if

and when necessary but do no harm and, finally, accept vulnerability and be a “good

enough” leader.

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Being aware of the negative consequences of lack of confrontation in the business world and

after diagnosing the hidden causes of the symptom through the clinical lens , leaders and

executives, teams and organizations would be well advised to put in place, using key

behavioral and organizational “firewalls”, a sound culture of confrontation for better

performances.

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It is widely accepted in the work environment and leadership literature that a good leader

must be consensual and that he should create a culture of consensus and alignment around

him and in the whole organization which should, therefore, evacuate confrontation and, all

the more, conflict. Consequently, “people who manage by consensus often climb the

corporate ladder quickly” (Sorcher & Brant, 2002)

However, peace and harmony are overrated and examples abound of negative, even

sometimes catastrophic, consequences due to the lack of confrontation or conflict, be it at

the leader, the management team or even at the whole organization and society levels.

Confrontation and Conflict

Although often used as synonyms, confrontation and conflict are not alike. In fact, it is the

lack of confrontation which often leads to conflict. “the constructive confrontation system is

a course of action that shows leaders how to use confrontation constructively to increase

accountability and decrease conflict in their organizations…the difference emerges when

confrontation is confused with conflict… diverse ideas, beliefs, and opinions, if not

confronted sooner, will surely become conflicts later”(Hoover & Disilvestro, 2005). In many

ways, a leader’s job is to encourage opposition by creating conditions where productive

debate can flourish and the best decisions can be made. The productiveness of this dialogue,

however, is at risk when people take things personally and experience conflict : “Many

people avoid opposition because they fear it will turn to conflict. But avoiding opposition can

actually create issues, and when ignored, can get bigger and become more frustrating, which

creates conflict. The experience of conflict short-circuits debate and dialogue” (Maccoby &

Scudder, 2011). Robert Branche in his book Neuromanagement explains why managers must

say no to avoidance and to conflict and yes to confrontation. “Conflict is a combat.

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Confrontation is looking for and facing reality” (Branche, 2008). Joe Weston in his book

Respectful Confrontation argues that the most effective way to avoid and resolve conflict is

with confrontation: “Many of us have negative associations with confrontation; we think it is

the same as conflict. However, confrontation is nothing more than open-hearted

engagement and ultimately the most effective way to avoid and resolve conflict” (Weston,

2012).

A bit of etymology.

Confront comes from: Middle French procedural language confronter, i.e. to border on,

confront; Latin com + front, frons, forehead, front; meaning 1: to face, especially in

challenge, to compare by opposing; meaning 2a: to cause to meet : bring face-to-face and

meaning 2b: to meet face-to-face, to put in presence, to encounter. Synonyms: front,

affront, , encounter, meet, come up against, face up to, go up against, oppose, repel, dare,

brave, defy, withstand.

Conflict comes from Middle English, from Latin conflictus, act of striking together, from

confligere, to strike: 1/ fight, battle, war and 2a/ competitive or opposing action of

incompatibles; antagonistic state of action (act of divergent ideas, interests or persons) or

2b/ mental struggle resulting from incompatible or opposing needs, drives, wishes, or

external or internal demands. Synonyms: battle, clash, collision, combat, discord, differ,

contend, contrast, disaccord, disagree, disharmonize, animosity, hostility, rancor, rivalry,

onslaught, ravage, disturb, competition, contention, contest, strife, struggle, war.

As a summary, we could say that “confrontation is a way to engage while conflict leads to

discord” (Weston, 2011). Confrontation seems to do more with facing up to reality, while

“conflict is a personal experience; it’s about the relationship, the emotion, responding to

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something that could potentially threaten a person’s self-worth”. (Maccoby & Scudder,

2011) To confront reality is to recognize the world as it is, not as we wish it to be, and have

the courage to do what must be done, not what we would like to do. (Bossidy & Charran,

2004). “Respectful confrontation is an ideal mode of communication that enables us to stay

connected and engaged” (Weston, 2012).

From the above, we assume that there is a difference between confrontation and conflict

and our hypothesis is that when there is a conflict, there are basically two ways to react :

confront or avoid, and there are different ways to avoid. Neurobiologist Henri Laborit has

well explained in his book Eloge de la fuite (Laborit, 1976) which mains ideas have been

popularized in the Alain Resnais’s movie Mon Oncle d’Amérique, the many ways of avoiding

from the negative ones (drugs, suicide..) to the positive ones – escape, from real danger, or

sublimation in Freud’s terms (creation, art, sport, charity…) as well as the negative

consequences of not being able to either confront or avoid (stress, anxiety, somatization,

depression…); that phase of not being able to either avoid (flee) or confront (fight) can be

assimilated as well to Martin Seligman’s concept of “learned helplessness” (Seligman, 1975)

in which a human being or an animal has learned to act or behave helplessly after

experiencing some inability to avoid an adverse situation even when it actually has the

power to change (confront) its unpleasant or even harmful circumstance; Seligman saw a

similarity with severely depressed patients and argued that clinical depression and related

mental illness result in part from a perceived absence of control over the outcome of a

situation .

Avoiding, or not confronting, can therefore be vital, not only, for example, when attacked

from a wild animal in the jungle but also in the workplace when, for example, an employee

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faces perversion in leadership (as in moral or sexual harassment). However, it appears that,

in life in general and in the workplace in particular, avoiding or not confronting is rarely vital

for survival but, as shown in more recent leadership literature, can often have, on the

contrary, negative, not to say sometimes dramatic, consequences at individual, groups,

companies or even society level.

Consequences of Confrontation or Conflict avoidance

Several studies have found that individuals tend to shun conflict. People seem inclined to

avoid conflict-laden choice if they can, by deferring choice, selecting a default option, or

maintaining statu quo. (Dalquié, 2000). Though we tend to think of leaders as dominant and

unafraid, many have a tendency toward conflict avoidance. (Kets de Vries & Engellau) “I

have witnessed many occasions, even at the highest level, when silent lies and a lack of

closure lead to false decisions. They are “false” because they eventually get undone by

unspoken factors and inaction.”(Kets de Vries, 2009)

People avoid confronting reality by not listening to their internal (organization) and external

(market, competition) environments. “Positive illusions, self-serving biases, and a tendency

to discount the future often prevent leaders from listening to their environment and from

gaining much needed feedback. Sometimes leaders are unable to overcome the state of

denial or the awareness of indicating tremors (Bazerman & Watkins, 2004); “yet, managers

at all levels are often unwilling or unable to address their competing perspectives

collectively. They frequently avoid paying attention to issues that disturb them. They restore

equilibrium quickly.” (Heifetz & Laurie, 2011) Margaret Heffernan wonders how big

corporations think: “well, for the most part, they don’t ! Not because they cannot, but

because people in there are afraid of conflict. 85% of European and American executives

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confessed that they had issues or concerns that they were unable to raise, afraid of the

conflict that it would provoke, afraid to get embroiled in arguments that they thought they

could not manage and found that they were bound to lose” (Heffernan, 2012)

Though conflict-free teamwork is often held up as the be-all and end-all of organizational

life, it actually can be the worst thing to ever happen to a company. Research shows that the

single greatest predictor of poor company performance is complacency, which is why every

organization needs a healthy dose of dissent (Joni & Beyer 2009). John Buchanan wonders

how it is possible that organizations have achieved outward diversity but not diversity of

thought and concludes “maybe the problem is more fundamental: that the culture works to

stifle dissent and push everyone in the same direction” (Buchanan, 2012)

Complacency often leads to the famous “boiled frog factor” (Kets de Vries, 2006), which

represents the syndrome affecting a leader, executives or a whole organization who realize

too late that the environment has changed while their organization has not. These

organizations often suffer from the following symptoms : “don’t rock the boat” mentality,

organizational arrogance (a “know-it-all” attitude), complacency, a reluctance to adopt best

practices from other organizations, company’s leadership is inaccessible, company suffers

from a control mentality (rules and regulations prevail), company has a no trust culture,

company operates with a system of deference which creates a “them and us “ culture (Ryde,

2013), real issues are not tackled, decisions are not taken or postponed despite obvious facts

and figures, available signs, information or KPI, and, because it is the most important for

many companies, people “follow the chain of command rather than behave sensible”

(Harvey, 1988).

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Leaders or managers who act like barons of their business entities are often so busy

defending their respective fiefdom that true conflict does not occur “while a 600 pounds

gorilla sits on the table, smelling up the place, the senior executive group squanders an

incredible amount of energy ignoring its presence. Far too often it has to be “high noon”

before corporate leaders are prepared to deal with the real issues” (Kets de Vries, 2006)

Margaret Heffernan (2012) is also telling the story of the epidemiologist Dr Alice Stewart

whose study in the 1960’s showed that one child out of two who had cancer had been x-

rayed during his mother’s pregnancy : although the information was officially published,

therefore available to all, and despite Alice Stewart’s years of fighting to make the truth

acknowledged, it took 25 years for the US and American governments to forbid X-rays for

pregnant mothers, avoiding to confront earlier facts and figures, causing thousands of

unnecessary children deaths by cancer.

Bazerman and Tenbrunsel highlight the gap between what people want to be and what they

actually are. They explain how the last major economic crisis in the USA was certainly due to

some greedy, ill-intentioned individuals who are or should be in prison by now and by the

system which did not alert or prevent major dysfunctions building up for years until the crisis

exploded; but the crisis was also due to “the thousands of people who were culpably

ignorant, engaged in what they thought were seemingly harmless behaviors without

consciously recognizing they were doing anything wrong… the crisis also involves the

multitude of people who were aware of the unethical behavior of others, yet did little or

nothing in response.” (Bazeman & Tenbrunsel, 2011)

Recent cases like Enron, Tyco, Lehman Brothers or Worldcom cases, showed just how

catastrophic situations can be when silence prevails over confrontation or conflict. Many

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times, often with the best of intentions, people at work decide it is more productive to

remain silent about their differences than to voice them up. But as new research shows,

silencing does not smooth things over or make people more productive. It merely pushes

differences beneath the surface and can set in motion powerfully destructive forces. When

people stay silent about important disagreements, they can begin to fill with anxiety, anger,

and resentment. As long as the conflict is unresolved, their repressed feelings remain potent,

making them increasingly distrustful, self-protective, and all the more fearful that if they

speak up they will be embarrassed or rejected. Their sense of insecurity grows, leading to

further acts of silence, more defensiveness, and more distrust, thereby setting into motion a

destructive "spiral of silence." Sooner or later, they mentally opt out--sometimes merely

doing what they are told but contributing nothing of their own, sometimes spreading

discontent and frustration throughout the workplace. All too often, behind failed products,

broken processes, missed business opportunities and mistaken career decisions are people

who chose to hold their tongues. “old-deal meetings are built around avoidance behaviors.

Disagreement is private or passive-aggressive, eroding any real sense of belonging to a

team” (Doz & Kosonen, 2007). “People discourage alternative views by rolling their eyes,

checking their smartphones, and turning their backs on colleagues” (Gardner, 2012)

Silencing self is a choice we make – consciously or unconsciously – to not fully express our

perspective (Perlow, 2003). “Managers who dislike conflict – or value their own approach –

actively avoid the clash of ideas; their organizations fall victim to what is called the

Comfortable Clone Syndrome: co-workers share similar interests and training, everyone

thinks alike. Because all ideas pass through similar cognitive screens, only familiar ones

survive” (Leonard and Straus, 1997). Top-level managers know that conflict over issues is

natural and even necessary. Management teams that challenge one another's thinking

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develop a more complete understanding of their choices, create a richer range of options,

and make better decisions. Without conflict, groups lose their effectiveness. Managers often

become withdrawn and only superficially harmonious. The alternative to confrontation or

conflict is not usually agreement but rather apathy and disengagement, which open the

doors to a primary cause of major corporate debacles: groupthink (Eisenhardt, Kahwajy &

Bourgeois III, 2009)

Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people, in which

the desire of harmony or conformity in the group results in an incorrect or deviant decision-

making outcome. Group members try to minimize conflict and reach consensus decision

without critical evaluation of alternative ideas or viewpoints. The concept has been

popularized by Irving Janis (Janis, 1982) who describes in his book Victims of Groupthink how

the Pearl Harbour attack, the Bay of Pigs invasion fiasco or the 1950 Korean war escalation

were made possible because of groupthink. Negative impacts of groupthink in the workplace

are illustrated by the two famous examples of British Airways and Marks and Spencer

companies which saw their reputation and stock market valuation fall caused by groupthink

symptoms, the predominant one being the illusion of invulnerability (Eaton, 2001). “A

number of recent articles and books have urged executive teams and corporate boards to

foster discussion and disagreement. Only from constructive conflict, we’ve been told, can

out-of-the-box opinions and ideas emerge. In short everyone – really everyone – agrees that

groupthink should be avoided like the plague and that new ideas are as good as gold”

(Buchanan, 2012).

Another consequence of a non-confrontation culture or attitude, and another version of

“groupthink”, is to be found in the Abilene Paradox, a parable about how groups follow a

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decision-making process that is not entirely open to individual differences of opinion.

“Stated simply, when organizations blunder into Abilene paradox, they take actions in

contradiction to what they really want to do and therefore defeat the very purposes they are

trying to achieve. Organization members fail to accurately communicate their desires and/or

beliefs to one another. In fact, they do just the opposite, thereby leading one another into

misperceiving the collective reality” (Harvey, 1988). The lack of true confrontation among

team members leads the organization into a group decision contrary to each member’s wish.

Lack of confrontation is also a major cause of interpersonal conflicts; “People usually

associate consensus with harmony but we found the opposite: teams that insisted in

resolving substantial conflict by forcing consensus tended to display the most interpersonal

conflicts. A considerable body of academic research has demonstrated that conflict over

issues is not only likely between top management teams but valuable. Where there is little

conflict over issues there is also likely to be poor decision making. We found that the teams

that engaged in healthy conflict over issues not only made better decisions but moved faster

as well; without conflict groups lose their effectiveness. Managers often become withdrawn

and only superficially harmonious. We found that the alternative to conflict is usually not

agreement but apathy and disengagement. Teams unable to foster substantive conflict

ultimately achieve, on average, lower performance. Among the companies that we

observed, low-conflict teams tended to forget to consider key issues or were simply unaware

of important aspects of their strategic situation. (Eisenhardt et al., 2009).

Not confronting authority can lead to ethical and moral condemnable acts and behaviors;

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“2008 financial collapse…also involves the multitude of people who were aware of the

unethical behavior of others, yet, did little or nothing in response, assuming perhaps that

someone smarter than them understood how it all worked” (Bazerman & Tenbrunsel, 2011)

In the 1960’s, Stanley Milgram (Milgram,2009) carried out a series of experiments in which

human subjects were given progressively more painful electro-shocks in a careful calibrated

series to determine to what extent people will obey orders even when they knew them to be

painful and immoral, to determine how people will confront or obey authority regardless of

consequences. The psychologist Philip Zimbardo (Zimbardo, 2007) did a similar experience

and explains in his book how a group of ordinary students were placed in a mock prison and

how, in less than a week, the study had to be terminated when the “guards” became

increasingly sadistic and the “prisoners” pathological. Hannah Arendt makes the hypothesis

in her book on Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem (Arendt, 2006) of the “banality of evil”, arguing

that evil comes from a failure to think, thus to confront. Adding to that comment, Jerry

Harvey (1988) reinforces H. Arendt’s argument that Eichmann has never been really

confronted by any determined opposition, but rather was almost always faced with

collaboration not to say collusion.

In view of all the negative, often catastrophic and sometimes even inhuman consequences

of avoiding conflict, in the workplace but as well in the society as a whole, it would seem

therefore logical and rational not to avoid but to confront in order to confirm (1) whether

there is a real serious disagreement which apparently cannot be solved except through

“fight or flee” (in the workplace it can mean, for example, asking for mobility or resigning) or

(2) if a compromise can be found because parties involved cognitively or emotionally

understand that stakes are so high that option one is not valid or reasonable and that all

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parties involved have to accept modifications of their respective positions in order to reach

an agreement even if it is unsatisfactory for each individual party; we, at least intuitively,

understand or feel that in a VUCA world (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) or in

ever more personal and professional complex systems, we are bound to negotiate and to

found a compromise; and (3) whether disagreement is really present, but only after a

respectful, sincere, matter-of-fact, courageous, “fair processed”, confrontation, driving

therefore the “decider” (the leader, the manager, the parent, the person in charge) to take

the final decision; in that case, either the “losing” parties accept that their position has not

been winning and therefore align behind the person in charge, or we are back to option (1).

Why is that so, then, that, in the workplace at least, not to mention in the political and social

arenas, the great number of brilliant, highly conscious, and rational, leaders, of highly

experienced, visionary, and rational, boards of Directors, of highly professional, MBA

trained, therefore rational, management teams, of well-thought, and rational,

Organizational Designs managers, are suffering from this too common lack of confrontation

symptom ? Why can’t “la crème de la crème” of the business world identify and take

concrete actions to make sure that they free themselves and their teams and organizations

from this paralyzing syndrome which consequences can be so devastating for themselves

and for entire organizations, not to say for society as a whole ?

And what if it had nothing to do with Rationality (or the work of our conscious) but on the

contrary with Irrationality (or the work of our unconscious)?

Anybody totally defiant to the notion of unconscious or a firm believer that all our actions

and decisions are rational and made out of pure consciousness, should read at least Sigmund

Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life and Interpreting Dreams , to understand that, slips

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of the tongue, forgetting mistakes of speech or lapses (in reading or in writing), errors,

forgetting of intentions, and, of course, dreams, which we all experience in our everyday life,

prove that we are “not master in our own home”, i.e. that there are unconscious forces

below the surface of our rational, conscious mind.

We would like therefore to study in this paper the lack of confrontation symptom through

the psychodynamics “lens” of the “Clinical Paradigm”.

The clinical paradigm is a “conceptual framework that not only recognizes but celebrates the

human factor, building on psychoanalytic concepts and techniques. When using a clinical

lens to study the life of people in organizations, remember that: Rationality is an illusion,

much of what happens to us is beyond conscious awareness, the past is the lens through

which we can understand the present and shape the future, nothing is more central to who

we are than the way we express and regulate emotions, we all have blind spots and basic

motivational need systems determine our personality” (Kets de Vries, 2006). Clinical

paradigm is therefore building upon foundation of psychoanalytic central theory stating that

“much of our mental life is unconscious” (Milton, Polmear & Fabricius, 2011). Indeed, the

clinical paradigm states that what you see is not what you get, or “what really goes on in

organizations takes place in the intrapsychic and interpersonal world of the key players”

(Kets de Vries, 2006) and that, therefore, as most of our behavior is unconscious, our

challenge, all the more for leaders and managers, is, in psychodynamic terms, to “manage

the elephant” in us. Like it or not, “abnormal behavior is more normal than most people are

prepared to admit. All of us have a neurotic side. “ (Kets de Vries, 2006). Or said with humor:

everybody is normal until you know them better! We can add that what is true at individual

level is true as well at group level and that, therefore, organizations as a whole, like

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individuals, are often driven by their emotions and their unconscious mechanisms. (Branche,

2008). “Just as every neurotic symptom has an explanatory history, so has every

organizational act; just as symptoms and dreams can be viewed as signs replete with

meaning, so can specific acts, statements and decisions in the boardroom” (Kets de Vries,

2006). “in addition, the business also took on the quality of a transitional object

(Winnicott,1975), a plaything evoking the illusion of unity with the mother and creating an

intermediate area of experience. It resembles a space between inner and external reality, a

place where he could re-enact his fantasies; through play he could master his anxieties”

(Kets de Vries, 2009); the enterprise represents therefore an extension of the entrepreneur

or leader’s self.

Even the most successful leaders are prone to highly irrational behavior, or too many well -

built strategies and plans in the work place derail because of unconscious forces that

influence behavior; therefore, we can assert with psychoanalyst and clinical professor of

leadership development at INSEAD, Manfred Kets de Vries, that “rejecting the clinical

paradigm is a mistake, plain and simple”. (Kets de Vries, 2006)

Confront the unknown

The first step therefore to understand the psychodynamics at work in the tendency not to

confront is to ….confront, as leaders and teams managers, the unknown, meaning our

unconscious, to become aware of the irrationality that drives us, to confront our “inner

theater” and to discover and accept the fact that we all have “blind spots”. “Psychoanalysis

takes a dynamic view of the mind seeing movement, energy and in particular conflict as

intrinsic to mental life” (Milton, Polmear & Fabricius, 2011). Leaders or managers are not

psychotherapists, and should not believe they are as they could otherwise do harm by not

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mastering what is a profession in itself requiring long years of (clinical) practice and, for

psychoanalysts themselves, long years of personal analysis. However, leaders and managers

cannot stay any longer completely unaware of psychodynamics concepts enabling them to

better know themselves and others, especially when managing people.

“It is essential for healthy functioning that we do not remain strangers to ourselves. We

need to free ourselves from the bonds of past experience to be able to explore new

challenges in life” (Kets de Vries, 2006). Not remaining strangers to ourselves means

confronting our “inner theater” as much as the outside world and others, digging past our

“false self” in order to find our “true self” (Winnicott, 1965 & Lefèvre, 2012). This necessary

introspection to confront our unconscious and our past can be done through therapy if

required as “it is impossible either to receive or to provide real therapeutic help as long as

the personal, emotional confrontation with one’s own past is avoided” (Miller, 1997), but it

can be done as well, as often in the workplace, through coaching or, at minimum, through

the development of individual self-awareness, learning to use “self as an instrument” and

learning how to be at the same time “at the balcony” and “on the dance floor” (Heifetz &

Linsky, 2002)

To introspect, we must be aware and go past the many defense mechanisms deployed by the

ego mediating, confronting, the demands of the id, superego and external reality (Milton,

Polmear & Fabricius, 2011). “A defense mechanism is an automatic, unconscious mental

operation, taking place in the ego, which has the function of helping the person to retain

psychic equilibrium.” (Milton, Polmear & Fabricius, 2011); there are various defense

mechanisms : denial, repression, reaction formation, regression, isolation, projection,

introjection, rationalization, intellectualization, displacement and sublimation, all aimed at

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protecting the ego against anxiety and other related negative emotions such as guilt and

shame. (Funder, 1997; Laplanche & Pontalis, 2009). Freud emphasized how these defense

mechanisms defend against anxiety produced by psychic conflict but David Funder (1997)

believes that they also function to keep us from worrying too much about the real world, or

to keep us, positively or negatively, from confronting reality, including, and we could even

say all the more, in the workplace. Projection and identification are defenses whereby parts

of the self are attributed to the other or those of the other to the self. In projection, disliked

aspects of the self are disowned and attributed to another. Projection always involves a

denial of reality. This often involves polarized splitting, with both idealization and

denigration (Milton, Polmear & Fabricius, 2011) or even scapegoating. Projection is central

to transferential relationships as we will see later.

Repression is a central defense mechanism in which unacceptable feelings or thoughts are

pushed from consciousness. Repression can be considered as a universal psychic process at

the base of the constitution of the unconscious (Laplanche & Pontalis, 2009) and if we had a

“good enough mother” (Winnicott, 2006) and/or caretakers during our childhood, we may

find ourselves in a situation where basic id drives (for example sex and aggressivity) are

repressed because not being acceptable by the superego (Funder, 1997). As a leader or

manager, I may desire my Female colleague, who is married, but my initial sexual desire or

drive is repressed by the ego because it may have practical negative consequences (I may

get slapped in the face, fired for sexual harassment) and by the superego because of my

country’s culture and law, my education and because “thou shall not desire your neighbors’

wife”. Repression of basic id drives, not only is not creating major problems or symptoms in

the ego, if, of course, id and superego are not creating a too strong psychic conflict, but it is

even, as developed by Freud in his books Totem and Taboo and Civilization and its

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Discontents, the origin of social bonds between people and the base of culture and

civilization.

On the other hand, major traumas taking place during childhood are deeply repressed with

often dramatic consequences at later life stages; indeed, these traumas happen before the

small human being can mentalize, meaning “making sense of what happens in the mind”

(Allen, 2003) or verbalize/symbolize, in the sense that “Lacan came to see language as

central, a matrix which fundamentally shapes and forms us” (Milton, Polmear & Fabricius,

2011), the unbearable emotion, like children victims of incest, rape, maltreatment, violence

or total lack of physical or emotional caring or “good enough” holding and handling

(Winnicott,2006 & Lefèvre, 2012) by parents, siblings or other members inside or outside the

family circle. Alice Miller (Miller, 1997, 2005, 2011) has achieved worldwide recognition for

her work on the causes and effect of childhood traumas in adulthood be it for the individual

himself, through heavy psychic and physical disorders and symptoms (feelings of emptiness,

alienation, depression – and its opposite grandiosity, anxiety crisis, addictions of all kinds,

somatization, auto-mutilation, suicide…etc.), but also for the people around that person in

the family and, obviously in the workplace. If not confronted and treated, mainly through

long and painful psychotherapy or psychoanalysis, repressed childhood traumas can express

itself in the workplace through leaders or managers repeating the repressed childhood

trauma like abandon or maltreatment in the form of a neurotic or worse psychotic

leadership and organizations “culture” (Kets de Vries, 2006,2009). Alice Miller gives

numerous extreme examples in her books of famous (country) leaders of the past who

became despots and monsters and who all had in common a traumatic childhood like Hitler,

Stalin, Saddam Hussein or Robert Mugabe, just to name a few. Manfred Kets de Vries (2005)

in his book Lessons on Leadership by Terror explains how the infamous 19th century African

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King Shaka Zulu, “an unwanted child, expelled from his parents’ tribes, terrorized by other

children” became later a cruel leader which brutal reign caused 2 million deaths.

Whereas it is not easy for an individual like a leader or a manager to identify alone, without

therapeutic or coaching help, strong defense mechanisms, especially those which “protect”

him or others from, for example, deeply rooted childhood traumas, there are some which

are often played in private life and, all the more, in the workplace, which are not only more

“accessible” to the “emotionally intelligent” leader or manager (Goleman, 2006) but which,

we believe cannot be ignored anymore by them if they want to lead and manage efficiently

in a “VUCA world”.

The power of transference

“We are all products of our past, influenced until we die by the developmental experiences

given by our caretakers. Childhood experiences play an absolute crucial role in personality

development, particularly in the way people relate to others. These experiences contribute

to specifically preferred response patterns that in turn result in a tendency to repeat certain

behavior patterns. The psychological imprints of primary early caregivers – particularly our

parents – are so strong that they cause a confusion in place and time, making us act towards

others as if they were significant people from the past; and these imprints stay with us and

guide our interactions throughout our lives. Though we are generally unaware of

experiencing transference – the term given by psychologists to this confusion of time and

place – we may relate to our boss as we did to our mother, or an important client as we did

to our father. The mismatch between the reality of our present situation and our

subconscious scenario (colleagues or clients are not parents after all) may lead to

bewilderment, anxiety, depression, anger and even aggression.” (Kets de Vries, 2006).

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For Freud, patients were ready to end therapy when they understood and mastered their

transference. They were then better equipped to confront their inner theater and the world

as it is. Leaders need to understand transference because on one hand it can be the glue

that binds people to a leader, but on the other hand “it is a real threat to leaders because it

destroys objectivity; this is why a good CEO will work hard to help his executive team

members see one another as they really are” (Maccoby, 2004). “Whatever role followers

project onto their leaders, most male CEOs in traditional organizations have consciously or

unconsciously encouraged paternalistic transferences. They tend to show themselves in

paternalistic settings – presiding over large meetings or smiling on videotapes – where the

message is invariably reassuring, upbeat, hopeful…the message is always the same : trust me

to steer you through these troubled waters” (Maccoby, 2004) Followers have then a

tendency not to confront this paternalistic figure who, in turn, believes he is the Father, not

to say “God”, and is losing touch with reality; transferential veneration discourages

confrontation. The creation of more organic organizations, flat, flexible structures that allow

lateral communication for continuous consultation and the exchange of ideas help defuse

excessive transferential manifestations. “The more pyramidal the organization the more

chances there are to have transferential manifestations while, on the other hand, a more flat

organization fosters a more siblings-like transference, offering people the opportunity of

developing their maturity, responsibility and a more reality- than fantasy prone action”.

(Kets de Vries, 2009).

Two important subtypes of transferential patterns are especially common in the workplace:

Mirror transference : Winnicott (2005) highlighted that the first mirror a baby looks into is

his mother’s face and for Lacan (Homer,2004)” the mirror phase corresponds to Freud’s

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stage of primary narcissism, a stage when the subject is in love with the image of himself and

his own body which precedes the love of others….although the child initially confuses its

image with reality, he/she soon recognizes that the image has its own properties, finally

accepting that the image is his own image, a reflection of himself” For Lacan the ego

emerges at this moment of alienation and fascination with one’s own image; “the primary

conflict between identification with, and primordial rivalry with, the other’s image, begins a

dialectical process that links the ego to more complex social situations. To exist, one has to

be recognized by an-other. But this means that our image, which is equal to ourselves, is

mediated by the gaze of the other. The other becomes the guarantor of ourselves. We are at

once dependent on the other as the guarantor of our own existence and a bitter rival to that

same other” Within organizations, the mirroring process between leaders and followers can

become collusive when followers use leaders to reflect what they want to see, and leaders

rarely resist that kind of affirmation. The result is a mutual admiration society. Leaders who

are fully paid up members tend to take actions designed to shore up their image rather than

serve the needs of the organization. This is why “consensus managers tend to assemble

teams of people who are like themselves.” (Sorcher & Brant, 2002). In times of rapid

change, embedded mirroring processes can be fatal to organizations. When things change

quickly, we all need to be able to face the new reality quickly to meet developing

challenges”. (Kets de Vries, 2009).

Idealizing Transference: All children idealize their caregivers as a way of building their own

ego and self-esteem; “We all idealize people important to us, beginning with our first

caretakers, assigning powerful imagery to them. Through this idealizing process, we hope to

combat feelings of helplessness and acquire some of the power of the person admired.

Idealizing transference is a kind of a protective shield for followers.” The problem is that

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some leaders might be happy to find themselves in a “hall of mirrors that lets them see only

what they want to see. In this world of illusion, the boundaries that define normal work

processes disappear, at least for the entitled leader, who has nothing to restrain him or her

from acting inappropriately, irresponsibly, or even unethically. Any follower who challenges

the leader’s behavior risks triggering a tantrum” (Kets de Vries, 2006). Followers tend then

to avoid rather than confront the leader because they fear his reaction; a strong defense

mechanism against the anxiety triggered by the aggressive leader is identification to the

aggressor himself like, for example, in the Stockholm syndrome (McMains & Mullins, 2001).

When followers face an abrasive leadership (Kets de Vries,2006) their fear to confront

translates into the “strong incentive to become like that superior force, as a form of

protection against future aggression”. Followers are therefore not only totally submissive to

that superior force through the introjection (Laplanche & Pontalis, 2009) of the leader’s

qualities and power but they gradually move from being threatened to bullying others.

“Because the need for idealization is an omnipresent phenomenon – humankind’s way of

finding strength in an otherwise anxiety-provoking world – we often see followers

responding to their leaders as they would have done to their parents or other authority

figures while growing up…leadership works partly because of the human tendency to

idealize although very few leaders have a truly charismatic disposition” (Kets de Vries, 2009).

Lack of confrontation because of fear of separation

John Bowlby’s seminal theory of attachment (Bowlby, 1997), capitalizing on his dual

expertise of psychoanalysis and ethology, stipulates that early separation from mother, or a

prime caretaker, can have detrimental behavioral consequences. Bowlby conducted an

experiment in 1944 in which the study of 44 young delinquents showed that 40% of them

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who had to be separated from their mother for a period over 6 months between the age of 6

months to 5 years and 70% of them showed a particular personality lacking tenderness:

apparently sociable, but strangely detached, they expressed indifference, no affection and

were little reactive to punishment. This discovery has anticipated Klein’s and Bion’s concepts

of the importance of the mother’s presence to contain the aggressive drives of the infant.

(Pierrehumbert, 2003) “So long as a child is in the unchallenged presence of a principal

attachment-figure, or within easy reach, he feels secure. A threat or loss creates anxiety, and

actual sorrow; both, moreover, are likely to arouse anger” (Bowlby, 1997). In the work place

as well “the fundamental organizing principle driving and structuring human existence is the

need for affiliation…these attachment needs will continue to manifest themselves

throughout our life. The breaking of these bonds may lead to feelings of annihilation,

persecution and loss….the most important tenet of attachment behavior theory propositions

is that a young child needs to develop a relationship with a least one primary caregiver to

enable normal social and emotional development…the nature of individual’s attachment

relationships will determine whether the outcomes lead to feelings of security or insecurity.

(Kets de Vries, 2006)

The lack of confronting others, either avoiding physical contact (the leader in his “ivory

tower”) or not “putting the horse on the table” during group discussions has to do with the

fear of separation and the fear of being rejected by and from the group and can lead, as seen

earlier to groupthink or “to Abilene”: “it is tempting to say that the core of the paradox lies

in the individual’s fear of the unknown. Actually, however, we do not fear what is unknown,

but we are afraid of things we know about. What do we know about that frightens us into

such apparently inexplicable behavior? Separation, alienation and loneliness are things we

know about – and so is fear. Both research and experience indicate that ostracism is one of

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the most powerful punishments that can be devised” (Harvey, 1988). In Harvey’s opinion, it

was the inborn fear of separation and the reciprocal desire for attachment that led Adolf

Eichmann to carry orders with which he might not have agreed.

Being a leader inevitably implies certain loneliness with followers (some of them who might

be former peers if the leadership position is recent) who project their own fantasies on the

leader who, because he has to take, sometimes, unpleasant decisions or because he has the

illusion that he needs no one, starts to create a distance between him and his followers. This

distance may cause frustration of his own (or of his team and organization) dependency

needs; increased isolation may make them anxious; “the needs for affectionate bonds and

attachment is a universal human characteristic… when this need is frustrated, separation

anxiety may be reactivated, making for a strong regressive pull…. Illusions of grandeur,

delusions of persecution, and paranoia will raise their ugly head. Consequently, leaders may

resort to one of the more primitive defense mechanisms: splitting, having an oversimplified

view of the world, and searching for scapegoats” (Kets de Vries, 2009). “Organization

members take actions in contradiction to their understanding of the organization’s

problems, because thinking about acting in accordance with what they believe needs to be

done makes them intensely anxious. In essence, they choose to endure the negative

professional and economic consequences of their decisions in order to avoid such anxiety”

(Harvey, 1988). Why does action anxiety occurs ? “To sum up, action anxiety is partly caused

by the negative fantasies that organizations members have about what will happen if they

act in accordance with their understanding of what is sensible. The negative fantasies

provide the individual with an excuse that releases him psychologically – both in his own

eyes and, frequently, in the eyes of the others – from the responsibility to act to solve

organization problems” (Harvey, 1988). Negative fantasies occur because of real risk (yes, an

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employee can be fired by telling the truth to his boss; but it may not happen as well) but as

well from the fantasized fear of separation which is at the heart of the Abilene Paradox.

Phantasy and Reality confrontation

Unconscious phantasy is the primary, continuous, content of the unconscious. (Milton,

Polmear & Fabricius, 2011). The term phantasy evokes the opposition between imagination

and reality (perception). This opposition, a major reference of psychoanalysis, leads to

define phantasy as a pure illusionary production which would not resist correct

apprehension of reality. (Lagache & Pontalis, 2009). Neurotic leaders tend to have difficulty

confronting and therefore managing phantasy and reality. Let’s have a look at some of the

personalities most common in the workplace, and described in details in Manfred Kets de

Vries books (2006,2009,2011).

Whereas a certain degree of narcissism is perfectly natural and healthy and contributes to

positive behaviors such as assertiveness, confidence and creativity, extreme narcissism is

characterized by egotism, self-centeredness, grandiosity, lack of empathy, exploitation,

exaggerated self-love, and failure to acknowledge boundaries. The narcissistic leader tends,

for example to live in his own world, his own reality and stay blind to the possible

consequences of his actions. “in workplaces around the world, even the mildest narcissists

seize the opportunity, when it presents itself, to reincarnate themselves as living gods. In

that transformation, they lose the ability to distinguish between fantasy and reality” (Kets de

Vries, 2006). The leader’s narcissism is often reinforced by the management surrounding him

with psychodynamics at work like, for example, transference and counter-transference

schemes; idealization or image feedback by the surrounding environment to the leader can

provoke some regressive processes during which the real person and the reality are lost.

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Narcissists’ tendency to blame others if things go wrong leads to a culture of fear fostering

silence spiraling among teams. “this narcisstic attitude encourages submissiveness and

passive dependency in subordinates, stifling their critical functions and their reality-testing

skills” (Kets de Vries, 2006). With their need for power, status, prestige, and glamour, many

narcissistic personalities eventually end up in leadership positions. Kets de Vries makes a

distinction between the constructive narcissist and the reactive one. “Constructive

narcissism develops in response to “good enough” care. Parents who give their children a lot

of support, age-appropriation frustration, and a proper “holding environment” for their

emotional reactions produce well-balanced, positive children who possess a solid sense of

self- esteem, a capacity for introspection, and an empathetic outlook. These individuals have

a high degree of confidence in their own abilities and are highly task and goal oriented.

Constructive narcissistic…take advice and consult with others before moving forward,

valuing cooperation over solo performance, although they take ultimate responsibility and

never blame others when things go wrong… they have the capacity to become larger-than-

life figures, in the best sense of that term, serving as transformational leaders and inspiring

models” On the other hand, “people suffering from narcissistic personality disorders, or

reactive narcissists, in a leadership position, become fixating on power, status, prestige, and

superiority. They overvalue their personal worth, arguing that, as exceptional people, they

deserve special privileges and prerogatives. They act in a grandiose, haughty way, expect

special favours, flout conventional rules, and feel entitled; they are un-empathetic,

inconsiderate to others, exploitative, and unconstrained by objective reality “ In workplaces

around the world, even the mildest narcissist may seize the opportunity to reincarnate

themselves as living gods. In that transformation, they lose the ability to distinguish between

phantasy and reality. Their inability to accept criticism or the free exchange of ideas, their

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self-righteousness and self-centeredness, their poor problem-solving, and their inability to

compromise impair organizational adaptation to internal and external changes. In extreme

cases this sends the organization into a downward spiral. This narcissistic attitude

encourages submissiveness and passive dependency in subordinates, stifling their critical

functions and their reality-testing skills”(Kets de Vries, 2006).

Schizoid and avoidant personalities may have emotional or cognitive deficits that makes

them either incapable of making close relationships and having no wish to become closer, or

actively detached, their detachment being more self-protective as early circumstances have

put them on a path away from people although they would like to move closer (Kets de

Vries, 2006).

People with a depressive disposition have feelings of low self-esteem and worthlessness,

they believe they are bad, suffer from their lack of spontaneity and their inability to take

initiative, all the more to confront others or external reality.

For the leader having an abrasive disposition, the end always justifies the means, no matter

how harsh those means can be. The primary defense-mechanism used by abrasives is

isolation, projection and rationalization. At the origin there is often a history of misplaced

parental rejection or hostility – that is, the child has been the inappropriate recipient of

parental anger. As the most vulnerable member within the family system, the child is the

most convenient outlet for displaced aggression, easy to scapegoat and labeled as bad. This

kind of treatment leads to feeling of resentment. Preoccupied with command, power and

dominance, this personality type is more commonly found in leaders than followers.

Abrasives want to gain and retain as much power as possible to prevent others from

controlling and harming them. These people often lack one important quality necessary for

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effective leadership: the ability to create networks and build alliances with others which

would help them be connected to reality.

The Paranoid is rife in organizations with his unwarranted suspiciousness and distrust of

people. His view that people are driven by hidden motives leads to a distortion of

perceptions, thoughts and memories. Paranoiacs favor three defense mechanisms : splitting

(good vs evil, us vs them); projection (blaming others for feelings that originate within

themselves and for faults and errors that are rightfully theirs) and denial (negating the

reality of a particular situation). Leaders with a paranoid disposition are often too isolated to

confront reality through constructive reality-testing, confused they are between subjective

and objective reality.

Hypomania and Alexithymia also abound in the workplace. Hypomania is a mild form of

bipolar disorder (or manic-depression) and alexithymia (the word comes from the Greek “no

word for emotion.”), is a difficulty to express and understand emotions. Hypomanic

behavior has to do with Dionysus; “according to legend, Dionysus was subjected to both

great ecstasy and great suffering, symbolizing the struggle between creativity and madness”

(Kets de Vries, 2009). Followers are usually drawn to such charismatic (i.e. with inherent

authority) personalities to whom they often identify themselves. Charisma is a precious

quality but it has a darker side as history has highlighted by “dark” charismatic leaders like

Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin or Saddam Hussein. On a more positive side, John Gardner describes

in his book (Gardner, 2005) why America is so hypomanic because it is populated with

immigrants who had the will, optimism and daring to take the leap into the unknown and

have passed those traits onto their descendants. Charisma and transference are closely

interconnected. Instability in mood state, alternating between euphoria and irritation, is

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frequently seen in hypomanic personalities. When confronted with opposition, they can

become pretentious, impertinent, and even verbally or physically aggressive. “Denial is a

frequent defense mechanism among hypomanic leaders – a mechanism that seriously

impairs their critical faculty” (Kets de Vries, 2009). It is easily understandable that it is not

easy to confront such a personality.

The alexithymic executive is the opposite of the hypomanic one and it is the lack of feelings

rather than the excess of it that makes it a personality difficult as well to confront.

Alexithymics lack empathy, self-awareness and resort to action as a way of dealing with

conflict, and have a total absence of human quality in human relationships.

While true impostors deliberately base their identity on impersonation (rejecting and

devaluating their own identity), neurotic impostors, though they may, as leaders, have

achieved great success, believe, deep down, that they do not deserve it; in their inner world,

they have the subjective experience of being a fraud, looking for external factors because

they suffer from deeply rooted anxieties about their exact place in life which, here again,

often comes from childhood experience or trauma. Neurotic impostors cannot rid

themselves of the subliminal feeling that guilt and retribution are the inevitable

consequences of success. As a result of that ambivalence, executives who believe that they

are impostors may subtly engage in self-sabotage through procrastination, perfectionism

(including a refusal to delegate) and ineffective use of their time. “My experience discussing

this topic with large groups of senior executives has shown me that feelings of imposture are

alive and well thriving in today’s organizations” (Kets de Vries, 2009). Being at the top often

bring imposturous feeling to a head; it becomes then harder to talk freely and openly to

people, and harder to find support and encouragement and procrastination or workaholism

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are often hyper-compensating habits which prevent the leader from learning and from

confronting others and external reality.

The clinical lens helped us better understand why leaders and managers may have difficulty

confronting their own or other’s “inner theater”, leading them and their teams and

organization to negative and sometimes catastrophic results.

What can be done then to foster confrontation in the workplace and break the “silence

spiral”?

A company is composed of various individuals who form a system, a collective force. The

leader must thrive to foster “added intelligence” the same way in the economy added value

(tax) measures the creation of value. All must be made to avoid entropy in the system. A

system is built on relationships, quality of connection, interchange between members of a

team and is therefore more than the mere sum of its parts or, as we saw earlier, less than

the sum of its parts when dysfunctionality causes entropy. The “added intelligence” of a

system comes from the confrontation of ideas and points of view, from combining diverse

approaches, from constructing on the disagreements in order to find a better, more creative

and more suitable solution. Additionally, the system must be geared to confront external

reality in order to avoid the “boiled frog syndrome” or the “Abilene Paradox.” Silence, lack of

confrontation produce entropy in the workplace and, in line with the “clinical paradigm”, our

hypothesis is that the first step to break that silence spiral is to accept the reality of the

unconscious and to confront the power of emotions.

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Confronting emotions

We are all at least intuitively aware of two fundamentally different ways of knowing, acting

and confronting internal and external reality, one associated with feelings and experience

and the other with intellect (Epstein, 1994). From everyday life we can argue that there is an

automatic, intuitive mode of information processing that operates by different rules from

that of a rational mode. In common language we say that we operate with the head and the

heart, the heart being of course a metaphor for emotions. Our growing knowledge about the

structure of the brain and how it functions allows us to argue as well that we, as individual,

function with two hemispheres, the left which is more “rational, logical and objective” and

the right which is more “intuitive, thoughtful and subjective”. Anybody still doubtful about

how each hemisphere is confronting reality differently should watch the TED video

presentation by neuro-anatomist Jill Bolt Taylor (Bolt Taylor, 2008) who shares her

existential experience subsequent to a cerebrovascular accident affecting her left

hemisphere. We are almost all familiar today, even in the business world, with the

difference between the IQ, which measures intellectual intelligence and the more recent EQ,

which measures Emotional Intelligence, (Goleman, 2011;Stein & Book,2006). The connection

between emotion and reasoning has been described by neurologist Antonio Damasio who

challenged in his book Descartes’s error (Damasio, 1994) the traditional ideas between

emotions and rationality, and more specifically the split between mind and body; Damasio

scientific discoveries, through various case studies, demonstrate that emotions are not a

luxury, they are essential to rational thinking, decision-making and normal social behavior;

“the new proposal in Descartes’s Error is that the reasoning system evolved as an extension

of the automatic emotional system, with emotion playing diverse roles in the reasoning

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system” (Damasio, 1994). Our “reasoning brain” is therefore built up on (or connected to,

confronted to) our “emotional brain” which operates as a foundation.

“All of us, as part of our paleolithic heritage (where we needed to be on the lookout for

predators at all times), have a tendency to converge emotionally. We all seem to be

programmed to be receptive to other people’s emotions and to mimic and synchronize facial

expressions, vocalizations, postures or body language and we experience the emotions

associated with the particular behavior we are mimicking. “In a team situation, it is often the

mood of the leader that sets the tone. If the leader is upbeat, the mood of the other team

members will rise. But if he or she is down, everyone is down” (Kets de Vries, 2006). It is

obvious that, should the leader be ready to confront reality and others (including himself,

accepting, for example, his own mistakes), he will send signs to his executive team and even

to the whole organization that they are free and safe to confront as well.

“We found that of all the elements affecting bottom-line performance, the importance of

the leader’s mood and its attendant behaviors are most surprising…the leader’s mood is

quite contagious, spreading quickly and inexorably throughout the business….a leader primal

task is emotional leadership. A leader needs to make sure that not only is he regularly in an

optimistic, authentic, high-energy mood, but also that, through his chosen actions his

followers feel and act that way too. Low levels of emotional intelligence create climates rife

for fear and anxiety…Managing for financial results, then, begins with the leader managing

his inner life so that the right emotional and behavioral chain reaction occurs… a leader must

first attend to the impact of his mood and behaviors before moving on to his wide panoply

of other critical responsibilities” (Goleman, Boyatzis & McKee, 2001). The leader must

therefore confront and manage his inner theater to be able to lead with emotional

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intelligence and to foster an emotionally intelligent organization, identifying itself to its

leader and able to confront reality including, if necessary, “brutal facts”. Of course laughter

is the most contagious of all emotions and that’s “because some of our brain’s open-loop

circuits are designed to detect smiles and laughter, making us respond in kind” (Goleman et

al, 2001). Research by Martin Seligman shows that high-functioning people generally feel

more optimistic about their prospects and possibilities than average performers (Seligman,

2006). This optimism is not a defense mechanism or a delusion to the brutal facts of life as

illustrated in the Stockdale Paradox (Collins, 2011) whereby on the one hand the leader

maintains an unwavering faith in the endgame (the optimism about the outcome) while

stoically confronting and accepting “the brutal facts of life” (not in the resignation sense but

more in the Buddhist or stoic way of accepting the reality as it is without projecting

judgment, good or bad, in it) . “This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith

that you will prevail in the end – which you can never afford to lose – with the discipline to

confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be” (Collins,

2011). Ethologist Frans de Waal explains in his TED video (De Waal,2012 ) and books (De

Waal,2005 ) that we, human beings, are geared like animals to mirror others’ emotions or

body language (like yawning or smiling) and psychologist Paul Ekman (2007) explains as well

how universal emotions like sadness, anger, surprise, fear, disgust, contempt and enjoyment

are contagious. During a crisis or a major change process, people begin to relax when they

see a calm, poised leader relating to their anxiety or loss. Optimistic leaders can therefore

influence greatly their management teams and whole organizations; the “father” of positive

psychology Martin Seligman explains in his book how Learned Optimism (Seligman, 2006)

can change our life and the one of those surrounding us at personal or professional levels.

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Optimism can also lead to passion, a word often banished from the workplace because

usually opposed to rational behavior; however, passion is energy, excitement, power,

limitless; it provides a capacity to endure difficulty. Leaders tend to be afraid of passion –

when it is not their own of course with its highly probable downside: bipolar disorder–

because it can subvert their authority. Leaders themselves can be bored and cut themselves

off from passion. Passion is linked to Chaos, it is the lighting of individual fires, taking the

risks of breaking rules and seeing where it goes. In life as in companies it is often the

confrontation between what philosopher Nietzsche called Dionysian (potentially destructive)

and Apollonian (structuring) forces (Nietzsche, 1886); of course part of these Dionysian

forces can feed destructive emotions (Goleman, 2004) such as hatred, craving or delusion,

that must be identified and contained. But it is clear today that confronting emotions, ours

and others, is a prerequisite to emotional balance and intelligence, at individual and group

levels, therefore to primal leadership (Goleman, Boyatzis & McKee, 2001) efficiency and to

emotionally based organizations performance.

Confronting yourself

The leader must therefore confront himself first to become a true emotional leader. He

must, as seen earlier, confront his inner theater; to do that he can search for outside help

like in therapy (when facing, for example, symptoms which can be incapacitating), the most

common being Freudian or Jungian psychoanalysis, psychotherapy (such as Neuro Linguistic

Programming or Transactional Analysis), Gestalt and Cognitive Based Therapy, or, obviously

more common in the workplace, through leadership, executive or group coaching; “in fact,

coaching is today’s most acceptable way of doing psychotherapy; indeed, the most effective

leadership coaches draw heavily on psychotherapeutic framework and skills. After all both

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leadership coaching and psychotherapy deal with behavior, emotion and cognition.” (Kets de

Vries, 2009).

Confrontation is often used during therapy as “confrontation is a powerful intervention

strategy within the therapeutic process. When done skillfully, it serves as a means for the

members themselves and the group-as-whole to address inconsistencies, clarify perceptions,

and to assume a more proactive rather than a reactive posture” (Reid, 1986). Confrontation

is directed towards “client discrepancies between his/her ideal and self, insight and action,

and illusion and reality” (Carkhuff & Berenson, 1967). Therapy is a way to confront one’s

inner theater and emotions as pointed out by psychotherapist Irving Yalom : ”it’s extremely

hard, even terrifying, to own the insight that you and only you construct your own life

design. Thus the problem in therapy is always how to move from an ineffectual intellectual

of a truth about oneself to some emotional experience of it. It is only when therapy enlists

deep emotions that it becomes a powerful force for change” (Yalom, 1989). Much can be

learned from group therapy in terms of confrontation for the leader and for managers of

either a small team (like an executive committee) or even a large organization; “conflict

cannot be eliminated from human groups…. If overt conflict is denied or suppressed,

invariably it will manifest itself in oblique, corrosive, and often ugly ways. Although our

immediate association with conflict is negative – destruction, bitterness, war, violence – a

moment of reflection brings to mind positive associations: drama, excitement, change, and

development. Therapy groups are no exception. Some groups become “too nice” and

diligently avoid conflict and confrontation, often mirroring the therapist’s avoidance of

aggression. Yet conflict is inevitable in the course of a group’s development that its absence

suggests some impairment of the developmental sequence. Learning how to deal effectively

with conflict is an important therapeutic step that contributes to individual maturation and

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emotional resilience.” (Yalom, 2005). Great parallels can obviously be made by leaders and

executives between group therapy confrontation or groups psychodynamics and the leader’s

confrontation of his own or with his team’s inner theater.

When the leader or the manager cannot benefit from an outside help to develop his own

self-awareness and emotional intelligence, he may try, in order to better confront reality or

others in the workplace, to develop self-reflection, introspection, mentalizing, using himself

as an instrument, “getting off the dance floor and going to the balcony” (Heifetz & Linsky,

2002), pushing himself outside his “comfort zone”, identifying, connecting with but, at the

same time, containing his own emotions and anxiety. The step back and reflect is all the

more important, when there is a crisis, that the leader must weigh the quick decisions made

against the realization that stress reduces cognitive abilities. The leader, all the more during

a change process, will have to find out “where he and his people are at” (Heifetz & Linsky,

2002); coaches and psychoanalysts often stop during an intervention or a cure and ask :

“where are you now ?”; equally, with his team or with his organization as a whole, the leader

must know where his people are at; for example, “if people have avoided a problem for a

long time, it should not be surprising that they try to silence when you push them to

face/confront it” (Heifetz & Linsky, 2002)

One of the leader’s main tasks is to identify and manage, as seen earlier, the transference

and counter-transference projections at work in his relationships with his teams, or within

his team, to identify his own personal triggers – what tends to push him into bad behavior,

and understand as well what it is that he does that can trigger unhelpful behavior in others,

and plan to avoid falling into those habits; this often requires confronting and solving what

some psychiatrists call our Core Conflictual Relation Themes (Luborsky, 2000). “The Core

39

Conflictual Relation Theme (CCRT) permeates our personal life and is at the heart of all our

repetitive relationship difficulties. The CCRT of key power holders determines the

organizational culture and the decision-making processes of the organization. Clearly then,

identifying the CCRT of a leader –isolating that person’s central theme – provides insight into

not only personality but also work style.“ (Kets de Vries, 2006). “A number of conflicting

forces – primitive impulses and defenses that combat our “rational” thinking – make up our

inner emotional life. We have seen earlier how many leaders (as many human beings in

general) have a tendency to avoid confrontation and all the more conflict, but there is also a

large group of executives who have a desperate need to be liked and approved of: the need

to be loved is the key theme in their CCRT. Another task of the leader is to unveil,

particularly in a change process, Competing Commitments which prevent executives, for

example, to change although they are not purposefully resistant;” instead, they are caught in

a competing commitment – a subconscious, hidden goal that conflicts with their stated

commitments. People often form big assumptions early in life and then seldom, if ever,

examine them. They are woven into the very fabric of our lives. But only by bringing them

into the light can people finally challenge their deepest beliefs and recognize why they are

engaging in seemingly contradictory behavior” (Kegan & Laskow Lahey, 2001). There are of

course other tools like, for example, the MBTI, or the Herrmann Brain Dominance

Instrument (Herrmann,1996) or the 360° personality and leadership audits (Kets de Vries,

2011) which are also available for the leader and the manager(s) to better know and

transform themselves and others and, thus, better confront reality. “Managers who use

instruments like the credibility of the MBTI or the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument

(HBDI) find that their employees accept the outcomes of the tests and use them to improve

their processes and behavior.” (Leonard & Straus,1997)

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Self-awareness is a first step, for the leader or for the executive, to better confront others

and reality. Business books and literature abound proposing guidelines, practical solutions,

action plans or even mere recipes on how to confront and to manage conflict; on our side,

we believe that the key ways to help the leader, the management team or the organization

as a whole to feel free and even encouraged to confront and to foster confrontation in the

workplace are: set up purpose, create a safe environment, build up a culture of

courageous dialogue and deep listening, implement power balance and fair process,

recognize your own power and build a coalition, look for the bad news, seek diversity and

make sure there are enough “peacocks in the land of penguins”, be provocative if

necessary but do no harm and, finally, accept vulnerability and be a “good enough” leader.

Teams hobbled by conflicts lack common goals. In order to favor confrontation over conflict

it is important for the leader to set clear objectives or goals and, key to defusing conflict, to

help people “find the greater good” (Archer & Cameron, 2009). If people are clear with what

they are all trying to achieve, they can then have a productive discussion about what may be

getting in the way of achieving it. Without that understanding each party is reduced to

trading in an attempt to get the best deal for themselves. This is why Robert Branche

believes that if two individuals or systems are in conflict, it is because they are competing for

the conquest of something unique that only one of them will get in fine.” On the other hand,

“if there is confrontation it’s because both want to reach the same objective but they

diverge on the way to get there”. (Branche, 2008) Joni & Beyer recommend as well to “focus

on the future, as a good future-facing fight speaks to what is possible, shifting the debate

away from what happened to what could happen; it is compelling and it involves uncertainty

(if things are certain there is no need to fight) and to pursue a noble purpose, as a right fight

connects people with a sense of purpose that goes beyond their own self-interest,

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unleashing profound collective imagination and abilities.” (Joni & Beyer 2009). The message

of the power of purpose or meaning is best delivered by Viktor Frankl (2006) who “has

devoted his career to a study of an existential approach to therapy, and who has apparently

concluded that the lack of meaning is the paramount existential stress. To him, existential

neurosis is synonymous with a crisis of meaninglessness” (Yalom, 1980)

When the purpose, the meaning, is set, the leader must then create a facilitating

environment (Johns,2005) to ensure people feel safe enough to be encouraged to confront.

A facilitating environment can be understood as a transitional space (Winnicott, 1971;

Lefèvre, 2012) where acting, playing, confronting others and reality can be done without

fear and anxiety. “From a conceptual point of view, the notion of transitional space is

symbolized by the contained or protected interaction between mother and infant; if people

have a safe area to play, they are more likely to reveal more about themselves, and have a

greater readiness to learn about new ways of functioning” (Kets de Vries, 2009). In a safe

environment, people are more likely to confront and therefore to break the spiral of silence.

Indeed, depending on the intensity, it may be difficult for some executives to open up. To

change this pattern, it is critical, therefore, to create a safe, transitional space, similar to the

therapeutic community in group therapy. “a therapeutic community is a program that relies

on interactions within the peer group to help members confront the reality of their mental

problems; the essential elements of a therapeutic community are setting behavioral limits,

creating sanctions, and rewards, and using the power of role modeling; as with group

coaching, peer influence plays a central role by facilitating social and psychological change,

through confrontation of certain issues by other team members; importantly, they will

interpret painful incidents in different ways – emotionally and cognitively reframing it, and

creating a new reality. Peer pressure can play an essential role in creating real tipping points.

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Trust is of course essential and the old Hippocratic dictum “do no harm” needs to be

stressed emphatically.” (Kets de Vries, 2006)

A safe environment is a place where courageous dialogue is thenorm. To confront means to

encounter, to talk face to face with someone, so the first action in order to confront is to

communicate with others and to verbalize. In individual or group’s therapy verbalizing is key:

“without conscious verbalization, team members are prone to be driven by bizarre, out-of-

awareness forces that may contribute to inappropriate behavior. The purpose of language is

to build a bridge between the visible and the invisible, the conscious and the unconscious.

The group coach or the “therapeutic” leader will encourage the expression of intrapsychic

conflict (and its attendant, emotional behavior) and its verbalization (as opposed to acting-

out behavior). Verbalizing has therefore a therapeutic effect and should be not only

welcomed but favored in a facilitating environment. The primary instrument to break a

culture of indecisiveness or silence is therefore human interactions and dialogue. Leaders

creating an atmosphere of safety permit candor, spirited discussion, group learning and

trust. Candor is a willingness to speak the unspeakable, to expose unfulfilled commitments,

to air the conflicts that undermine apparent consensus. Candor means that people express

real opinions, not what they think team players are supposed to say. “Candor helps wipe out

the silent lies and pocket vetoes that occur when people agree to things they have no

intention of acting on, like in the Abilene Paradox. (Charan, 2001) Informality encourages

candor and reduces defensiveness. People feel more comfortable asking questions and

reacting honestly. Obviously, the leader must be authentic when communicating and avoid

double-bind communication; a double bind is a communicative situation where someone

receives conflicting messages, one at verbal level, one at a more covert level” (Kets de Vries,

2006), making, thus, confrontation from and with others more difficult. Conversation is the

43

first component in the cycle of Constructive Confrontation (Hoover & Disilvestro, 2005).

Some business conversations can be hard: telling someone his/her work is not up to the

standard, having to disappoint someone that rely on you, confronting the boss on his

assumptions, are not easy: “these are the kind of conversations that trigger defensiveness

and attack, blame and counter-blame...etc.“ Fluency in difficult conversations is thus a

sophisticated skill and takes time – and practice – to master. But if you are to deal with

conflict effectively, you cannot do without it. (Archer & Cameron, 2009) “courageous

conversations occur when people are prepared and unafraid to say what they honestly think

and feel, to whom they need to say it, and to do so in a positive, constructive way so that

others can hear their message without judgment and respond to it in a similar manner”.

Courageous conversations should therefore be constructive and never harmful. In the best

places to work, courageous discussions are part of the DNA of the workplace where trust is

an essential part of organizational life and the glue of courageous conversations, meaning to

engage in a dialogue with people we do not always meet or like to meet to discuss things

that we do not normally discuss about. “It is through courageous conversations that a team

can address the undiscussables that have to be verbalized. The essential task of people who

want to create more effective team dynamics is to create and facilitate safe spaces in which

feelings can be brought into the open in a constructive manner, rather than left stewing

under the surface.” (Kets de Vries, 2006)

Courageous conversation requires as well from all parties involved to “listen to the song

beneath the words” (Heifetz & Linsky, 2002) or to “listen with the third ear”. (Kets de Vries,

Korotov & Florent-Treacy,2007); in psychotherapy it involves listening very carefully to what

someone is both saying and not saying; it calls into action the listener’s intuition and

emotional intelligence, to capture what is going on under the surface. Good listeners seek to

44

understand – and challenge, confront – the assumptions that lie below the surface of every

conversation. (Ferrari, 2012) In psychoanalysis, the patient is the one to talk and the analyst,

the one to listen deeply. Of course, in the workplace, it is not always easy to find the right

“ear” like, for example, with hypomanic leaders “who are not always the best listeners”

(Kets de Vries, 2009).

Another powerful way to encourage confrontation in the workplace and for taming

interpersonal conflict is to create a sense of fairness by balancing power within the

management teams, and through the whole organization. Fairness, as well as empathy,

cooperation and reciprocity are deeply embedded in human nature and even, according to

ethology, into animal behavior (de Waal, 2012). Fair process is a decision-making approach

which addresses our basic human need to be valued and respected. People care about the

decisions made by their management but they care more about the process used to make

these decisions; “in knowledge-based organizations – whose lifeblood consists of trust,

commitment and ideas – fair process is essential. It enables companies to channel

employees’ energy and creativity towards company’s goals” (Chan & Mauborgne, 2003).

Interpersonal conflict is therefore lowest in companies with fair process but as well with

balanced power structures where the top manager, or the management, of course exercise

their power but where all executives participate to the strategic decisions (Eisenhardt et al.,

2009) and/or are encouraged to oppose the leader (Maccoby & Scudder, 2011). “For

example combining the roles of CEO and Chairman in one person is an invitation to disaster.

There are very few leaders that can resist the siren call of this kind of power. Organizations

must also establish systems of accountability to encourage the participation of employees

and shareholders in corporate decision-making, thereby balancing the power equation.”

(Kets de Vries, 2006) “Leaders who encourage opposition based on experience, facts and

45

analysis are able to fully consider the issue at hand and generally get better results.

According to the research, the most successful leaders address 60% more opposition than

their peers” (Maccoby & Scuder, 2011). Opposition can be encouraged only if people feel

safe to oppose and know that, like in a brainstorming session, the basic rule is :“all ideas are

welcome and will not be judged or criticized by other members of the group”; people are

then encouraged and safe to say it all rather than remain silent.

Even if the power in the organization is not well shared or balanced it is important that every

individual, especially an executive, recognizes his own power; indeed, in the workplace we all

have much more power than we think and most of the times our boss for example needs us;

“the power to destroy the pernicious influence of the Abilene Paradox comes from

confronting and addressing the underlying reality of the situation, not from one’s

hierarchical position within the organization. Therefore, any organization member who

chooses to risk confronting that reality possesses the necessary leverage to release the

organization from the grip of the paradox.” (Harvey, 1988) Organization members usually

know more about the companies issues that they don’t know mainly because in the

“knowledge” economy, information availability thanks to technology provides top managers

but as well middle management with necessary facts and figures to be aware of the internal

and external situation; “organizational change and effectiveness may be facilitated as much

by confronting the organization with what it knows and agrees upon as by confronting it

with what it does not know or disagree about” (Harvey, 1988). Of course group power can be

even more impactful than individual power, so it is important for the leader, the executive,

and in fact for everybody in the workplace, to build a coalition, as it will be easier to break

the spiral of silence by giving more courage to speak up if the individual has the support of

others who believe like or in him. Building a coalition with other colleagues in the

46

organization can also, for example, “keep the hypomanic out of harm’s way. This strategy

does not address the underlying disorder, but it helps minimize damage to the individual in

question and to the organization” (Kets de Vries, 2009). A way to build a coalition is to

implement collaborative leadership which is a “management style and skill-set that engages

all participants by designing constructive processes for working together, that convenes

appropriate stakeholders, and facilitates and sustains their interaction” (Archer,D. &

Cameron, A.,2009). Additionally, “people we trust let us try out unfamiliar parts of our

leadership repertoire without risk” (Goleman et al, 2011).

A tactic the leader should use to be sure that his management team particularly is not afraid

of confronting him, contributing to his loss of reality testing, is to look for the bad news.

Indeed, management teams have a tendency to hide bad news to the leader who, then, in

that case, can follow Churchill’s example during World War II who, fearing that bad news

might not reach him because of his position and charisma, created a separate department

outside the normal chain of command. Charisma can be as well a liability as an asset, as the

strength of leadership personality can deter people from bringing up the brutal facts of

reality (Harvey, 1988); “the hope of leadership lies in the capacity to deliver disturbing news

and raise difficult questions in a way that people can absorb, prodding them to take up the

message rather than ignore it or kill the messenger.” (Heifetz & Linsky, 2002)

Inter-personal communication, safe space, courageous dialogue, deep listening, balance of

power and fair process, looking for the bad news, are all good and efficient ways to

encourage confrontation but to protect as well the workplace from complacency or

groupthink, the leader must strive to seek diversity in his team and organization in order for

him not to be only surrounded by “penguins” but also by “peacocks”. “Organizations need

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penguins as a conservative force, to maintain tradition, to provide institutional memory and

keep us from repeating the past, and to provide some stability in the face of constant

change. Penguins make sure that all i’s are dotted and the t’s are crossed. At the same time,

we need peacocks in our organizations to provide creativity and new thinking. Innovation

and breakthroughs almost never come from penguins, but always come from the peacocks,

those outside the mainstream. Peacocks see things from different perspectives, who are

always looking for the new angle, and they are outside the mainstream of tradition and

predictability” (Gallagher Hateley & Schmidt, 2001). A corporate culture needs to be created

where there is a healthy disrespect for the leader (Ryde, 2012), a culture where people can

speak their mind. Participation to executive management development programs like

Consulting and Coaching for Change from Insead is another way to encourage people to

better confront authority, combat statu quo or defuse company’s “boiled frogs syndrome”.

The leader or the organization as a whole must therefore make sure that the environment is

facilitating enough to allow the emergence of peacocks, deviants or fools (Kets de Vries ,

2006). Indeed, to break the walls of silence, we have sometimes to behave in ways that are

not considered appropriate for our particular organization. We can ask deviantly by, for

example, asking tough questions in a meeting where employees usually accept without

questions decisions from the top management. Deviance is, at heart, a creative act, a way of

searching out and inventing new approaches to doing things. Every team needs a deviant,

someone who can help the team by challenging the tendency to want too much

homogeneity which can stifle creativity and learning, or which can blur or simply hide

outside reality. Deviants are the individuals who are willing to say the things that nobody

else is willing to articulate. The deviant raises the level of people’s anxiety, which is a brave

thing to do for the leader to stay confronted with reality especially when he is surrounded by

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a too-much aligned executive team (Hackmann, 2009). In his research, Hackmann points out

that, teams with deviants outperformed teams without them. Manfred Kets de Vries in his

book Leadership Mystique makes a case as well for the fool (deviant) in organizations

insisting that every leader needs one. “the fool, a guardian of reality, uses antics and humor

to prevent the pursuit of foolish action, avoid groupthink, show the leader his or her

reflection, and remind him of the transience of power; because fools remind leaders of the

need for candor, they help them confront their true self. Leaders must therefore ask

themselves if they have someone playing the role of the fool in their organization and if not

they must wonder whether they have created the kind of organization in which people can

“talk back” to the leader and top management without fears or retaliation. (Kets de Vries,

2006). “Samuel Beckett in waiting for Godot wrote: “we are all born mad, some remain so”.

It is hoped that we all retain a touch of madness; without it, life in organizations would be

pretty dull. Moreover, such dullness would lead to complacency, making us less creative and

unprepared to deal with life’s discontinuities.” (Kets de Vries, 2009). When this “natural

dose” of madness is either not there or has been “destroyed” by isolation or stress from the

leadership position, the deviant is the one to instill that dose of missing madness necessary

to stay connected to reality. When the deviant does not exist within the company, an

external coach can play that role with often more acceptance as the person is not part of the

company and will leave after his mission is over. The coach will have then first to make sure

that the reason why he has been called in is the true one or not just the symptom; he will

then have to unveil the hidden cause. Playing the role of the fool will help him in confronting

the leader or the organization with reality; “the sage-fool plays an essential role in keeping

an organization on track, maintaining its ties to reality, and most important of all, fighting

the forces of hubris” (Kets de Vries, 2009). The deviant, or the wise-fool, can be used by the

49

leader or any manager in the company as, for example, a “sounding board” with whom to

play a trial-error process, helping bring to the executive or the organization a healthy dose of

reality. The deviant or fool often uses humor to pass on his messages; all the teams with low

interpersonal conflicts described ways on which they used humor on the job, while humor

was strikingly absent in teams marked by high interpersonal conflict. Humor is considered by

psychologists as a “mature” or even a “courage” defense mechanism (Mishinsky,1977).

Humor can also move decision making into a collaborative rather than a competitive frame

through its powerful effect on mood. A positive mood triggers a more accurate perception of

others’ arguments because people in good mood tend to relax their defensive barriers and

so can listen more effectively (Eisenhardt et al., 2009). Humor is the best deviant’s or fool’s

weapon. Humor is kind of a meta-communication meaning that with humor is

communicated more than what appears first.

When the leader realizes that one or more of his managers or that the organization as a

whole is risking or is already suffering from the “boiled frog factor” or, the other way

around, when boards or executive teams find the leader is plagued with the “muscle

syndrome”, whereby the leader is so “resistant to change that he may as well be cemented

in place” (Kets de Vries, 2006), the solution may well be to “shake” the organization or the

leader himself by applying sometimes provocative techniques borrowed from provocative

therapy (Farrelly,1974; Salem,2012) or provocative coaching (Hollander,2013); principals of

provocative therapy/coaching can be applied to many areas of life including business. The

latin word “provocare” literally means to “call forth”. For example, the provocative therapist

seeks to create environments that will result in the clients discovering their own solutions

and insights to matters they had previously considered problematic. “There are numbers of

central assumptions of provocative therapy that will govern the therapist’s behaviors

50

towards the client: people change and grow in response to challenge, people can change if

they chose to do so, clients have a greater ability to change than is often assumed by

therapists, the psychological fragility of patients is frequently overstated by both themselves

and others, adult and/or current experience is as significant as childhood experience, people

make sense and are ultimately logical and understandable, the key messages between

people are non-verbal…etc. What the provocative therapist is seeking to provoke in his client

are “assertive behaviors” like self-affirming behavior, realistic and appropriate self-defensive

behavior, psycho-social reality testing behavior, behavior that denotes the ability to

communicate positive messages (Farrelly, 1974).

Finally, we will complete our “toolbox” of confrontation with the apparently oxymoron-like

concept of good enough leader which we borrow, once again, from Winnicott (2006) and his

concept of the “good enough mother” who is able to provide good enough care to her

infant, creating for him a transitional space, a safe holding environment, to help his psychic

development through a sound self-esteem and self-confidence to explore and confront the

outside world. (Winnicott,2006; Lefèvre, 2012) The same way it is an illusion for the mother

to try to be “perfect”, it is a mirage for the leader to pretend to be “perfect” as well. Leaders

have to accept that they are not perfect and that it is better for them to be “good enough”

leaders providing a “good enough care” to their teams and organizations, “holding” them

when necessary, for example to overcome anxiety in a world changing fast, or during an

major internal change process. To accept to be a good enough leader, or executive, means to

accept ambivalence and vulnerability; “perfect and bulletproof are seductive but they don’t

exist in the human experience. We must walk into the arena, whatever it may be – a new

relationship, an important meeting, a creative process, or a difficult family conversation –

with courage and the willingness to engage” (Brown, 2012); the courage and the willingness

51

to confront means to “dare to show up and let ourselves be seen”, not expecting impossible-

to-reach perfectness but just “daring greatly” (Brown, 2012). These good enough or daring

greatly concepts applied to leadership are all the more important that studies have shown

that “bad is stronger than good” (Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenauer & Vohs, 2001), that is

to say that negative social interactions can be potentially more harmful than social support is

helpful. It is therefore more negative for a leader not to confront and “resign” his leadership

responsibilities, or leading by “laissez-faire”, than to endorse his responsibility and confront

reality and others. The leader will all the more have the courage to confront external reality,

i.e. endorse full responsibility of his position, that he will accept his own vulnerability – as

well as understand others’ vulnerability - and accept to be a good enough leader. In short, a

good enough leader will help the group confront reality, all the more when it is harsh, by

exposing himself and by leading from the front, by being visible and concerned about the

group’s fears, doubts or anxiety, by demonstrating courage, by facing personally conflicts,

tough decisions, by showing commitment, maintaining perspective and focusing on the core

purpose, providing and embodying core values and aligning them with reality.

Being aware of the negative consequences of lack of confrontation in the business world and

after diagnosing the hidden causes of the symptom through the clinical lens , leaders and

executives, teams and organizations would be well advised to put in place, using key

behavioral and organizational “firewalls”, a sound culture of confrontation for better

performances.

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