transit authority recently called us in to coach the organization’s new head of HR. Having joined the executive committee six months earlier, Jocelyn was having difficulty integrating with the team. According to the CEO, her attitude was holding back its efforts to develop a strategy for meeting the city’s growing transportation needs in a more sustainable way.
In what follows we’ll discuss how to recognize, understand, and overcome such self-sabotaging dynamics. But first we’ll explore the psychology behind them.Any pack’s deepest concern is for its own survival, and work teams are no exception. In times of heightened stress, allaying that concern may override all else. When its collective anxiety becomes intolerable, the team must do something to counter it.
The psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion first noticed groups’ extreme patterns of evasion and denial while working with shell-shocked soldiers returning to Britain from the Second World War. He observed that although such coping mechanisms reduce anxiety, they prevent real work from getting done. In other words, a team’s natural defenses start to sabotage its mission.
As CEO, Simone’s mother had been a combination of comforter, micromanager, and protector. Although Simone was a more empowering and decentralized leader, she sensed that the team she had inherited was unconsciously demanding that she adopt her mother’s style. Worse, she realized that she had started to do so, getting minutely involved in handling the team’s concerns, decisions, and conflicts.
If unchecked, saviors may come to overestimate their capabilities, developing a sense of entitlement and invulnerability that leads them to overstep boundaries and may result in their expulsion. What appears to be self-sabotage may actually be the product of a sole-savior configuration.A related form of dependency occurs when two people are cast as saviors. The chief risk here is that the pair will get carried away with their power, increasingly losing touch with reality.
We saw those dynamics in the executive committee of a European investment bank. The CEO had realized that the top team was suffering from a lack of trust and brought us in to facilitate a trust-building program. Significantly, he himself did not attend. We encountered this dynamic while studying the Australian subsidiary of a global information provider. Its top team had grown used to having a new country manager imposed on it every two or three years. The head office, in the United States, treated the position as a developmental assignment for rising talent.
Farsighted!
Thank you for sharing!