Leadership is the global obsession. Thousands of recent books—many of them best sellers—have dissected the leadership styles of great leaders from Jesus to Jefferson. Business writers, too, have joined the frenzy. The trouble is, much of the business literature on leadership—unlike the broader literature on the subject—starts with the assumption that leaders are rational beings. In part, that's because readers come to these business books for advice, so they get suggestions on how to imitate the conscious motivations, behaviors, and choices of role models. Advice books are hardly likely to focus heavily on leaders' irrational side—and still less likely to suggest that the role models' successes may even stem from their psychological frailties. Yet irrationality is integral to human nature, and psychological conflict can contribute in significant ways to the drive to succeed. Surely, therefore, we can benefit from putting CEOs on the couch, to explore how their early personal experiences shaped subsequent behaviors and to understand how these leaders deal with setbacks and pain.
Although a number of business scholars—most notably Harvard's Abraham Zaleznik and Harry Levinson—have explored the psychology of executives, only one has made the analysis of CEOs his life's work: Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries, the Raoul de Vitry d'Avaucourt Chaired Professor of Leadership Development at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France, and the director of INSEAD's Global Leadership Center. Kets de Vries is also a practicing psychoanalyst whose research has provided rich pickings: He has authored or edited some twenty books on the psychology of leaders and organizations, including best sellers such as Life and Death in the Executive Fast Lane, The Leadership Mystique, and The Neurotic Organization. Kets de Vries's work has brought him close to many of the world's leading corporations: The executives of such firms as Heineken, BP, and Nokia have drawn on his expertise. Indeed, it's probably fair to say that no other leadership scholar has had as much exposure to the mind of the business leader. ...
Diane L. Coutu: Can you expand on the narcissism of leaders? There's been a lot of talk about the subject lately. Why is it so problematic?
Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries: We need to be careful here. Narcissism has a terrible reputation, often rightly so. But all people—especially leaders—need a healthy dose of narcissism in order to survive. It's the engine that drives leadership. Assertiveness, self-confidence, tenacity, and creativity just can't exist without it. But once a narcissist gets into a position of leadership, funny things start to happen. Because narcissistic leaders are often charismatic, employees start to project their own grandiose fantasies onto the narcissistic leader. And suddenly everything becomes surreal.
| All people—especially leaders—need a healthy dose of narcissism in order to survive. |
I remember being in a meeting once in southern Europe. Thirty senior executives were gathered for a presentation about the future of the organization. The president was a very wealthy man who used to brag that he would need ten lifetimes to spend all his money. Not surprisingly, his office was filled with enormous statues and paintings of himself. He arrived twenty minutes late for the meeting, and he came in talking on a mobile phone. Nobody acted annoyed. Eventually the presentation started, and the CEO's phone rang. He picked it up and talked for fifteen minutes while everybody sat there, waiting. Suddenly the CEO got up and said he had to go. This was the most important meeting of the year, and he just walked out. But no one, not one person, objected. Everyone told him what he wanted to hear. It was as if the CEO were in a hall of mirrors.
This reaction on the part of followers is hardly unusual. Do you remember the Peter Sellers film Being There? It looks at the life of an illiterate and slow-witted gardener named Chance, who is standing in the street one day when a limousine backs into him. Hoping to avoid publicity, the woman in the car takes Chance home to be seen by a doctor who is caring for her husband, a big-shot financier and friend of the president. When the president asks Chance what he thinks about the economy, the poor man hasn't a clue. Taking refuge in what he knows best—gardening—he says: "As long as the roots are not severed, all is well." The president interprets this simple statement as a great revelation. The results are inevitable: Chance is eventually pushed to run for the presidency. It was George Bernard Shaw who said, "Kings are not born: They are made by artificial hallucination." There's a lot of truth to that. The problem with many so-called narcissistic leaders is that they both deliberately and inadvertently activate the latent narcissism of their followers. These followers are often ideal-hungry personalities who idealize wildly and uncritically. And if the leader happens to like being positively mirrored by others, he can become addicted to the followers' idealization of him. Tragically, some leaders get to the point where they fire individuals who don't praise them sufficiently.
Q: Why are followers so prone to idealizing?
A: It has its roots in what Freud called transference. Transference is probably the most important concept in psychotherapy; it was one of Freud's great discoveries. After he started working with patients, Freud found to his great consternation that patients kept falling in love with him. To his immense credit, Freud realized that it couldn't be his own wonderful personality that was stirring up such deep feelings of admiration. Instead, he realized that in their dealings with him, patients were interacting with powerful figures from their own internal theaters, usually important childhood figures like parents, teachers, and siblings. Transference is the term for this continuity between early childhood and adult behavior. What Freud meant is that we all bring to our current relationships a map of past relationships that we transfer onto the present. This particularly happens during times of stress and in hierarchical situations, which are reminiscent of the parent-child constellation. Indeed, people in positions of authority have an uncanny ability to reawaken transferential processes in themselves and others. And these transferential reactions can present themselves in a number of ways—positively or negatively.
| Tragically, some leaders get to the point where they fire individuals who don't praise them sufficiently. |
One employee, for example, may relate to her boss as if he were her favorite brother, and thus she idealizes him. But that boss may relate to her as if she were his withholding mother! It is precisely this confusion of time and place that results in the psychic "noise" of the workplace. Sadly, Freud was not interested in business, so he never studied it. But it would have been fascinating to see what sense he would have made of everyone's tendency in business to relate to people as if they were someone else.
Q: Doesn't all this put followers in a vulnerable position as well?
A: It certainly does. I discovered this when I was about 14 years old. I was with my brother in a youth camp in the Netherlands where we went every summer. Most children were sent to this camp for only three weeks, but we were sent there for the whole summer. After three weeks, there was always a transition between the old group and the new, and one year my brother and I decided to liven up the changeover with an initiation ritual. We placed a bathtub filled with freezing water in the middle of a field and announced that according to an old camp tradition, all the newcomers had to dunk themselves in the tub. I can still clearly remember more than sixty boys (most of them much bigger than us) lining up and, one after another, obediently immersing themselves in the cold water. Everything went well until the headmaster of the camp passed by. He was dumbfounded. He broke our spell by inciting the newcomers to rebel, pointing out that there were sixty of them against the two of us. Eventually, my brother and I got what was coming to us. But for me, the scene remained etched on my mind as a testament to just how far people are willing to go to obey what they perceive as authority.
The fact is that even scant authority can get away with murder, both literally and figuratively. Indeed, I would say that some organizations are so political and unsafe that they resemble concentration camps. Everyone kowtows to authority out of tremendous fear. And you can see why. I once met an executive who told me, "Every day I walk into the office, I can make the lives of 10,000 people completely miserable by doing very, very little." His company was probably not a very healthy workplace—why wouldn't he say instead: "By doing very, very little, I can make the lives of 10,000 people much easier"? That's why at INSEAD I try to introduce CEOs to a kind of applied psychoanalysis in an organizational setting. In each of my workshops, there are around twenty individuals who together might be responsible for 100,000 people. My hope is that by helping leaders to become a little more self-reflective, we can make their organizations a bit less like concentration camps.