The Leaders We Need, And What Makes Us Follow

by Michael MacCoby

  Although strong transferences to a parental figure can hold an organization together, once the leader leaves, rivalries can fracture an organization. That’s what happened with Freud himself and with other psychoanalytic organizations founded by charismatic leaders. As long as the competitive, ambitious analysts had to please the parental leader—there were women as well as men in this role—they cooperated with each other and kept sheathed the knives of sharp criticism. Once the parental founder died or left the scene, different training analysts, with their own transferential follower-students, let go of their aggressive inhibition; the result was the splintering off of different schools.5 Of course, the same thing often happens in family firms after the founder father leaves the scene, but this relationship of children to a parent isn’t transference. It’s the real thing.

  CHANGING TRANSFERENCES

  The images we project from childhood are shaped by the family cultures we grew up with, a fact of particular importance today because more people now have family experiences that differ—sometimes quite radically—from what was long considered the norm. For an increasing number of people, the significant person from the past is not a parent but a sibling, a close childhood friend, or even a nanny. As we’ll discuss later, the shift from parental to sibling transferences can fit organizations’ needs for boundary-crossing project teams and networks. When managers at Boeing sought a leader for a software team that required a lot of collaboration among members, for instance, they joked about finding someone who was the fifth child in a family of nine siblings, someone who was used to mediating among brothers and sisters. In other words, the job called for a different kind of leadership than the traditional hierarchical boss would provide. Sibling leaders have to facilitate problem solving and build consensus. More than parental leaders, they invite collaboration and criticism. As we noted in chapter 2, they are part of the team, not above it.

  Another complicating factor is that people can have multiple transferential relationships in an organization. It seems very likely to me that at GE over the past two decades, many employees not only had such relationships with their immediate bosses but also transferred childhood feelings onto Jack Welch, even though they had never met him. In cases of multiple transferences, both the immediate boss and the CEO might unconsciously be seen as father figures. But when this happens, the employee usually experiences the transferences differently. Typically he will relate to his immediate boss from the perspective of a child who is four, five, or even older. But he will regard the CEO as an infant would see an earlier father figure, who is more distant, protective, and all-knowing.

  What is shaking things up for would-be leaders is that transferences no longer necessarily work in their favor. In other words, people no longer want to follow leaders because of a positive transference. That’s because the changing structure of families—more single-parent homes, dual working parents, and kids growing up with less respect for authority—combined with changes in companies have begun to shape work environments in which people value traditional leadership less. The paternalistic model of leadership that flourished in the large monopolistic firms I worked with from the 1970s to the turn of the century has been frayed beyond recognition. Employees can no longer count on lifetime employment; even promised pensions may be lost as great companies like General Motors flounder and others downsize or restructure. Furthermore, like George Raymond, cited at the start of this chapter, knowledge workers often know more about their jobs than does the boss, whose role thus has to change from the all-knowing parental figure to someone who clearly adds value for followers. Otherwise, the transference can be negative—the boss experienced as an interfering, witless parent or the parent who isn’t serving them very well. This is the pattern that more and more describes the interactive social character in the knowledge workplace.

  On the one hand, a positive transference can be a facilitator of followership and therefore a source of strength for leaders; on the other hand, it can be a real threat to leaders because it distorts objectivity. This is why, as we’ll see, the kind of leaders we need will try to understand transference and will work hard to help executive team members see one another as they really are. The future of the organization may depend on this ability. It’s worth taking a moment, therefore, to examine the most common types of transference. In doing so, we’ll see more clearly the changing social character and how it can be led.

  THE MOTHER TRANSFERENCE

  To be sure, there are still many people in the workplace from traditional families, with a bureaucratic social character and traditional transferences to parentlike bosses. But even these people can have trouble with the increasing diversity of bosses who are so different from their parents and who come in all genders, races, and national origins. For example, Lydia Thomas, CEO of Mitretek (now Noblis) in Virginia told me that employees often expect her to be maternal. How does she respond? She tells them: “I’m not your mother, but maybe, just maybe, I can be your friend.”6

  Maternal transference differs from paternal transference in that it usually draws on an earlier childhood relationship. Unlike the father, who is often perceived as distant and detached, and whose approval is dependent on performance, the mother is often seen both as an authority figure and as a giver of unconditional love. She is the protective parent who gives us life and showers us with support, but she is also the first person who says no. It’s the mother who weans us and, for the most part, who toilet trains us. Later it is she who separates herself from us to go back to work or to move on to other children. Not surprisingly, she is represented by both the fairy godmother and the evil stepmother in children’s stories. She is both deity and witch, and this deep divide in our psyches can play itself out to dramatic effect in business situations. One only has to look at the public’s extreme reactions of love and hate toward Martha Stewart or Hillary Clinton to realize that women leaders stir up some of the most conflicted feelings in our unconscious.

  Followers often have a hard time dealing with strong women precisely because they stimulate in subordinates the feelings of awe and fear that the mother once did. Children depend on the help and support of the all-powerful mother. They also want her to be happy and proud of them, and they feel deep guilt if they cause her suffering—a dynamic that some mothers use to control their kids. In my clinical work, I have found that, sometimes, beneath the guilt is the unconscious fear that the mother will cut off her life-giving nurturance.

  A negative aspect of maternal transferences in the workplace is that they can generate greater expectations of empathy and tenderness from bosses than can realistically be met. Usually a boss’s approval is more contingent, as it should be, on an employee’s performance than on warm feelings. A colleague of mine saw this when he coached the forty-year-old vice president of a home-building company, who was told in no uncertain terms by the (male) president that he had handed in a bad proposal. The VP complained that the president should have shown more emotional intelligence in rejecting the proposal. When the president dismissed this complaint as “psychobabble,” the VP grew irate. As my colleague immediately realized, the VP was projecting an inappropriate maternal transference. When the company’s president didn’t respond as the VP wanted, the VP reacted like a rejected child.

  On the other hand, positive maternal transferences can give people a powerful sense of support. Think of Ronald Reagan, whose wife, Nancy, was like a protective tigress during and after his presidency; he called her “Mommy.” Although his father was a failed shoe salesman, Reagan’s own strong mother was a major reason for his self-confidence and success. However, even positive maternal transferences can have bad effects. A close friend of mine taught for eighteen years in a private school where most teachers had a maternal transference with the headmistress, who created a familylike culture. The teachers loved their boss and felt cared for and protected by her, but the warm feelings they had were not a good measure of her ability to perform. As she neared retirement, the scho
ol was in the red, and it became clear that the headmistress had done little either to evaluate and develop the teachers or to help them deal with discipline problems. While her successor was less comforting and more demanding, he succeeded in raising money from rich parents, improving teachers’ salaries, and establishing rules that were followed.

  THE FATHER TRANSFERENCE

  The father transference was a powerful glue in an age when male managers brought up in traditional father-led families looked up to bosses in bureaucratic hierarchies. This dynamic was nicely illustrated for me by the top executive who told me his dream of walking into the powerful CEO’s office and looking down in horror to see that he was wearing short pants. When I asked his association to the dream, he said, “That’s the way I felt when my father was about to scold me for something I did wrong.”

  Most male CEOs in traditional organizations have consciously or unconsciously encouraged paternal 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. Even when times are bad, these leaders assure their followers that the downturn is temporary. The message is always the same: “Trust me to steer you through these troubled waters.” The claim by CEOs that their success is based on their integrity or their concern for their people, rather than good business thinking, indicates their buy-in to belief in the power of transference.

  Some companies go a great distance to promote practices that strengthen paternal transference, although they wouldn’t call it that. In the early 1970s, when I worked with managers at IBM, they told me that the company had a strict rule against teams and against shared decision making. The rule had come directly from the legendary CEO, Tom Watson Sr., and it had the effect of forging a direct link between employees and their bosses. Whether he was aware of it or not, Watson was sanctioning paternal transference at IBM. It was further reinforced by the company’s paternalistic commitment to employees that good performance ensured lifetime employment.

  I saw similar dynamics at work when I was a consultant to the executive team of AT&T Communications during the 1980s. Most of the vice presidents there were uncritically worshipful of their business-unit presidents and the several CEOs who were making disastrous strategy moves—giving up cellular telephony, for instance, and losing billions in an effort to compete in computers. Instead of encouraging healthy debate about the future of the company, bosses expected—and rewarded—transferential veneration. One vice president stuck out because he didn’t comply with this company culture. Although his division produced the best results within the long-distance business unit, the executive team didn’t appreciate him—not only because his realistic attitude toward his business unit’s president implicitly criticized the other vice presidents’ transferential overvaluation of the leader, but also because he was an unconventional manager for AT&T at that time. Unlike the others, he delegated responsibility, didn’t need to take credit for his division’s success, and initiated new businesses. Ultimately, he took early retirement, frustrated by his failure to push his ideas through the bureaucracy.

  From a social character point of view, this vice president was a mutant who didn’t fit the bureaucratic world. In the new context of a collaborative knowledge workplace his behavior would have been better appreciated.

  In my coaching practice, I’ve helped a number of executives whose careers have floundered because of their father transferences. Fred Wertheim, a brilliant technical manager in his thirties, had reached a level right below the top in two companies before being fired.7 In each case, he idealized a boss who seemed to treat him like a favored son. However, when the boss didn’t support his innovative ideas, Wertheim rebelled, tried to bypass the boss, and was reined in and fired. Once he understood and frustrated his need to attach himself to a father figure, his career took off.

  THE SIBLING TRANSFERENCE

  The father transference has also made people idealize presidents and ignore their faults. Presidents like Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan stimulated intense father transferences in their followers, but this type of transference has become weaker with subsequent presidents. Sibling transference made its debut in national politics with the first baby boomer U.S. president, Bill Clinton. People didn’t relate to Clinton as a father—the kind of transference you might have expected with the nation’s commander in chief—but rather as an admired older brother or “buddy” (as Clinton named his dog). Although he had his critics, Clinton was never really expected to be a model of good behavior. Unlike Lyndon Johnson, for whom Americans’ positive attitude flipped when their paternal-transferential expectations were shattered by his inability to end the Vietnam War, Clinton was allowed to get away with his womanizing because he was perceived by much of the public as merely a naughty brother.

  The growing power of sibling transference is a new phenomenon. I could only find one reference where Freud writes about a sibling transference, and that’s based on a woman’s experience of a ridiculing brother.8 But Freud’s patients came from traditional patriarchal families in which sibling rivals competed for paternal approval. He had no experience with Interactive families in which it’s just as likely that parents compete for the affection of their kids—who are themselves more concerned with being popular with other kids.9

  At work, the sibling or peer transference can be to someone who is like a helpful older sister or to peers who are like those kids who banded together to escape from authorities. Unlike parental transferences, which make people feel small and idealize authority, sibling transferences forge bonds of affection that allow for critical ribbing as well as mutual aid. Perhaps the huge popularity for this Interactive generation of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books owes something to the fact that Harry’s parents are dead, his foster parents are abusive to him, and his close relations are siblinglike friends Hermione and Ron.

  Transferential feelings about George W. Bush have changed over time. Before 9/11, his popularity was low and, like Clinton, he was seen as a brother or buddy figure, the kind of guy you’d feel comfortable having a beer with (except he didn’t drink). His strong leadership response to the 9/11 national trauma triggered infantile paternal transferential feelings in many Americans, the kind of transference toward a protective leader provoked by pervasive anxiety about what might happen next. The Bush team reinforced these feelings politically by emphasizing continued threats by terrorists, ratcheting up the color-coded terror alert at key points in the 2004 reelection campaign, and contrasting the image of a resolute Bush, the nation’s protector, to an image of his opponent, John F. Kerry, the unreliable flip-flopper on the invasion of Iraq. Of course, positive transferences can turn negative; the image of protector, forged in the anxiety after 9/11, was shattered by the Iraq fiasco and the inept response to Hurricane Katrina.10

  DEALING WITH TRANSFERENCES

  If all relationships are colored by transference, how can you as a leader ever know if your followers’ relationships with you are real? The short answer is that you can’t. Even the closest relationships combine objective reality with images and emotions carried over from the past, and there will never be any way around that. However, your followers’ motivations for following don’t have to be totally grounded in reality in order to work. What’s more, there are ways of managing transferences that not only reduce the potential for negative transferences but actually increase the likelihood of positive ones.

  A key way that leaders can influence their followers’ positive and negative transferences is to become aware of their own transferences. The classic path to self-knowledge is introspection—the approach favored in psychology. But the trouble with introspection is that it can paralyze a leader, especially one with a strong obsessive bent. Endless self-analysis will prevent her from making the quick decisions any CEO must make. Consequently, many of the most effective leaders rely on an outsider to provide an incisive reality check. The “consultant” ca
n be a member of the family—Bill Gates, for instance, routinely uses his wife as a sounding board. Other people turn to a longtime friend or associate; British tycoon Lord James Hanson relied heavily on his U.S.-based business partner Sir Gordon White. Increasingly, leaders also work with executive coaches to get an outside perspective on what is going on and to check their views of subordinates. I’ve played this role with a number of leaders.

  To manage followers’ transferences, as well as their own, leaders might even start by raising the level of awareness in the team, bringing the unconscious into awareness—which is what Freud is all about. This effort is especially important when staff members view a leader through different transferential lenses. In such a situation, a leader can deal with his followers’ transferences by showing himself as he actually is, thereby demystifying his professional relationships. But to do this, he needs to have a lot of self-confidence. With some executive teams, I’ve used the personality questionnaire that can be found in my book Narcissistic Leaders.11 When executives share their personality types and discuss how their personalities explain their behavior, this knowledge dilutes transferential projections.