Leadership and Self-Deception: leading starts with what the other person wants
Notes on the Arbinger Institute's book, and the idea I keep coming back to: leadership is understanding what the other person needs.
I first heard about Leadership and Self-Deception by the Arbinger Institute on a podcast, and picked it up expecting a management book. It turned out to be a book about how I see people, and how easily I stop seeing them.
It is written as a story. Tom, a newly hired manager, spends a day with two senior leaders who walk him through one idea from different angles. The format is simple, almost too simple at first. By the end, I found it had described several conversations from my own working life more accurately than I would have liked.
The box
The book’s central idea is that we can be “in the box” with someone. In the box, the other person stops being a person with needs, worries, and priorities of their own. They become an object: an obstacle, a vehicle for what I want, or someone who is simply not relevant.
What makes the idea uncomfortable is how we get there. The book calls it self-betrayal. I have a sense that I should do something for someone, even something small. I do not do it. Then I start building reasons why I was right not to: they are difficult, they do not deserve it, I am too busy, it was not my job.
Those reasons feel like observations about the other person. The book argues they are actually justifications for me. And once I am holding them, I see everything that person does through them.
Why it spreads
The part that stayed with me most is what happens next. When I am in the box with someone, I usually treat them in a way that invites them into the box with me. They see me blaming them, so they justify themselves and start blaming me. Each of us now has evidence that we were right.
The book calls this collusion. It explains a lot of friction that no process or tool could fix, because the problem is not the work. It is the way two people have stopped seeing each other.
What leadership is really about
The lesson I took away is that leadership is about understanding what the other person actually wants. Not what I want from them, and not what I assume they should want.
That sounds obvious. The book’s point is that I cannot do it from inside the box. If I already see someone as the problem, I will hear their needs as excuses. Any negotiation turns into me trying to get my way, with better manners.
Out of the box, the same conversation looks different. The question stops being “how do I get them to do this?” and becomes “what are they trying to achieve, and where does that meet what the team needs?” A good agreement is one where both sides’ needs are treated as real. That is the kind of bargaining I want to get better at.
How to get out
The book is careful about this. You do not get out of the box by trying harder to change the other person. That just keeps them as the object of your effort. You also cannot get out by perfecting your technique, because a technique used on someone is still treating them as a thing to manage.
What helps is noticing the moment of self-betrayal, and questioning the story I am telling to justify it. Once I see the other person as a person again, the right thing to do is often plain.
What I want to practise
A few questions I want to keep asking at work:
- When I feel irritated with someone, is there something I sensed I should do for them and did not?
- Do I actually know what this person wants from this situation, or am I assuming?
- Am I describing this person accurately, or collecting evidence for a conclusion I have already reached?
- In this conversation, am I trying to understand them, or to get something from them?
It is a short book, and an easy one to read in a day. I expect it will take a lot longer to practise.
